War. Good God Y'all.

A letter to Americans

To my dear countrymen,

We interrupt your regularly scheduled programming for an important message on the absolute most critical issue facing Americans today, whether we realize it or not:

War.

I’m going to be blunt.

This post is not an exercise in fear-mongering or righteous indignation. It’s a mirror-gazing exercise. We’re going to try and look at the thing as objectively as possible, see our role in it, and come to a decision about what we truly want to support and give our energy to.

At present, the United States government is bankrolling two major wars and multiple smaller conflicts around the globe. A few important things to note:

• This is not a new state of affairs. The Israel/Palestine and Ukraine/Russia wars are newer developments, but our government’s financial, military, and advisory participation in the wars of other countries has been ubiquitous throughout all of our lifetimes. It has continued under both Democrat and Republican leadership, without fail.

• Neither the Israel/Palestine nor the Ukraine/Russia wars show any sign of a decisive resolution being immanent.

• Both of these wars are presently destabilizing the regions in which they are situated, with major fallout implications for the globe.

• Both of these wars have the potential to explode into a World War III.

• The Ukraine/Russia war has massive potential to go nuclear, and the current presidential administration has made decisions that could very easily hasten that outcome.

  

Our complicity

I am not here to tell you which side of each war is right or wrong, good or evil. I have my opinions, but honestly at this point they seem immaterial to the fact of the matter. Which is that the whole damnable situation is evil, and American taxpayer dollars are enabling all of it.

It is, after all, our money that is being spent on these useless, life-negating, violent horrors. I ask you to really reflect on this fact. Every day when you, as an American citizen, go to work, you are committing a certain portion of your labor and energy to the proliferation of war in the Middle East and Eastern Europe.

If you’re a nurse, you’re caring for patients while financing the killing of children. If you’re a construction worker, you’re enabling the destruction of cities. If you’re a teacher or a lawyer or a short order cook, your daily work is going to fund the creation of refugees and then the burning of those refugees in their tents. Our money, our skills, our effort, our lifeblood is being siphoned off to promote the escalation of conflicts that could lead to all-out and global, very possibly nuclear war.

And God help us if the chickens ever come home to roost.

War Profiteering

People often say that no one profits from war, but this is not true. There are always those who profit from it. Every multi-billion dollar aid package that our government sends to Israel or Ukraine translates directly into profit for military contractors and the politicians who invest in them. These individuals are not personally impacted by the wars as they sit in their ivory towers, smoking cigars. It’s not their houses which are being reduced to rubble. It’s not their toddlers who are bleeding in the streets. It’s not their stomachs shrinking from lack of food. It’s not their sons and daughters who are coming home legless from the battlefield, or even their meager paychecks that are being taxed out of existence to pay for tanks and missiles. And these bad actors cleverly cloak their fathomless appetite for war profits under guises of humanitarian cause. Are we really falling for it? Still?

How can we possibly believe that these wars constitute a humanitarian cause in any way? No, absolutely not. They are plainly and simply markets of human butchery.

Now, it’s true that without American funding, these wars would both probably still be going on. But take away the multiple billions of dollars of financing in each case, and they couldn’t possibly be any worse then they presently are. What our masters have done is created an economic incentive to more war. Bigger, badder, deadlier war. By subsidizing the wars of foreign lands. By handing out weaponry like candy.

Drunken information

Though most of them don’t realize it, war is absolutely the most pressing issue facing American voters in 2024. The reason voters don’t realize that this is the most important issue is because of the drunken effect that mainstream media has on the human brain. And the most “well-informed” of us are typically the drunkest.

The brewers of this powerful intoxicant, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and the rest, are on the same side: the side of profits. The fact that they expend so much energy on keeping you and me locked in a vicious battle of wills only shows that it must be profitable for them to do so. So they pour out vitriolic propaganda focused on less important but more divisive issues like abortion and immigration, and treat these wars as if they’re quasi-fictions happening in another world and having nothing to do with us. From these media outlets we imbibe on draught ever more outrageous insult and hyperbole about our neighbors. They put us in a trance, locking us onto their target of choice, and fomenting fear and hatred. And in our addiction to the outrage, we keep coming back for more. The TV tells us Americans to fear each other while the marrow of our country is being sucked dry by salivating war profiteers. Shall we un-entrance ourselves from the malignant media yet?

