George Bush and Jesus Christ
In the spirit of Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol.
On the evening of September 11 2001, and for months following, the options for the United States were many. In that historical moment, the president of the United States was truly the most powerful person on the planet. Everyone wanted to hear what he had to say. What would “the decider” decide was the wisest course of reaction after such an audacious assault on our homeland? Billions of people around the world were grieving the horrors that three thousand Americans had just suffered. They held us in a global empathic embrace. Nous sommes tous américains read the top headlines of Le Monde. We are all Americans. And George Bush II was our leader.
It could have been a threshold moment, a potential tipping point for Civilization.
The president’s 9/11 Address to the Nation began thoughtfully enough.
“This is a day when all Americans from every walk of life unite in our resolve for justice and peace. America has stood down enemies before, and we will do so this time. None of us will ever forget this day, yet we go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our world.”[i]
And then nine days later, in an Address To The Joint Session Of The 107th Congress, Bush acknowledged the support from around the world:
“And on behalf of the American people, I thank the world for its outpouring of support. America will never forget the sounds of our National Anthem playing at Buckingham Palace, on the streets of Paris, and at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate. We will not forget South Korean children gathering to pray outside our embassy in Seoul, or the prayers of sympathy offered at a mosque in Cairo. We will not forget moments of silence and days of mourning in Australia and Africa and Latin America.”[ii]
Through the eloquence of his speechwriter, Michael Gerson, he expressed sentiments that frankly would be reassuring for many of us today should our president elect Donald Trump tweet something similar:[iii]
“I also want to speak tonight directly to Muslims throughout the world. We respect your faith. It's practiced freely by many millions of Americans, and by millions more in countries that America counts as friends. Its teachings are good and peaceful, and those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah. (Applause.) The terrorists are traitors to their own faith, trying, in effect, to hijack Islam itself. The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends; it is not our many Arab friends.”
Then came inspiring lines that could have been delivered just as well from a spiritual warrior as from a commander in chief rallying his troops and steeling his citizens for war.
“Great harm has been done to us. We have suffered great loss. And in our grief and anger we have found our mission and our moment. Freedom and fear are at war. The advance of human freedom -- the great achievement of our time, and the great hope of every time -- now depends on us. Our nation -- this generation -- will lift a dark threat of violence from our people and our future. We will rally the world to this cause by our efforts, by our courage. We will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail. (Applause).
George Bush could have sealed his legacy as one of the greatest leaders of human history, placing his name alongside those of Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, and the Dalai Lama. By joining the leaders of the emerging paradigm of peace and love he could have more wisely spent the trillions of his people’s dollars and avoided the innumerable atrocities that he would soon set in motion. With all Earth’s winds at his back, he could have helped make the world a far safer place for everyone, and spent far less money in doing so.
If only the president of the United States had followed the prescriptions of his professed faith. He could have taken any number of verses that spoke of foregoing an eye for an eye, and instead turning the other cheek… and Ye have heard that it has been said, you shall love your neighbor, and hate your enemy. But I say to you, love your enemies… even sinners and tax collectors love those who love them… do good to them that hate you… as we forgive those who sin against us, for Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy, and Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God, and so on and so forth.
This stance would have taken extraordinary courage from an American president. He was to bear the heavy cross of leading the many who had vengeance in their hearts, through the deserts of ignorance, to the promised land of love and compassion. This Christian would have had to take that mysterious leap of Faith, relying on one of the most beloved Biblical verses, John 8:31-32: Then Jesus said, If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. 32 Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.[iv]
He would have had to trust that our challenges are actually psycho-spiritual treasures, that the darker the challenge, the deeper one must delve to find the truth, and the greater the treasure that lies waiting. As he contemplated, in the manner of his Lord who had spent forty days in the wilderness, he might shared some of the visions many of us have seen, such as the mindset of those 19 men who sacrificed their lives into the towers and horrifically massacred three thousand others… the rage in their hearts, and the history that propelled them into such darkness… taking him to Saudi Arabia, the mother of fifteen of those men and of Osama bin Laden, from where the world’s biggest spigot flowed rivers of Civilization’s black, viscous juice. In his meditations, he might have felt grateful that his few years as an oilman had prepared him for this historical moment. He knew enough about oil and what it takes to get it out of the ground and to market and how its wealth and power defiles everyone that it touches.[v]
Being president he was privy to information accessible to few others. He would have known that the American military spent hundreds of billions of dollars each year insuring the oil’s flow in the Persian Gulf, trillions over the decades, and that trillions more would be spent in the coming years.[vi] He did grasp some of the implications. “America is addicted to oil,” he announced in his 2006 State of the Union Address. And Osama bin Laden had made it clear to all that the humiliation of American theft through force was a prime motive for his hatred.[vii] Bush knew that too.
