Its easy to find yourself thinking about war lately, and that’s a good thing. Care when you see one people oppressing another. Killing them.
And it’s especially important when it’s your country doing the oppressing as we were in Viet Nam.
My books, the Lucky Monkey Stories, are about my life and travels in the late sixties into the seventies. This is some of what I wrote about Viet Nam:
By now everybody in the world called us hippies, us long haired freaks. I resisted. I hadn’t joined anything. They thought we were all the same because we looked and acted differently from them. We were different from straight people because we followed a couple unsaid but universally accepted principles - 1) Do what you please, and 2) try to be moral while you do it. What’s moral? Baby, just follow that Golden Rule.
It all comes back to the Golden Rule. First, any decent religion should at least give lip service to the idea that you should do unto others the way you would like them to do unto you. Compassion. You’ve got to notice that no matter who they are, those others have feelings just like yours. That's what the Golden Rule is all about. Give everybody what you'd like to get from them. Every useful (to some extent) religion starts with the Golden Rule. But then you have to move on to real life. Because, let's face it, you're not going to be spending a major hunk of your time reaching out and doing things for others. Love your neighbor? Well, some of your neighbors are schmucks. You’re not likely to like some of your neighbors. Love them? So, the Golden Rule's got to give you a little slack right? No, the problem with the Golden Rule is that it's too ... proactive. The model for doing just that is Christ and frankly, you ain't him. Here's another idea... This is my improvement on the Golden Rule... It's a corollary rule. Don't do unto other's what you don't want done to you. Sounds pretty much the same, right? Except, think of it, you aren't expected to run out and do something, or even anything for others. You're never gonna be expected to go out and build a house for that worthless neighbor you know you're never gonna "love." All you have to do with the new Golden Rule is - don’t knock his house down. Hey - you can do that.
And here's the reason it's so critical to follow "the Big New Golden Rule" as a country: because you have to think about what your glorious war will be like for the people who live over there where it's being fought. Picture this. You're pretty much hiding in your house. Wondering if you're too exposed there. Where will you go? People, foreign men, could come at any time. You will have to fight them to protect your daughters, sisters, friends. Uh well, forget it, because the wall has just blown in and your family is suddenly mostly dead anyway. Maybe burning and screaming. Not so much fun for them, our glorious adventure. Here's the first step in following the Big Goddamn New Golden Rule. 1) Notice what you're doing. To them over there. Notice what you're doing and ... 2) Don’t do anything to anybody else, that you don't want done to you!
Let’s take for instance that carpet bombing. Sounds pretty cool right? Very mighty. As long as it’s your planes and not your hometown being bombed. A regular bombing of the sort used mostly in World War II would mean that a bomb landed somewhere nearby and possibly killed someone you knew. Maybe, if you were unlucky enough it would land in your yard and kill someone in your family. Odds generally were though, that you yourself weren’t killed during the bombing. With a carpet bombing it means there are so many bombs being dropped that there is no where you can go that isn’t being bombed. Or napalmed. Flaming, jellied gasoline, falling from the sky. Everywhere. So your neighbor and his entire family and you and your mother and the grocer have nowhere to run and all die in a screaming painful world of fire. Hell on Earth. Who was doing that? We were. You. Me. So somewhere along the way I joined up with this non-group that had no leaders and no rules. I was a hippie.