And all of this reaches a fever pitch during election season. The media has each half of the country convinced that the other half is the enemy and the villain. It’s gotten so much worse in recent cycles. Young people who are turning old enough to vote this election have never known a time when Democrats and Republicans didn’t hate each other with a white hot burning rage. That’s their basis of knowledge for making a decision in this election. They ask not “what do I want for the future of my country?” but “who should I direct my animosity against?” When it comes to war, the latter question yields no desirable results.

The 2024 Election

The problem is, neither candidate has rejected war as an activity our nation should be involved in promoting and funding. Harris has reiterated many times her support for both wars, has lauded her administration’s profligate war spending, and has buddied up to infamous warmongers such as Dick Cheney.

Trump has blasted off war speech against Iran and expressed support for the continuation of the Israel/Palestine war until a decisive victory can be had. There’s an error in his thinking. A decisive victory could have been declared many times over by this point, but the goalposts keep getting moved. And as long as America keeps putting dollars in the underpants of warring world leaders such as Netanyahu, there will never be a victory decisive enough to end these wars.

So if you’ve been waiting for me to propose a solution that takes place at the ballot box, I’m sorry to disappoint. The way I see it, the system is a clown car and it makes little difference which clown is in the driver’s seat.

It’s sometimes true that one candidate may bring short-term improvements to problems, but just look at the U.S. government’s longer term record on war—regardless of which party has led—over the past few decades. We’ve steadily gotten more war, with the exception of when Trump was in office, when for a brief time we had less. Not none, but less.

Unlike my MAGA friends, though, I don’t attribute the relative peace during the Trump administration to Trump. I attribute it to the pandemic. For a minute there, world “leaders” were too distracted (or their citizens too locked down) for warring. Once that debacle was over, the warmongers got busy making up for lost time. And they are not going to stop, ever, until we, the ultimate source of their largesse, take a firm stand against this bullshit.

And unlike my Democrat friends, I don’t think Trump poses a pronounced threat to foreign affairs. I think he poses a normal threat, characteristic of presidents in general. Which is nothing to dismiss! But for Democrats to quaver in fear of the human cost of a Trump presidency while the Biden/Harris administration racks up skulls around the globe is… a very interesting type of projection.

Below is an example of the type of rhetoric I have been seeing from the left as this election season reaches its fever pitch.

Please snap out of it, friends.

Domestic Violence

Beyond the WWIII potential of our next presidency, either way it goes, there also seems to be a real risk of civil war. I would appreciate if everyone reading this letter would please take a moment to soberly consider this risk, and to examine where it comes from.

It doesn’t come from “Commie-La” or from “Dictator Trump.” The divide between us has been dangerously widening since at least the nineties. And although I do acknowledge the influence of media and various elite agendas on our thinking, I don’t believe that influence is the root of the problem. Deception and manipulation are weeds that don’t grow in well-tended soil. I believe this division, which has us teetering on the precipice of a civil war, comes from our own inner states of conflict, projected out onto the world in the form of resentment and vitriol, finger-wagging superiority and control tactics. Media doesn’t cause it, but only fans its flames.

I don’t think we are going to get anywhere by continuing to blame and denigrate the other side or wrest control away from each other every four years. Progress and peace will come when we take accountability at the individual level, thus creating a culture of accountability. In such a culture, toddlers and sociopaths can’t ascend to leadership positions because their dishonesty and refusal to hold themselves accountable makes them stand out like a sore thumb.

America’s war problem took a long time to create, and it’s not going to be solved overnight. But I really do think we stand a decent chance of ending the government’s war dependency, if we’re ready and willing. The first step is simple awareness. To acknowledge that the problem exists, how extensively it reaches, and how entangled it is with every facet of American empire. Then we’re going to have to look at some new and different avenues of change. We’re going to have to question the sanctity of some of our most time-honored institutions. For instance, is “our democracy” really such a great engine of change for the people, if all it gets us is a different warmonger every four-to-eight years, along with ever more apocalyptic levels of political division?

A few suggestions

I’m going to be honest, I don’t know what exactly it would look like for Americans to successfully say no to war. I think it would have to ultimately involve mass conscientious objection to our present form of taxation, but I don’t know how Americans would go about doing that or how it would play out.

But I do have some suggestions. These are a few things we can do as individuals to step away from the brink of World War III, regardless of who wins the election.

1. Boycott the legacy media. Give them zero views, zero clicks, zero subscription fees, zero advertising dollars. My advice is to quit cold turkey. Sober up. Get your news from independent journalists and publications here on Substack and elsewhere. When evaluating a news source, ask yourself, “Is this source telling me what to think, or is it giving me things to think about?”

