WAR TOYS AND ECOCITIES
Guest Editorial
Richard Register
February 2003
Several of us were mulling over what one can do for peace when
national and business leaders are planning war and moving weapons
of mass destruction toward use against real, living people—military
defenders of Iraq, old men and women, people in their prime, children
and babies. I lamented that my own proposals for solutions go too
deep and take too long for people needing quick fixes.
The dramatic non-violent honest confrontation is the best we seem
to be able to do once the warships and bombers are poised and the
politicians are screaming their brains out to attack—for reasons
that are false, when the truth is they are hungry for power, wealth
and ego gratification. We who care for life and liberty on this
planet and hold compassion dear have to confront their lies and
greed in any speedy way we can.
But so much of war-making comes from much deeper roots that are
neglected in emergency times like these because we need to move
fast, and are neglected in times of peace because war seems far
away and we feel no emergency. Both perspectives on war, close in
and far off, have their excuses for not dealing with the deeper
issues, and for neglect of the deeper issues we keep coming back
to the emergencies in which we don’t have the time to deal with
the deeper issues.
During the Vietnam War, as early as summer of 1964, I was disturbed
that adults were lying to children about the nature of war. On the
Fourth of July, I was driving through a typical Los Angeles neighborhood,
but one with more American flags than usual. Here comes a sweet
looking little boy, about five years, old alligator crawling across
his lawn in military fatigues and helmet, a machine gun in one hand,
his belt dripping with guns, knives, hand grenades.
Remembering that Fourth of July image, by the spring of 1965 I
was working to establish a campaign I called No War Toys. I though
a lot more was going on than most people recognized when parents
gave their little boys war toys and smiled while the kids pretended
to kill one another, laughing all the way. By Christmas of 1966,
Charles Whitman had taken us into the era of citizen-initiative
mass killings. That summer he had murdered 14 people shooting from
the University of Texas tower in Austin. For the birthday of the
Prince of Peace, I rolled out photographs from Life Magazine of
Whitman as a child posing under a Christmas tree with his new toy
machine gun.
Was violence really fun? Are the real seeds of war in the home,
in the psyche, in the step-by-step giving of the impression that
a good, even exciting and proper way to be a man is to exact violence
upon others? Do apparently small things like giving war toys to
children and taking them to violent movies encourage the drift back
to the emergency at which time we don’t have the time to deal
with the glacial drift set in motion long ago, like small snowflakes
of violence collecting into an enormous pressure grinding across
the country.
With this war, we are beginning to catch on to the fact that the
way we drive around promotes a dependence upon oil and that dependence
forces the people of the United States to buy into the violent games
of the leaders who want to control more oil. The leaders are really
playing the power-and-wealth game, but the oil is the substance
that, like a drug in the body, changes things in a destructive direction.
As people begin to comprehend, they start blaming the SUV drivers
for all the gasoline they demand and start saying we should all
be driving energy efficient cars.
Enter an even deeper cause of war: city structure, and another
connected insight: that we need to take a “whole systems” or “ecological”
perspective if we hope to figure this one out and dispel another
deeper cause of war. In the recent peace marches, the signs against
SUVs and for hybrid and other energy efficient cars made immediate,
reflexive good sense. Knee-jerk isn’t a friendly way to think about
it but the immediate response to move away from SUVs is, very honestly,
a quick-impression reaction. We need to understand the interrelated
systems if we are going to solve this problem underlying the cause
of our present generation of American wars.
The energy efficient car probably promotes war more than the SUV.
(That should shock a few people of good conscience!) Why? Because
the more efficient car causes people to drive farther for less money
and feel good about it. That in turn means they are promoting sprawl
development and the paving of more landscapes with asphalt—another
oil product—causing the destruction of agricultural land and
natural habitats, CO2 build-up and climate change. Because of both
habitat destruction and climate change, the energy efficient car
is a major component in the cause of the largest mass extinction
in the last 65 million years. More energy efficient cars—especially
when people believe they are in some sense “good”—means
more travel, more accidents, more needless death and injury; about
a third of a million people are killed by cars every year and mostly
by cars much smaller than SUVs.
It will sound strange at first, but the city structure—flat
and sprawling—is one of the major causes of war today. The
car isn’t the problem alone. If it were, perhaps flailing against
SUVs would do some good. But the car is part of a whole system in
the way that blood corpuscles are part of a human body, along with
the veins (roads), heart (energy for movement such as gasoline provides
in cars), and body (the particular physical structure of the city’s
buildings and arrangement of open spaces, connectors and associated
natural features like creeks, shorelines and ridge lines).
Today’s cities are defined by cars, sprawl, freeways and oil.
They could be defined by people on foot and bicycle with support
from transit, compact development with a high level of diversity
of “uses” and activities close together, connectors like
pedestrian streets, elevators and foot bridges and natural energy
from sun, wind and other renewables. That—building ecological
cities, cities for people instead of cars—is one of the crucial
physical solutions to today’s problem of wars. On the psychological,
intellectual and spiritual level, war toys and other means to lie
about the nature of war is a another deeper cause seldom dealt with
as if it were serious. But it is serious. Dead serious.
How to stop wars? There are undoubtedly many ways, but among the
most important are two I’ve been involved with that as yet very
few honor.
Peace now! No war toys! Build ecocities!
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