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August 26, 2005

Me, A Conscientious Objector

My name is Tom Bodhi Reeves. I’m twenty years old and I’m still growing up. When I was a little kid, like most boys, I had a cap gun that made really loud noises. I liked to go play laser tag with my friends and shoot them right in the chest for the most points. I even played computer games where main goal is to wipe out your enemy in outer space combat or ancient medieval forests. During that same time, I also liked to sit outside at sunset and watch nature move in its slow ways as the darkness fell, to sit and think about the lives the insects lived underground and if they were like mine in any way. I looked up at the amazing people my parents were surrounded by and wondered how everyone was so different. The life around me—plants, animals, and people alike –fascinated my senses and gave me a sense of the beauty of life very early on.

During those times of playing video games and laser tag, never once did it cross my mind that real people are forced to use real guns to kill real people they’ve never even met. What I was doing was playing games, and games can be based on reality but in the end are not real. As I grew older and moved out of that carefree innocence of childhood, I learned about the consequences of guns and warfare and what they do to the beauty of life I love so much. Laser tag lost its fun and war-based video games made me sick. War destroys people. It destroys love, families, and lives. War devastates nature. It tears apart forests and jungles and slaughters all kinds of life in their homes. War eliminates art. It eliminates the beauty of creation by obliterating architecture, paintings, libraries and tries to erase and rewrite history. War eradicates that which I love.

When I was only seven years old, I remember spending a few hours in the basement of Music’n’More, a local center for the arts, making anti-war signs for the first war in Iraq. I carried one on the side of a busy highway along with every other member of my family and many, many friends and senior citizens. I was there because it was the natural thing to do. I couldn’t comprehend the complexities of war as I do now, but the underlying qualities of war are quite simple. I could see the oil fields burning on TV in a hellish vision that didn’t seem to be of this Earth. I understood that young people and old people alike were being killed in the war, just as they always are, and there could be no reasonable explanation. It must be stopped.

My deeply held belief that warfare of any kind is wrong and has no place on this planet of ours stems from many experiences with family, friends, and teachers. My mother has always been an anti-war activist, and I retained an image in my head from around the same time as the peace signs. There was a story in the newspaper about the war and a picture of my mother buried under hundreds of film canisters representing oil drums. A tag on each one said “No Blood For Oil” and made a powerful statement to all involved. I soaked up anti-war sentiment at school and the very peace-oriented Waldorf education system. I was involved in the Unitarian church groups as a young boy and my spiritual beliefs have grown with me.

In recent years, an amazing spiritual community has developed and evolved in my very own home. My parents have influenced the way I see the world in significant ways by their unique perspective on religion and they have created a following based on Consciousness, Life, Earth, and Universe (CLEU). The Cleu is a representation of the great miracles of existence and strives for all life to reach a level of compassion and awareness that brings us to at-onement. I wear the CLEU symbol around my neck always to remind me to celebrate consciousness, defend life, preserve the Earth, and live in awe and wonder at the universe. The Cleu represents the unity of all people through the miracle of consciousness, a spiritual view that is in complete opposition to organized warfare and one which is rooted at the very core of my family, my spiritual community, and my own deepest self.

The feeling of severe wrongness connected with war has been with me since I can remember, and it’s grown stronger over years. After I graduated high school, I felt that even though I was well educated and had traveled a bit through the States, there was still so much of the world I knew nothing about. I planned a trip to Thailand and ended up spending eight wonderful months in the midst of a Buddhist culture where I felt truly connected to the oneness of humanity. I realized the people I met there were no different than everyone else I’d known and respected in my life, regardless of the color of their skin, the angle of their eyes, or the foreign tongue they spoke. I believe this to be true with all of the people of the globe-- I don’t have to meet them personally to know they are my brothers and sisters. Since the people of the world are like my family, they should not be killed for any reason or conquered for any greater cause.

I accept and acknowledge that war has been around for as long as recorded history and maybe even longer. That doesn’t mean it’s okay; it simply means we’ve been making mistakes since the beginning of time. Even Thailand, where I felt such love and compassion from the general populace, has a war-torn past and the borders separating it from the surrounding countries are strictly enforced, even to this day. There’s nothing wrong with loving your own country and living a life separated from the rest of the world if that’s what you find comfortable. What’s wrong is when you travel to exotic, distant lands and kill people to further your own cause— be it power, resources, or so-called national security.

I believe in the diversity yet connectedness of every human on this Earth and the right of each to choose to live a life filled with love and beauty and individuality. A soldier must answer the state’s call for self-sacrifice and learn to fight without thinking, to just follow orders. War destroys individual humanity on both sides. Soldiers must not think of the oneness of us all, but must transform the enemy into an entity of pure evil who must be eliminated. A soldier is a tool of death. I am someone who cannot blind myself to the truth and the obvious connection I share with every other person, no matter what their ethnic or national identity. To be part of any kind of military operation, even as a noncombatant, would conflict with my spiritual beliefs and my sense of morality, and eventually lead me to deep despair. This is why I am registering as a conscientious objector to any form of warfare. It goes against my entire being and would destroy me long before I could even participate.

Posted by Tom Bodhi at August 26, 2005 11:01 PM

Comments

Posted by: emma at September 8, 2005 11:07 AM

Posted by: Dhiraj at October 21, 2005 10:47 AM

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