THE CRESTING OF SACRIFICE

American troops sent to Iraq sacrifice their lives to preserve the wealth of the richest among us, and what they get in return for their pain is a paycheck while they are alive, and a letter of condolences to their relatives when they are dead.

The unprovoked war in Iraq remains illegal in the eyes of most constitutional experts. Further, administration officials who ordered the war do not expose their own lives to risk. So why should U.S. soldiers die for a policy formulated by a unilateralist government bent on ignoring the American Constitution?

President Bush represents the elite of the rich. While being wealthy has never been a crime in America, corporations such as Enron, not to mention Halliburton, have direct or indirect connections to the highest office, in Halliburton’s case, through Vice President Dick Cheney. The profits of these and other corporations involve billions of dollars. That is to say, the unilateralists not only declare illegal wars, but the men and women who fight and die in these wars do so to preserve and increase the wealth of the extremely rich.

These wealthy few are now waging war—and not only in Iraq—to gain monopoly rights over the economy of the world. Of course, such war cannot be waged in Russia and China because of their sizeable military powers. But the poorer regions of the world—Africa, South America, the Middle East, the Far East, and the borderlands of the wealthy lands themselves—are subject to corporate invasion in the name of democracy, free trade, and globalization. For this “opportunity,” th,e poor earn sweatshop wages. The poor, by the way, number at least three billion, half or more of the world’s population.

When a country’s wealth is based on violence, it takes ever more violence to maintain that wealth, because those who lost their economic well being to the violent ones have not given up fighting the injustice that violence imposed on them. The losers simply go underground.

One does not have to be a university professor to understand that the story of oil is a story of violence. Those who depend on oil from countries sitting atop oil fields have to keep increasing the violence to ensure their gain.

American troops have become martyrs on behalf of the wealthy. The country has spent 1.3 trillion dollars to keep the wealthy in luxury, while the rest of America reaps no benefit from the war. At the same time, the global ecological crisis accelerates to the point that it is now five minutes to Armageddon, according to the Doomsday Clock created by scientists to warn the public. The pushing ahead of the clock’s dials no doubt has something to do with the unusual weather patterns during the past year, but economic factors are at work as well. As Ben Bernanke, chairman of the US Federal Reserve, told the Senate budget committee, the recent improvement in U.S. public finances was only the “calm before the storm.” He urged immediate action to head off the looming Medicare and Social Security funding gap. And guess what action he recommends—reduce or eliminate the funding of same.

Soldiers’ sworn duty is to fight and sacrifice their lives even if they are being exploited. This oath to duty must be upheld.

At the same time, the lay public, the citizens, the so-called civilians must guarantee an honest government, a government that will not exact an unjust sacrifice of its soldiers. The citizens’ job is by no means easy, because the extremely rich own the media and prevent the public from being fully informed. Fortunately, the Internet has arrived, wresting control of information from media conglomerates and making a potential reporter of every citizen. This is why precisely at this time the conscience of citizens notes and reports the unjust sacrifice of soldiers taking place in Iraq.

But if soldiers must die serving in an unjustified war, that war having been ordered by the Commander in Chief, President Bush, the soldiers have the right to ask their commander and the U.S. public to recompense their sacrifice.

At this time in history, the only recompense that can do justice to a dead soldier is cloning, more properly called cresting.* To clone means to duplicate. A cloned individual is a duplicated individual, a clone. A crested individual is not duplicated, but renewed. In short, the recompense due soldiers for the loss of their lives is cresting, that is, the renewal of their lives. Of course, what is renewed is not the sacrificed ‘I,’ but the Self within which the ‘I’ is imbedded and out of which another ‘I’ will arise. This other ‘I’ will have a sovereign existence as well, except that—like a sovereign country—it will know it has a history by way of having a record of an earlier Self.

Notwithstanding the hullabaloo over cloning among the orthodox religious, it would be absurd for the religious to insist that soldiers sacrificed in battle remain dead, when the possibility exists for their sacrifice to crest in the rebirth or renewal of the former selves. One would hope that the new ‘I’ of each will crest a career as bravely as did the former selves, which is not to say that they will return to a military career. Indeed, a human crest is more likely to do everything possible to achieve peace, because war means being born into a violent world again. Dying as a sacrifice of the powerful in battle should never be repeated. The next time the Selves would rather give their lives over to peace.

Therefore, the Congress of the United States of America must finance a major research project in human cresting. If the U.S. President has the legal right to override America’s legislative body, that body can at least cleanse itself from complicity in the death of American troops by giving them a chance (and choice) to come into this world again, perhaps even be reborn in a peaceful America.

*Crest—as in the crest or top of a hill or a wave; the high point as in the crest of my career; the boat crests the wave; also, a family crest or shield, suggesting the family has a history. Cresting, as in the cresting moon; the sun crests the horizon in a blaze of light.