As he settled deeper into his meditation, the president might have witnessed the wastes spewing from all the vehicles and ships and planes and factories, as if our very air were a sewer. He had already publicly accepted the dangers of global warming and its threat to climates around the planet.[viii] Now he could tie these to the price of oil, the squandered tax dollars for the military occupation of the Persian Gulf, the pollution, the injustices, humiliation, discord, and horrors inflicted upon the world by the addiction. A little deeper, if it wasn’t too painful, and he might see the billions of poor and hungry around the world, and—juxtaposed—the outrageous fortune in which he sat. He might have remembered from Mathew 25:41 “Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’ And then it would have taken the smallest step deeper to see a way out of this morass.
This epiphany could have been the inspiration to mobilize “the coalition of the willing.” For it would require exceptional political will from those who had not seen as deeply as he had. This is the burden that weighs on the head of the leader of the free world. But who else on the planet, in one word, in a single stroke of the pen, could achieve this? This Road to Damascus insight would have made him giddy with joy!
Charity would go to those who were poor in material and in spirit, an amends from the wealthy nations to the poor. A grand coalition of countries would surely have tripped over themselves to collectively commit ten billion dollars a year to end the world’s water problems, thirty billion dollars a year to end world hunger, less than six billion annually for universal contraception, and $27 billion to shore up universal education.[ix] Not only could so much gain come at so little cost, but world poverty – repeat, world poverty – could be eradicated in twenty years, according to economist superstar Jeffrey Sachs, at the low, low price of $165 billion annually.[x] Okay, maybe not so low. Actually, that’s a lot of money. And yet in 2001 it represented but one-tenth of the world’s (official) military spending, 1.6 percent of the U.S. GDP, and only 0.4 percent of the global economy.[xi] If Bush had led us forward in 2002, we would be only six years from experiencing the full reward of this economic miracle.
And for a viable civilization on a healthy planet, president Bush would assemble the greatest minds of the day to initiate his generation’s Apollo Mission, their Manhattan Project, their Marshall Plan, by powering civilization with something other than the fossil fuels stored underground. How much would that effort cost, he would ask them. They would do their calculations, and they would all be astounded. It would not be cheap, but then again the price tag would not approach the trillions upon trillions that the wars in the Middle East would soon cost the U.S. alone, at least five trillion as of 2016, perhaps eight trillion, perhaps more, when the last check is written.[xii] And instead of hundreds of thousands killed, two societies—Iraq and Syria—completely destroyed, he would have been the architect of a new era of peace and prosperity. He would have achieved far more in love than bin Laden had in hate.
This was 2001, the first year of the new century and the new millennium. It would also be the beginning of a new age, when we turned our homes into distributed solar power plants and our pastures into wind farms. Electricity would flow for everyone from the sun, itself, the ultimate energy source for light years distant.
With this vision, wealth would have surely poured from all corners of the Earth into his projects. Not only from governments, but also from private philanthropists and from all who genuinely desired to be a part of bettering the world. We simply needed a visionary. A leader with a worldview at the leading edge of consciousness. We needed a tipping point moment.
9/11 could have been that moment. It was poised to be. A moment when the three saviors—the economy, technology, and the evolution of consciousness—integrated synergistically to make the punctuated jump in human affairs. And we would now be speaking of the hope we feel for the future. It does suggest just how close we always are to a sustainable, empathic civilization.
George Bush didn’t do any of this, of course. He was, after all, a person whose worldview lay somewhere in the middle of humanity’s Gaussian curve and who, as president of the history’s most powerful country, inhabited an outlier position in society. He was an ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances. In some significant way, he reflected our own state of consciousness. And so, following a script carved in the Stone Age, he promised us vengeance, instead.
He declared to the world that, “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” And by June of 2002, he announced in the State of the Union Speech, otherwise known as the “axis of evil” speech, that three “regimes” had been identified as threats to the civilized world—Iran, North Korea, and Iraq. Of these, Iraq became singled out—for reasons a legion of historians will spend their lifetimes parsing out—as the country that would feel the full impact of America’s revenge, through the “shock and awe” of America’s military might. Trillions of American dollars later, with the Iraqi state in ruin and hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians murdered and brutalized, and tens of thousands of soldiers killed, shredded, and traumatized, no consolation can yet be found in this man’s decisions.
September 11, 2001 will not be remembered as a turning point event in human history. Along with Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy and Chernobyl and Fukushima and the European heat wave of 2003 and the invasion of Iraq and the subsequent civil wars there and in Syria and in numerous African nations and in the genocide of Rwanda, 9/11 will likely stand, in the retrospect of the not too distant future, as but one more punctuation mark among many in the narrative of Civilization’s rise and fall.
We will have other opportunities. If, as many people firmly believe, we are transitioning into a new paradigm, a Fourth Revolution, exemplified by a far deeper sense of inclusiveness in which we each participate as a profoundly self-aware sovereign in an interconnected planetary or even cosmic whole, then we may yet change our course or at least face the coming collapse with dignity, compassion, and wisdom.
