The lambs of the world, finally, have the arms of liberty that makes for Franklin’s “well-armed lamb, contesting the vote”.  A global democracy, guided by Dao, or Deist Christianity, can begin to make America “safe for democracy” again, and become “A republic of virtue, if you can keep it” in Mr. Franklin’s most famous words spoken outside of the Independence Hall of Philadelphia some 250 years ago

To defeat a war that has been won, almost exclusively in the past 60 yeas, by “weapons of mass deception”, Internet is the obvious counter-weapon of choice.

(2)“Sustainable Community Transformation” that has seen flourishing writings in recent years. To begin, go to www.yesmagazine.org/greatturning, or many others like it. Daodejing is again its essential guide in the galaxy, and has indeed been much adopted by people in this movement already.

(3)“A Globally Coordinated Youth Education Program” that incorporates (1) and (2) above, to teach a Daoist way of life which might be Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, Indigenous, or simply New Age. It is well that we know the word “Commune” has its origin in early Christian history, and the most successful communes known to man had been the early Christian communes during the first three centuries after Christ’s birth, to large measures because they are very much like Daoist communities as exalted by Lao Zi.  Thankfully, some of the prominent left intellectuals are finally getting it. (Ref. 8)

The new global awareness of the limits of growth, depleting resources, and the importance of sustainable communities has brought Daoism into renewed focal attention no longer restricted to Chinese.  In the words of Professor Kristofer Schipper who has lived as a Daoist, not merely studied it, “Chinese culture is too serious to be left to the Chinese alone.” (Ref. 9)  However, at least from my 40 years of personal experience, it is the Chinese who have been too fearful to take Chinese culture seriously.  I feel that we do great spiritual disservice to ourselves and to our own children by that.  To all the young everywhere left with less and less resources, both material and spiritual, to be hopeful by, “A time comes when silence is betrayal” has never been more true and urgent than now.

It has always saddened me that to this day, I have not yet met one Chinese American leader who thinks, says, and acts as if he/she wants to help elect an American president of Chinese cultural descent.  They were invariably fearful of calamities, such as assassination, befallen upon them if they were to have such a dream.  To that I share with them the quote by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”  Being fearful, thus keep silence, is not becoming of anybody over age 60.  Even Confucius warned us against that. (Lao Ehr Bu Shi She Wei Dzei).

At age 32, I left a “15 minutes of obligatory fame in New York Times” type of career in science and technology, and tenured professorship, almost thirty years ago to search for ways to global peace with justice. I felt that unless mankind can achieve that, nothing else might have mattered much for our children.  Mankind has finally been able to produce enough food to feed everybody again for the first time in 10,000 years, setting the physical pre-requisite to reclaim our birthright of peace with justice. Our generation, the sixties’ one, had truly believed in the personal to be the political and vise versa -- a rather Daoist “orthopractice” way of life in retrospect. Our generation thus must try to give up careerism in order to find ways for the awesome progress in science and technology to be used for the betterment, rather than the detriment, of mankind.  And it was not for lack of good science and technology that mankind does not have better lives, but for lack of better values and workable democracies.

My friend, the highest educated American Lama Surya Das, has expressed much hope that the sixties’ generation, coming to maturity with their bulging inherited / self-made wealth, and experiences gained through their idealistic multicultural youth, would put their money where their mouth is, and will make the Aquarian Age finally come true. Peace on earth and goodwill toward men will then be humanity’s shared destiny.  I hope he is right, for most of the time, I do feel the same way as two of the most influential spiritual teachers of my youth did: Karl Jung who said that he did not need to believe in Christianity because he “knew“; Joseph Campbell who said that he did not need to have faith in Christianity because he “had experience”.  They both spoke as true Daoist would have spoken.

One of the next-generation of the Kennedy family said something last year that I personally identify with even more.  Of his young life strewn with too many personal and family tragedies, he said: There are too many things in my life that others might call mere coincidences.  I choose to call them Grace.

Only after global spiritual healing can mankind hope that the spirit of Amazing Grace, which to me has always felt like the spirit of Dao, be the guiding force for humanity’s future again.  After that, if I may predict, the first three policy changes in America would be: (1) the establishment of Single payer national health care system. (2) National Sunshine law that enables Jefferson’s necessary peaceful revolution every 25 years to unfold.  (3) The establishment of a cabinet level Department of Peace campaigned for by Congressman Kucinich that had met with much more enthusiasm abroad than in America so far.  For too long, wars have been made too easy so that the Department of Defense has been in reality the Department of War.

Our grandchildren can no longer afford to wait for every 60-year-old American to become a sinner first, and then a successful member of the Alcoholic Anonymous (AA); or every retired general to write heart-felt books pleading for peace.

It is time that Chinese Americans speak up for all mankind even though the culture tradition that has always controlled the Chinese subconscious,  Daoism, has been used by the mainstream Chinese more as a personal retreat than social activism.  I pray for the spirit of “being independent together” to rule the next chapter of human history for the sake of my own beautiful grandchildren who can not vote yet.

Democracy can work – but only if we keep it simple. There is no tradition that is as good at keeping it simple as Daoism and the Book of Dao.

References:

(1)“Blow Back: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire” by Chalmers Johnson, 2000.

(2)“Meeting At Potsdam” by Charles L. Mee, Jr., 1975.

