by Ray Jason
I am rowing home to my boat, which is anchored in a beautiful, isolated cove near Key West. Suddenly, the solitude and peacefulness is shattered by the sound of two military jets shrieking back towards the nearby airbase.
As I cover my ears
and look scornfully towards them, a sport fishing boat comes blasting out of
the mangroves with 500 horsepower ensnared in its outboard motors. I wonder to myself if the fish that they will
catch in their $100,000 boat will taste any better than the one that I just speared
from my little rowboat.
When they pass
beside me and see me covering my ears, they holler over to me, “That’s the
sound of freedom.” I nod
noncommittally. For the remainder of the
day my mind could not stop thinking about what I wish I could have said to
them. If only we could have shared a
beer and some grilled fish and some open-mindedness, I would have tried to give
them a different perspective on the true essence of that sound.
*******
In America, and in
fact in most of the world, we do not realize how thoroughly we have been
manipulated by what I call, The Malignant Authorities or TMA. These are the politicians, the religious
leaders, the media owners, and the corporate tycoons who shape our way of
looking at the world. This “sound of
freedom” myth is a perfect example of how they exploit us. And even more sadly and tragically, it is a
grim reminder of how we accept their deceptions without even questioning their
truthfulness.
In the U.S. we have
never been under siege. We have never
known the wrath of outside invaders, whether they were on horseback, in tanks
or in supersonic aircraft. Our towns
have never been bombed, our children killed and our wives and sisters
raped. But much of the world has
experienced this. And in some places
they have repeatedly suffered this
grotesque horror down through the centuries.
When we hear the
roar of a combat jet overhead, it is just an aircraft that is practicing for a
mission far, far away. Many of us would
look skyward and be proud of the young top gun pilot who is protecting our way
of life. The fierce noise that it makes
is merely a minor nuisance in our daily lives, and it presents no danger to us
whatsoever. So most Americans tolerate
it, because it is supposedly “the sound of freedom.”
*******
But for a mother
far, far away the sound of a jet means something entirely different – something
insanely horrible and senseless. That
evil supersonic dragon screeching in from the horizon could transform her beautiful
daughter, full of life and laughter, into a pulp of bloody, burning flesh. It means that the putrid smell of her
charred, dying child and the anguished sound of the little girl’s screams and
whimpers as she yearns for the release of death, will remain with that mom for
the rest of her tortured days.
Are those jets the
“sound of freedom” for that mom? Is the
horrific pestilence that they spew from the sky acceptable because they are
“spreading democracy?” The great peace
pilgrim Mahatma Gandhi answered those questions about a half a century ago when
he wrote, “What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the
homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of
totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?”
To a mom with a
murdered child in her arms it makes no difference. And it makes no sense. Should one ever kill innocents because some
people believe that their political system is better than the political system
of some other people? If you are
inclined to answer “yes” to that question then I suggest that you reverse the
situation. If The Malignant Authorities
of some other country sent their jets into your skies to bomb you into adopting
their political system would you find that acceptable? No, you would not. And yet
you permit your own government to do just that!
But what is even
worse is the fact that the true motivation for sending in the bombers probably
had very little to do with spreading democracy and a whole lot to do with
capturing territory or gaining control of some valuable natural resource. Somewhere, deep within that mourning mother,
there is probably the realization that this whole nightmare is an accident of
geography. If her family lived in a
place that did not have oil flowing beneath the ground there would be no
attack, there would be no mutilation, and there would be no everlasting
yearning for her lost child.
*******
Another pair of
jets just screamed by, and this time I actually curse them as I sit in the cockpit
of my boat filleting the fish that I caught for my dinner. I have been trying to climb inside the head
of the tormented mother with her dead daughter in her arms, and imagine what
she thinks of the pilot of that despicable plane.
Does she wonder how
he could be smart enough to fly one of those complicated machines and yet too
dumb to realize the true consequences of his actions? Does she question whether he has ever had to
actually witness the severed bones, the spewing guts and the smoking hair of his
victims? Does she believe that he is not
a hero but a coward since he rains this murderous horror from the sky and yet
is rarely in any danger of being shot down himself due to the superiority of
his technology?
Does she suspect
that he has been so warped by an adolescence spent in front of violent video
games that he can no longer distinguish between actual carnage and electronic
destruction? Does she cringe when she
realizes that by spreading lifelong misery he is a hero in his homeland and is
guaranteed a high-paying airline job when his military days are over?
Does she think any
or all of these things? Or can she only
think of the limp, little body in her arms, and her daughter’s wasted, exterminated
future? When she hears the echo of that
jet down the tormented decades of her life, will she hear the sound of freedom…
or will she hear the sound of butchery?