It bodes well for us that societies have changed in the past, that they have intentionally redirected the courses of their futures, and have been doing so with increasing speed. It further bodes well for us that we are becoming aware of our predicament, have history to guide us, and are able to intentionally direct our future actions. Clearly, our predicament is not a result of what must be, but simply of our behaviors that have brought us to this point. Our circumstances are only as dire as the inverse of our awareness.
With awareness can come swift action. We don’t need to wait until biospheric consciousness becomes a majority view. Only some small percent sufficiently inspired and strategically located can change the course of history. The women’s right to vote and the Civil Rights movement in the United States, the rise of Nazism in post World War I Germany, the birth of new religions, and the fall of kings and autocrats, the American war of independence and then its entry into World War I, the socialist revolution in 1917 Russia, and then its dissolution in 1991—all of these, for better and for worse, were catalyzed by a small group of dedicated visionaries. If their visions speak to people, if they are voicing an unconscious worldview that is bubbling up to collective awareness, whole cultural paradigms can be swept aside. According to plate tectonic theory, slow imperceptible tension can build up along fissures deep inside the earth for millennia, until suddenly a threshold is passed. The earth trembles. In an instant, thousands of years of cumulative pressure are released. Above the surface, where we experience it, earthquakes trigger tsunamis and bring down mountainsides. You get the picture. To turn the patriarchal adage on its head, “As below, so above.”
REFERENCES
[i] George Bush (2001, September 11) Address to the Nation on the September 11 Attacks. Accessed December 19, 2016 at https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/infocus/bushrecord/documents/Selected_Speeches_George_W_Bush.pdf
[ii] George Bush (2001, September 20) Address to the Joint Session of the 107th Congress. Accessed December 19, 2016 at https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/infocus/bushrecord/documents/Selected_Speeches_George_W_Bush.pdf
[iii] Russell, A. (2006, June 16) Bush Loses ‘Axis of Evil’ Speech-writer. The Telegraph.
[iv] Wording from the New International Version.
[v] Jackson, B. (1999, May 13) Bush as Businessman: How the Texas Governor Made His Millions. CNN. Accessed December 20, 2016 at http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/05/13/president.2000/jackson.bush/
Also, Yergin, D. (1992) The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power, Free Press, New York
[vi] This was actually well known. However, in 2010 Roger Stern, a professor at Princeton made the numbers very clear: Stern, R.J. (2010) United States Cost of Military Force Projection in the Persian Gulf, 1976-2007. Energy Policy, doi:10.1016/j.enpol.2010.01.013
[vii] For example points 1 (d), (e), (f). Find the full transcripts in The Guardian (2002, November 24) Full Text: ‘bin Laden’s Letter to America’ Available at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/nov/24/theobserver
[viii] See, for example, President Bush Discusses Global Climate Change (2001, June 11). Accessed December 20, 2016 at https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/06/20010611-2.html.
[ix] Ten billion dollars for water – Associated Press (2000, November 23) Price of Safe Water for All; $10 Billion and the Will to Provide It. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/23/world/price-of-safe-water-for-all-10-billion-and-the-will-to-provide-it.html
Thirty billion dollars to end hunger – FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) (2008, June 3) The World Only Needs 30 Billion Dollars a Year to Eradicate the Scourge of Hunger. http://www.fao.org/NEWSROOM/en/news/2008/1000853/index.html
Rosenthal, E. and Martin, A. (2008, June 4) UN Says Solving Food Crisis Could Cost $30 Billion. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/04/news/04iht-04food.13446176.html
Contraception – Stars, A. (2014, December 5) Adding it Up: The Costs And Opportunities of Universal Access to Contraception Services. The Lancet Global Health Blog. http://globalhealth.thelancet.com/2014/12/05/adding-it-costs-and-opportunities-universal-access-contraception-services
Universal Education -- Euractive.com and the Guardian (2015, March 13) Universal Education will Cost £20.7 Billion a Year, Says UNESCO. http://www.euractiv.com/section/development-policy/news/universal-education-will-cost-20-7-billion-a-year-says-unesco/
[x] For expedience, I take the average of Sach’s (page 299) estimate of $135 to $195 billion. His numbers include some of the other aid interventions (for water, education, and nutrition, for instance), so, although there is a bit of double counting here, his estimates are so kitchen napkin that a few billion for margin of error are in order.
Sachs, J. (2005) The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time. Penguin Press, New York.
[xi] Given the increase in all these metrics—GDP alone has risen 50% since—the $175 billion would represent even less of our resources.
Military – Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (2016) SIPRI Military Expenditure Database. Available at https://www.sipri.org/sites/default/files/Milex-constant-USD.pdf
[xii] Crawford, N.C. (2016) Costs of War. Brown University. Accessed December 20, 2016 at http://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2016/Costs%20of%20War%20through%202016%20FINAL%20final%20v2.pdf
Stiglitz, J.E., and Bilmes, L.J. (2008) The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, W.W. Norton and Company, New York.