(3)“The Decision To Use The Atomic Bomb: And The Architecture Of An American Myth” by Gar Alperovitz, 1995.

(4)“Gold Warriors: America’s Secret Recovery of Yamashita’s Gold” by Sterling and Peggy Seagrave, 2003.  Chinese translation published in late 2005.

(5)“Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II” by William Blum, Revised 1995.

(6)“Lifelines From Our Past: A New World History” by Dr. L. S. Stavrianos, (1989).

(7)“60 Years of Faulty Logic” by James Carroll, March 12, 2007, Boston Globe.

(8)“When West Meets East- International Sinology and Sinologists” by Wang Jia Fong and Li Guao Dzin, 1991.

(9)“Left Hand of God, The: Healing America's Political and Spiritual Crisis” by Michael Lerner (Paperback - Mar 13, 2007)

(10）Report by the Commission on the Relation of the Church to the War in the Light of Christian Faith, Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, March 1, 1946.

(11)“James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age“by James Hershberg, 1995.

APPENDIX

“I think one man is just as good as another so long as he’s honest and decent and not a nigger or a Chinaman...  He (uncle Will) does hate Chinese and Japs.  So do I.... I am strongly of the opinion that Negroes ought to be in Africa, yellowmen in Asia, and the white men in Europe and America. ... ”

---Harry S. Truman in Dear Bess, letter to his wife.

“His Majesty the Emperor, mindful of the fact that the present daily brings greater evil and sacrifice upon the peoples of all belligerent powers, desires with all his heart that it may be quickly terminated.”

--- Intercepted message from Japanese Foreign Minister Togo to Ambassador Sato in Moscow, July 12, 1945.

"We knew the world would not be the same. ...I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. 'Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.'”

--- July 16, 1945, Father of Atomic Bomb, Oppenheimer after witnessing the first explosion of an atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert, the Trinity Project.

“Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima. ... It is an atomic bomb.  It is the harnessing of the basic power of the universe.”

--- Truman’s announcement read to press on Aug. 6, 1945.  Truman was at the Atlantic sea returning from Meeting at Potsdam that he delayed for months to wait for the Atomic bomb test result so that Japan might not surrender, and decided upon its use on civilian Japanese cities without consulting, even informing, the Congress; nor the two generals in charge, Eisenhower and MacArthur.

“My belief (was) that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the (atomic bomb) was completely unnecessary, ... and I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.  It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender.”

--- General Dwight Eisenhower, Commander Of WWII

“(General MacArthur) had not even been consulted (on the use of the atomic bomb). ...Moreover, he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bombs.  The war might have ended weeks earlier, (MacArthur) said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor.”

--- Norman Cousin, in 1946 Saturday Review interview with General MacArthur.

“The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of war at all.”

--- Air Force General Curtis LeMay, Interview, New York Herald Tribune, September 20, 1945

“The surprise bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are morally indefensible…Both bombings, moreover, must be judged to have been unnecessary for winning the war … As the power that first used the atomic bomb under these circumstances, we have sinned grievously against the laws of God …”

--- Commission on the relationship of the Churches to the War in the Light of Christian Faith, Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, March 11, 1946

“The dropping of the atomic bomb was not so much the last military act of WWII, (but) as the major operation of the cold war with Russia.”

--- P. M. S. Blackett, British Nobel Physicist ,1949.

“The dropping of the bombs stopped the war, saved millions of lives.”

--- Harry S. Truman, 1959.

Arthur’s Note: To this day, repeated survey results indicate that the absolute majority of the American public still believes that the use of the atomic bombs had been necessary to end the Pacific war of WWII, and to save the lives of American soldiers. American public school teaching material is no less dis-informational than those in Japan that had been a continuous source of rancor in Asia. The myriads of injustice ranging from Japan’s refusal to give apology to the “comfort women”, to compensation to victims, including American’s own POWs, all expressly forbidden by the bilateral peace treaty between the U. S. and Japan signed in 1951, before Truman was to leave office in 1952.

“As a precaution, should anything odd happen, we have arranged for this book and all its documentation to be put up on the Internet at a number of sites.  If we are murdered, readers will have no difficulty figuring out who “they” are.”

--- Sterling and Peggy Seagrave, as preface to their book “Gold Warriors: America’s Secret Recovery of Yamashita’s Gold”, (2005), In “Authors’ Note: Slaying the Messenger”.

“The Seagraves have uncovered one of the biggest secrets of the twentieth century.”

---Book cover quote of Gold Warriors by Iris Chang, Author of the Rape of Nanking, Died November, 2005, at age 38.

“We went back and studied history.  We learned our lessons from President Truman when he decided to be tough with Communism at the end of WWII.”

--- Tom Ridge, Chief of newly created Homeland Security Department explaining on TV why they had worked under such secrecy in preparing for war and the passing of the Patriot Act in 2003.

“It (Iraq since Gulf War I of 1991) was like some sort of a 'social nuclear bomb”. .... During the times of Hitler, you would see Germans gathered in perfect cohesion, chanting slogans in fervour. Today, those who support fascist leaders do not make such an effort. They can simply show their support by going to the ballot and voting for them once every four years instead. What happens later, which could include genocide or torture, they would watch calmly on TV.”

---Ali Al-Sarraf, Middle East Online, March 23, 2007.