War, Violence & Suffering - My Random, Wobbly Thoughts

by Hank Pellissier

“War, Violence & Suffering” is my topic today. I need warn you, this subject matter might be disturbing. We are born via suffering, we die via suffering, and life in between - although illuminated with joy, love and humor - is also plagued with pain, anger, grief.

I justify my presentation by quoting the Buddhist priest Thich Nhat Hanh, who says in the 4th Precept of his 14 Precepts of Engaged Buddhism:

“Do not avoid contact with suffering or close your eyes before suffering. Do not lose awareness of the existence of suffering in the life of the world. Awaken yourself and others to the reality of suffering in the world.”

Are you ready? I will start with a childhood memory.

I grew up on a dairy farm in Southern California. It was a great place to have dry cow-pie fights with my six brothers and sisters, but an impossible place for Halloween treat-or-treating because we had no neighbors.

We needed a sugary suburbia to terrorize, so every October my Dad called Uncle Bud, a pale frail man in Pomona who had arthritis, a pale frail wife and two pale frail children. “Yes” quavered Uncle Bud, “bring your brood over.”

My costume was always Native American, pseudo-Apache. A black wig with a macrame headband secured filthy feathers. My face smeared with war paint. My war club was gnarled driftwood that I let my bloody nose drip on. My loincloth exhibited a problematic amount of pre-adolescent flank, a homemade bow and arrow and a quiver of disintegrating deer skin.

I loved Halloween, especially the Double Bubble gum with Bazooka Joe cartoons and tiny fortunes on the bottom, that I regarded as 100% prophetic.

When I was seven years old, my mouth was stuffed with gum after raiding Pomona, as I chewed ten pink rectangles together. I unwrapped an eleventh piece and read the fortune, it said, “You will be a brave soldier someday.” Immediately I coughed out the massive wad, I started blubbering like my baby sister, I ran to my mother screaming “NOOOOO! NOOOOO! I DON’T WANT TO BE A SOLDIER!”

I believed, and I still do, that there’s nothing more horrible than war. I knew, at seven years old, even though I was wearing the garb of a warrior that was seeking to slay enemies, I knew that was just make-believe, I knew I didn’t actually want to kill anyone and I certainly didn’t want to anyone to kill me. I didn’t want to shoot bullets at anyone’s face, I didn’t want to get disemboweled by a bayonet, or blown up by a grenade, shrapnel turning me into a red puddle, I didn’t want to hate enemy soldiers because I knew they were just boys like me, that I could be friends with if we weren’t supposed to massacre each other.

My mother calmed me down eventually, I moved slowly out of hysteria, but after that I gave up Double Bubble Gum forever because it lied to me, and I lost my appetite for sugar because it was a dark portal to destruction. I was an impressionable child.

Seven years later, when I was 14 I was bullied in my high school swim class, half-drowned by chortling boys I didn’t even know. I developed a pushup routine after that and bigger muscles, so I could survive at school, so I could climb up the masculinity ladder and not be a target.

Another seven years went by, the Vietnam War was hungry for flesh, but my draft number was 355 so I was safe but I would never have gone anyway, I knew I could cut a tendon in my forefinger like Bill Kilby did to get a medical deferral, or I could move to Nova Scotia in Canada like Mark McDonald.

My Uncle Leon fought in WW2 at Guadalcanal and afterwards he was alcoholic until he died, totally pickled. I was told the funeral director didn’t even need formaldehyde to preserve him. My Dad fought in the Korean War, Captain of Artillery, the experience left him half-deaf, and paranoid, my Mom says “he came back completely different.” My cousin Jimmy went to Vietnam, he came back cynical, shaken, so relentlessly vocal against all wars he was banned from family parties. My nephew Ethan joined the Army at 17 because he was skilled at paintball and Call of Duty. He fought in Iraq, as a gunner in an Armored Personnel Carrier, he shot off someone’s head, and now he always sits silently by the rear exit door at Christmas, scanning anyone who enters the front door. Another nephew, Eric, joined the Navy Seals but he dropped out because he said all the other candidates were psychopaths.

Are men naturally physically violent? I’m amazed when my two daughters argue, they only insult each other, picking mercilessly at each other’s most vulnerable spots. I don’t know how to do that because I only seem to have a fight-or-flight response, with a third option: paralysis.

I am 95% anti-military. I want the USA to shutter its 750 international military bases. I would never invest in weaponry stock and I’m disgusted that friends of mine do. Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed. I’m nauseated by NATO, foreign interventions like Libya, Syria, Serbia, and war hawks like Lindsay Graham and Nikki Haley.

When you’re leaning anti-military like me, it’s a slippery slope. Next thing you know, you’re anti-nationalist then you’re anti-patriotic, and eventually, you wake up one day and realize you’re anti-state, you’re an anarcho-pacifist like Henry Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy, or Dorothy Day. With side effects, like you want open borders or you might stop eating meat.

I’m not 100% anarcho-pacifist, though or even thoroughly committed to non-violence. I smile, without guilt, when I see Free Luigi graffiti. If I get slapped, my instinct is to slap you back. I know I want bad guys to die, so that good people can live. I’m not alone in this. The #12 precept from Thich Nhat Hanh says “Do not let others kill. Find whatever means possible to protect life.” Doesn’t that sound just like the Malcom X saying “by any means necessary”?

Let’s talk about harming animals, for a while.

