“The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.”

The words are from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (where else?), explaining the root causes of a dystopian world. The book may be a work of fiction, but his words are deeply embedded in reality – we need enemies, the worse the better! This certainty may well be humanity’s most profound existential threat. I fear it could be “the meteor” that hits Planet Earth, ultimately spelling extinction for the dominant species.

Mostly what we do is prepare for – and wage – war. We always wage it in self-defense, even when in retrospect its motivating factor is colonial conquest. When it comes to the manifestation of power, at its core are the words “us vs. them.” That captures the public spirit so much more fully than cooperation, connection, understanding . . . or, groan, love.

As far as I’m concerned, this is humanity’s primary challenge of the moment. It’s time to transcend war, the meteor of our own making.

As we all know, wars are waging across the planet right this moment. Unless we’re directly affected by the violence, we can easily reduce it to an abstraction, usually with the help of the words “self-defense” – a particularly egregious term when used by the one inflicting the most harm. And for some reason, the name George W. Bush comes to mind –  the guy who bequeathed us "Axis of Evil” as our current reason to be afraid.

But an inescapable fact of American history is the long trail of evil enemies who have helped define us over the centuries. As Jérôme Viala-Gaudefroy writes:

“. . . the American identity is probably the best example of a ‘self’ understood through ‘otherness.’ Research in various disciplines has shown that Americans have long defined themselves through a binary narrative of ‘us’ versus ‘them.’ Whether it takes the form of the American Indians of the Frontier, the British during the American Revolution, the immigrants in the early 20th century, the Nazis, the Communists, and more recently the terrorists . . .”

He also notes, a la Orwell, that our enemy of the moment “has three constant characteristics: it is always deemed a threat, somewhat uncivilized and evil, and serves to define national identity by demarcating . . .’ a “self’ from an ‘other’ . . . “

Nations are essentially random creations. In order to unify socially into actual entities, their populations have to have a clear sense of who they aren’t. I would add to the above list of “others,” the country’s long history of racial exclusion, which of course begins with the importation of slaves, who were property, not actual human beings. “White” was a word bequeathed to us by God, apparently, and even though moral sanity has been slowly seeping into our national identity, whiteness still plays a significant role in the national task of othering. Think about the “invasion” going on at our southern border, for instance.

And, oh yeah, there’s also that war on Gaza – by which I mean genocide – that we’re playing a key role in sustaining, But as President Trump 2.0 keeps telling us in various ways, we also have a lot of work to do “Americanizing” the Western Hemisphere, from reclaiming the Panama Canal to . . . uh, seizing Greenland? And then there’s the recent decision by the State Department to officially designate some major Mexican drug cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs). Yikes, that means they’re really, really evil.

As Jon Rainwater writes, this isn’t just a symbolic gesture. Doing so “opens the door for military intervention under the guise of counterterrorism. The U.S. could justify drone strikes or cross-border raids without Mexico’s consent—a blatant affront to its sovereignty.”

What could be wrong with that? Come on, we have the most powerful military in the world; it’s up to us to decide how and when to use it, right? No matter, as Rainwater points out: “Combining the failed strategies of the war on terror and the war on drugs is not just misguided — it’s doubling down on failure.”

And not only that. “Designating cartels as FTOs,” he goes on, “feels like another chapter in this playbook: framing another country’s problems as existential threats to justify American imperialism. So long liberal internationalism, hello Make the Monroe Doctrine Great Again.”

No matter that war is hell. No matter that the problems humanity faces are basically the problems it created – and they’re serious. Waging war poisons the world; it perpetuates and intensifies the problems it purports to be eliminating. I open my soul with a shout into the darkness. We live, as Rainwater notes, in an interconnected world – a world of complex wholeness. Creating borders can be a reasonable way to get a handle on that complexity, but only – only – if we can also see beyond the borders we’ve created and embrace the wholeness we’re still trying to understand.

What does this mean? As much as I want it to mean. oh, let us say a high-five with God, it often means – as we struggle to transcend our impulsive violence – far quieter, almost unrecognizable change, if any change at all. Consider, for instance, Bernie Sanders’ recent opposition to the latest U.S. sale of weapons to Israel to keep its evisceration of Gaza going. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee now has to consider the merit of his Joint Resolutions of Disapproval, or JRDs. Last November, Sanders also filed JRDs regarding the latest Biden administration’s weapons sale to Israel. When the Senate voted on them, the resolutions lost; only 19 senators voted in support, which can easily feel like nothing more than a pathetic loss.

But maybe it was more than that. “. . . never before have so many senators voted to restrict arms transfers to Israel,” noted the senior policy adviser for the organization Demand Progress. He called the vote “a sea change” among congressional Democrats – an awakening, an infusion of . . . do I dare say: moral sanity?

This doesn’t stop the slaughter. This doesn’t stop the hell. But let it give us the will to keep trying.

Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His newly released album of recorded poetry and art work, Soul Fragments, is available here: https://linktr.ee/bobkoehler

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