Living Freedom Archive

When I was a young man and needed to believe that my service to my country meant something, I held closely words like “land of the free and home of the brave.” But after serving a year of front line combat in the jungles of Vietnam, I realized just how hollow those words were.

I can understand the need for us all to hold ideals for ourselves. It’s part of how people aim themselves at their highest possible state. But large institutions of governance are really not able to tolerate ideals, especially if in the end, the ideals interfered with their need for power and control.

After seven months of taking my airborne infantrymen into the possibility of being ambushed day after day, as we went from one search and destroy mission to another, I awoke one day in Vietnam to a stark reality. I looked into their eyes and found emptiness. We were in a daily reality with death and dismemberment close at hand without any coherent or congruent explanation from our leaders as to why we were there, in a country so far from our borders, which posed no direct threat to our nation itself.

This is true today in Iraq. Defeating communism or Muslim terrorism is such a meaningless idea to soldiers who don’t really know why capitalism is such a great idea to start with.

The little we had to hold on to in Vietnam came from the pure events of each day that we survived. Our stories were of sacrifice for each other not of valor. Our enemy was the stifling heat and the monstrous packs on our backs. I can remember distinctly that my sense of why life was worthwhile dwindled at the edge of insanity on every operation. I thought of the millions of young Americans who had been in this same state of disbelief throughout the past century. And yet the cheap stories of freedom still rang in the hollow voices of the government with its comically ignorant political clap trap during election times.

I was inspired to create a pictorial history of our time together as soldiers in Vietnam, a sort of “year book” so that when these men got home they could put some pieces of value together to explain to themselves and their families what had just happened in their lives. Upon hearing this idea, my Brigade commander agreed and sent me to Tokyo to begin the project. One day I was in the swamps, fighting for my life, the next in a hotel suite, pasting up photos and text.

When I arrived home after two years of putting my life on the line, I had a moment of deep importance at hand. I was going to participate in the birth of my second child. But as I went to enter the delivery room to see this sacred miracle occur, I was told by an attendant that the hospital was trying to keep its low infection record intact and that no fathers were to be allowed in the delivery room. I will never forgive “the system” for that kind of tyranny.

Once again, the folks in charge lost their sense of values. I was free to die and kill people I had no real understanding about, but not free to see my own child being born.

Governments and large institutions as such are obsolete and have been for most of this century. The ones who scream freedom the loudest seem to be the ones most ignorant of it. I have watched the strange arrogance of those who rise to power and their need to keep the machine rolling at all costs. The constitution for them is no where in sight.

As human beings and bonafide citizens of planet earth
we have the responsibility to guide our large institutions
toward the goals we all seek.
Imagine this future set of institutional shifts and pass it on.

THE LAND OF DESTINY

All the ARMIES will replant large forests clean the watersheds
All the BANKS will invest in visions and dreams
All the CORPORATIONS will .. create global villages/renaissance fairs

All the CHEMICAL companies will send medicines to needy people
All the OIL companies will start transporting fresh water
All the NAVIES will protect from over-fishing and deploy hatcheries

All the CHURCHES will have a refugee placement program
All the MEDICAL INSTITUTIONS . join travel adventures w/preventive medicine
All the high SCHOOLS will plant food foraging forests
All the MARINES will restore the wetlands and corral reefs

All the GOVERNMENTS will break into bio regions/natural security
All the SPACE agencies will build portals to other worlds in space
All the NEIGHBORHOODS will share common work tools

All the AIR FORCES will monitor the biospheric health with sensors
All the COLLEGES will keep the most viable seed sources
All the CONSTRUCTION firms will canal the rising seas to the deserts

All the HOMEOWNERS will do creative relationship w/ nature/garden
All the GRADE SCHOOLS will recycle/trade broadest range of goods
All the PEOPLES will seek a visionary mindset, evolutionary consciousness,
and unified civilization

All the WORLD will see the earth as a paradise
Staging the genius of others

by Jim Channon
Social Architect
Big Island, Hawaii
Website

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