Sander Hicks - Slingshot to the Juggernaut: Total Resistance to the Death Machine Means Complete Love of the Truth

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Table of Contents

To David

OPENING INVOCATION

Lets stop and do a visualization together.

Take a deep breath.

Hunch up and relax your shoulders. Exhale.

Close your eyes for a moment. Put yourself in the presence of the deeper truth. Connect to the higher power you recognize, whether its God, peace, nature, the earth, or the universe.

Now, visualize a future where the United States is a global leader in exporting peace, a leader in the science of conflict resolution. Visualize a new kind of country, one that is about empowering its citizens and the citizens of the world rather than intimidating them. Imagine the United States as a country best at figuring out how to meet the needs of all parties in a conflict. Instead of being number one at war, we become number one at fostering peace.

In New York Harbor, we have a former military base, Governors Island, that was converted into a public park for art and music. Simply visualize that happening on a global scale. See the U.S. military bases and the entire crony-capitalist empire converted into a better life-giving infrastructure. Imagine the U.S. Army coming home and retraining as professionals with expertise in nonviolence and communication, empathy and justice, diplomacy and civil engineering.

See it. Taste it.

Right now we have a president who is calm, cool, understated, and completely amoral, capable of fooling much of the country and some of the world into believing were moving toward peace, all while keeping several illegal wars going strong (and launching a few new ones). The vision I outline is very different from what we do today. But its a vision thats not really all that different from who we really areits a vision similar to that of Enlightenment thinkers who foresaw Americas revolutionary, transformational promise.

This is a visualization I just did coast to coast, at the beginning of each of my gigs, on my 2011 national tour. I talked about this, my new book to come. But doing these visualizations and having conversations helped write this book. This book is a collective effort. The vision is not just my own. Its in this vision of peace that we are building up a new political party, the Truth Party.

This book is a door. We are going to go through it to a new place. These are ideas that resurrect the dead. If you are spiritually dead, its time to wake up! We are all a little deadened by the crushing death that surrounds us. Its time to go from death into life. We are going to examine a tragedy and a cover-up. But that is not all.

I promise you a pathway to something greater.

Welcome to Slingshot to the Juggernaut.

Come in.

PART ONE

PICK UP A SLINGSHOT

DAVID AND GOLIATH

Remember the story of David and Goliath?

We can all relate to the underdog, the scrawny shepherd boy who with a strange self-assurance takes on a bloodthirsty giant. The stage is set for tragedy, because Goliath is an undefeated champion warrior. But in a shocking upset, the little guy wins.

How did that happen? How did a kid knock out a towering, fearsome ogre using just a slingshot?

Certain details of the David story are often overlooked. David had faith that he could do the job because he had some experience fighting off lions as a shepherd. He felt a divine power over him in those struggles. He had faith that the divine power was real, that God was inside him. God wasnt some postmodern master narrative; David believed in what he was doing. And people who believe in what they are doing are undefeatable. David will keep reappearing, to prove this point, through the lives of many individuals in this book.

When David volunteered to do the impossible, he was at first gussied up in the armor of the Israelites. But he couldnt move around. He said, I cannot go in these because I have never tried them before. A modern translation could be Dude, I cant even breathe in this gearforget it. Let me try something. So he put away the professional weapons and armor. He went to a dry creek bed and picked out five smooth stones.

Goliath, for his part, was loud and obnoxious. He was a trash talker. He mocked the God of Israel. He blasphemed so obscenely, David was filled with a special kind of rage. Davids rage was holy. You see, David loved God. He loved the truth and the poetry of God. We know this because of the songs he wrote, the Psalms. Radical, antimaterialist, antiwar stuff, like:

Trampling under foot the pieces of silver
God has scattered the peoples who delight in war.

So, even if you, my reader, dont believe in God, or dont believe in the God of ancient Israel, I think you can still relate to Davids situation. Goliath had already killed a lot of Davids friends and countrymen, but when he mocked God, Davids foundational beliefs, it hit David in the gut. And that was the beginning of Goliaths end.

The juxtaposition must have been startling: Next to his enemy, David appeared practically naked. David was stone cold terrified as he looked out at the battlefield that day. The famous statue David by Michelangelo reminds us of this. Many people have joked about how small Davids penis and testicles look in that work, but that, too, is a telling detail: His fear of death was so intense, Davids genitals shrank up as a natural protective measure. Davids face was trying to look cool, while his body was contracting, terrified. We guys can relate.

And yet despite the fear, and the odds, and the unequal weaponry, David won. He felt fear but worked through it. He put his faith in the holiness of truth, the divine poetry, the God that was within him, coursing through his veins as the Spirit of Revolution flows in the heart of history. God is the history of all history, and the Spirit of History tends to love subversive underdogs.

History teaches us we can beat a brutal military juggernaut with a slingshot. God is an anarchist. Throughout history, kings have claimed that God has given them their authority, but a close read of the Bible shows that God does not love human power. God loves truth. God sends the electrical, fiery power of language out through prophets. God sends activists, catalysts like David, Daniel, and Jesus, to completely subvert human power and the corruption of our kings. But as the prophet Daniel said to King Belshazzar of Babylon, you have to learn how to read the writing on the wall.

This book is my slingshot. Theres a Goliath in our midst. That Goliath is the status quo reality of war and lies. Its an America that doesnt know what it stands for. Its an American politics that is locked in its addiction to self-destructive, wasteful cycles. Its a war machine that has not only killed millions already but has also grown expert in the realm of spectacle creation. The war machine kills people, but it also kills truth. It molds public opinion to support wars that normally we regular, peace-loving people would never support.

Our current politics, foreign policy, and domestic antiterror police tactics are brutally executed in the name of 9/11. But 9/11 is a rotten onion. When you hold up this defining event, you find not a definitive story but a complex, rotting vegetable. Peel back any layer, and every one stinks. Its soft and cant be supported logically, but were all too scared to talk about the truth. Instead, we as a country keep killing and killing. In the past year alone we have killed bin Laden, and American citizen Anwar Awlaki, for being in the so-called Al Qaeda movement.

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