I had a semi-nervous breakdown when I was 20. I lost 15 pounds in two months back-packing in Europe and I was majorly sleep-deprived. I started collapsing in Sweden. I was sitting on a park bench. A big fly decided it would die right next to me, noisily, it spun around on its back, wings beating furiously, twisting spasmodically in circles BZZZZZZZZZ BUZZZZ BUZZZZZ. I had to move away because I was experiencing, in my own body, its insectoid agony.

When I got home my Dad took me fishing and right away I caught a very stupid trout that completely swallowed the hook, I had to pull the barbed metal out of his stomach, tearing through its tender esophagus, while it flapped in excruciating pain. I threw everything down on the sandy riverbank and ran weeping into the woods. I was ashamed and regretful. But still, at dinner that night, I ate that trout, cooked in butter and sprayed with lemon juice.

My hypocrisy is huge. I’m theoretically opposed to violence, but, is this true?

I studied the Jains of India in college. The ahimsa people. Jain monks wear face masks to avoid inhaling small insects - they don’t want to hurt them. Jains don’t kill ants, or even mosquitos. They don’t walk on wet grass in the springtime because they might crush a slug. I am not one of those guys. I’ve gone vegetarian multiple times, until I relapse with a Whopper.

I never eat veal, but when I do, I think it’s delicious.

I understand animal pain because I witnessed it, growing up on a farm. I branded cows that scream in pain as much as you would if we shoved a red hot iron on your soft sizzling butt. I have seen every farm animal slaughtered, pigs are psychic, they hide under the trough when they see a shotgun. I saw a goat skinned, it was a kid, just like me (ha ha - comic relief) it was exactly my ten-year old 100 pound size, it looked human with its skin cut off. Eating it seemed like cannibalism, but it was delicious. I still buy goat meat regularly at a Halal Market on Telegraph and 30th. I decapitated 55 chickens in one day with an axe, they really do fly with their heads cut off. And cows, wonderful cows, docile descendants of the Great Auroch, they are the most tragic, we separate the gentle mothers from their beloved calf-children right after they gave birth, we wicked humans break up the bovine family because we want to steal all the milk for ourselves, and eat the baby boys. No cow lives long. They are culled. When her milk production drops, cow is turned into tough steak and glue.

But still, ice cream. I love it.

Now I will redeem myself, perhaps, with my next opinion. I am an advocate of the Plan to Eliminate Predators, designed by British empath-philosopher David Pearce. People like me in this society of the anti-carnivorous, we see existence in the forest, jungle or savannah - as relentlessly cruel. If you are a wildebeest, every day you are hunted, by a pack of slobbering lions, or a crocodile hiding in a fetid pond, or stinking hyenas who want to eat your genitals and liver first while you’re still alive. How fun is that, to be a wildebeest?

Biologist Richard Dawkins describes the situation:


"The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear."


I am not a biologist, I am a part-time ethicist, but - I want all the predators bio-engineered so they only eat fruit or tubers. I want all the ungulates to grow old in peace. Nature is cruel unless we intervene.

The prophet Isaiah predicted, “the wolf shall dwell with the lamb and the leopard shall lie down with the goat, and the calf and the lion will rest together.”

Let’s get back to war now. What should we do about it?

When I read about the war in Ukraine, 1500 people dying daily, I mourn all the lost consciousness, lost loves and memories, lost receptacles of data and feeling. Like Walt Whitman, I see every living thing as a precious irreplaceable universe. Whitman says,

“I am a cosmos! I am limitless, I carry threads to the sun and the stars. I have thousands of globes and all time.”

How can we end violence? How can we reduce the suffering in the world?

I have four suggestions - the first two I stole from Engaged Buddhism, the third I stole from the IWW, the fourth I stole from Crosby, Still and Nash.

The first advice - BE MINDFUL - asks us to pay attention. It is easy to avoid looking at starving children. But pretending we don’t see it, won’t make it go away. Paying attention to war and violence won’t kill us - Thich Nhat Hahn lived to be 95 and studies indicate that empaths live longer than ostrich-head-in-the-sand people because they are socially connected.

The second advice - TAKE RESPONSIBILITY - says ordinary people condone war if we make wrong choices in daily life. We need to think about what we eat, what we buy, where we go on vacation. We need to stop buying products from war-profiteering companies, we need to demand policies that promote peace, reduce military budgets and halt foreign interventions.

The third advice is the Wobbly maxim, NO WAR BUT CLASS WAR. Buddhism calls greed a poison of the mind that is often the motivation for war. Greed craves more territory, more resources. Greed motivated colonialism. In WWI, socialist leaders like Rosa Luxembourg and Eugene Debs opposed the war, saying workers should not kill each other for the profits of capitalists. Iraq wars were battles for oil. Wars receive immense support from weapons suppliers and their investors, who make extraordinary profits via the slaughter provided by their death-machines.

My last bit of advice is the Crosby Still and Nash Song TEACH YOUR CHILDREN. We need to teach children that all creatures want to live without pain, all creatures deserve compassion. We need to teach children that all humans everywhere deserve to be free, educated, fed, clothed, sheltered, and listened to with consideration. We need to teach children that it is wonderful to weep when animals and humans suffer, because it indicates they feel the interconnection. We need to teach our children that Greed, Hatred, and Ignorant Delusion are poisons in the brain. Let’s teach children peaceful communication, let’s teach them that struggles for liberation are the great moments in history.

We also need to teach them what is true, and real, when I was a preschool director I asked the children where milk came from, the children told me milk came from boxes in stores, I told them milk came from cow’s nipples, they looked at me warily, like I was a pervert.

We need to teach children to share with others.

And now, my patient audience, Go forward in Peace, all of you, this speech about violence is finally over. I apologize if it caused you to suffer.