Lemmings for War

I spent this past weekend at the Libertopia 2014 Festival in San Diego. During the same days this was held, there was a military veterans program at the same hotel. It seemed to be a family event, with young children of the participants in attendance. As the war system depends upon conditioning the minds of children in both the virtue and necessity of war – a lesson to be carried out in their adult lives by going to foreign lands to kill strangers and, perhaps, to be killed themselves – I asked myself how seemingly loving parents could encourage their children to partake in such destructiveness. At a time when the government War Department acknowledges that an average of twenty-two military veterans commit suicide every day, the dispirited, dehumanizing, and deadly consequences of the war system should be a sufficient threat to their children so as to elicit deeper questions than were probably being asked at this pro-military gathering.

For those who love their children more than they do the state, and who would appreciate a reinforcement of the life-enhancing values of peace as an antidote to the collective psychopathy of modern America, I thought it might be helpful to republish my March, 2003 article on The Great Lemming Race.

“Wake up, son,” Papa Lemming shouted as he ran into Little Boy Lemming’s bedroom. “President George W. Lemming has just announced that all lemmings, particularly the young ones, are going to have the honor of participating in the great race to the Persian Gulf! There’s even talk of restoring the draft in order to get more participants.”

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