2. Withdraw your projections. The more fearful we are, the more resentment we feel toward our political opponent, the more intense and exaggerated our feelings about the election, the more likely we are to be harboring projections. Honestly review each of your criticisms of “the other side” and ask yourself whether there is some hidden hypocrisy, some way in which this criticism is true of your own side. When you find evidence of hypocrisy—and you will if you’re being diligent—then you can begin to withdraw your projections, forgive your opponent his error, and return to the negotiation table in peace.

3. Connect with your neighbors, regardless of their politics. This is going to take a thick skin for partisans and dissidents alike. Trust me, as an anarchist, I know. If I rejected everyone who disagreed with me politically, I wouldn’t have any friends outside the internet. And in fact, for a long time I didn’t because it was too much of a challenge for me to be in the same room with people who said things I vehemently disagreed with and not blow a fuse. So I isolated myself. But eventually I discovered that this was no way to live a healthy life. So I have made friends with people across the political spectrum, even though I disagree with most of them on most things. And it turns out, people are just people. They are beautiful, flawed, miraculously human. We are all the children and image bearers of God, and politics is little more than an obstacle to our treating each other as brothers and sisters. We don’t have to agree on everything or even most things in order to have community, to respect one another, to care for each other, and to have each other’s backs when challenges come our way. If Hurricane Helene taught us southern Appalachians anything, it taught us this.

4. Be willing to be wrong. In order to stop allowing ourselves to be led to slaughter under the uniparty’s war hawk banner, we need to be able to unite with each other on what matters most. Mutuality is only possible to the extent that each participant has the humility to confront his or her own error. Stick to your principles, express your views, but in the back of your mind, keep an acknowledgement that you are a fallible human being just like everyone else. And you could be wrong about some things. Along with this, keep an awareness of the fact that sometimes (gasp!) it is possible for your opponent to be right on some things as well. Even if they sound like an asshole when they say it.

5. Take local responsibility. The whole clown car that is our federal government is fueled by the untested assumption that we the people need it to bear the responsibility for everything from caring for our poor to making our healthcare decisions. When we cede our responsibility to the Powers That Shouldn’t Be, our freedom and peace goes along with it. So take responsibility for what you can, where you can. Starting with yourself, then your family, then your community. Don’t worry so much about what the whole dang country is doing. If you live in Maryland, maybe you don’t need a strong opinion about how Texans deal with Texas problems. What problems can you solve on your own street?

6. Speak love. The words we speak to and about each other are powerful. Let’s use them in love and good will. When you find yourself speaking out of fear or malice or superiority, check yourself. It is possible to say critical things in a way that respects the person you are speaking to or about. Through this step, you cultivate greater inner peace. Inner peace spreads. Practice, practice.

7. Extra bonus step: Reduce your federal tax liability. To reduce the state’s ability to wage unwanted proxy wars on our behalf, we’re eventually going to have to cut the purse strings. This is probably a bridge too far for most people at this present moment, not least because our taxes are confiscated from most of us before we even see our paychecks. But if you’re ready to take some personal responsibility for stepping back from the brink of World War III, you might consider ways to reduce the amount of funding you contribute toward it. One way—completely legal—is to consciously decide to make less money, which may involve voluntarily lowering your standard of living for a time. There are other ways, but my FBI agent gets a tummy ache when I speak of such things.

Above all, let us calm our troubled hearts. It is near impossible to see and effectively respond to real danger when we allow ourselves to be tossed endlessly upon stormy seas of imagined dangers. Take a moment today, and every day, to experience tranquility of spirit. Touch grass, pray, meditate, hug a tree. Whatever works to bring coherence to your mental and emotional life will have profound impact on everything in your sphere of influence.

From this place of calm-heartedness, we can much more easily decide where we want to put our energy. Into fear, resentment, and division? Or into taking accountability, loving our neighbors, and planting good seeds for the future?

Fellow countrymen, I believe in you.

With love,
Starr of Appalachia

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Thank you all for reading my work and witnessing the bearing of my dissident little heart. I appreciate you greatly.

I am publishing updates on Helene recovery in southern Appalachia twice per week. In addition, my Prayer of the Week comes out each Sunday and I am always working on more new content focused on spirit-filled, heart-centered responses to the wider dystopia. If you feel so inspired, you can support my work—and give me more time to accomplish it—by becoming a paid subscriber to this Substack for $5/month or making a one-time contribution through the Buy Me a Coffee link below.