May 2021 – Susan Feathers

WWII Veteran, my father, Edward B. Feathers

All he wanted was to learn to fly. He was a teenager in rural Tennessee, inspired by the heroic flights of the Wright Brothers and then Lindbergh, Dad worked in a little village of Watauga and saved to take flying lessons in near by Johnson City. Soaring over the green hills, he then was seized with a huge desire to leave the poverty and inward directed community of his youth to see the world, to break free.

He had a wonderful mind for math and science, eventually graduating with a degree in physics from East Tennessee State College (his mother walked the graduation stage for him as the US colleges awarded a full degree to all the men and women serving in the military in WWII in their last year of college but not able to finish due to the war).

Dad joined the Army Air Corps when Pearl Harbor was bombed. All the country kids who had not made entry into the military were now able to join up as the USA took everyone willing. Most of the rural kids did not have the best of health, having suffered as children through the Depression, a time my Dad recalled as being hungry all the time. America’s poor citizens comprised a good half of the country back then. Farmers all.

He became a bomber pilot, Captain of a B-29 crew, which he ably led through terrible, death defying excursions in the Pacific, flying over Saipan and Tokyo on bombing raids. His crew included men as young as 19. Dad told many stories from this period of his life, naturally, as it remained the most dramatic of the remaining 75 years (he lived to 95 in reasonably good health to the end).

I think of him every Memorial Day since he passed in 2012 on Pearl Harbor Day ironically. To the end, he worried he’d not be forgiven for killing people on those low level bombing raids. “We could smell flesh burning, Susan!” he recalled often.

The men and women who serve in the nation’s military carry the burden of killing, of maiming in the name of us. We must always remember that what we ask them to do in defense of our way of life is very serious and has life long consequences for them. Honor your war heroes, and let us never forget them and their devotion to the cause of America.

The legacy of the Peacemaker [the man credited with bringing the Iroquois Nations together under a Pax Iroquois] is best illustrated in his concept of The Good Mind. The Peacemaker believed that a healthy mind naturally seeks peace and that a nation of individuals using reason and harboring good will in their hearts can not only establish peace in the worst circumstances but maintain it forever.

At the time the Peacemaker was born, the region was beset by wars among the five tribes (Onandaga, Mohawk, Huron, Seneca, and Cayuga). In some areas the hatred ran so deep that individual warriors practiced cannibalism on their enemies. These dark times were at least 1,000 years before the Europeans arrived in what is now New York State.

There are noteworthy circumstances surrounding the Peacemaker. First, his grandmother had a dream that a great man would be born who would save the tribes from utter destruction. He was recognized as a youth for his exceptional qualities of mind as someone who would become a leader. But he had a problem—a speech impediment (stuttering)—which later required the assistance of the great Iroquois orator, Hiawatha, to help him accomplish his mission to bring the tribes of his nation together under the Great Tree of Peace—the democracy of constitutional laws and principles that exist to this day.

When I began studying with my teachers in Yuma, Arizona (see previous blog post, The First American Democracy) I was completely unaware of this body of law, the Iroquois legacy of which some passed into the U.S. Constitution, nor was I aware that the Iroquois Confederacy had maintained peaceful coexistence for 750 years before the founding of the fledgling American democracy.

The most important lesson of my four years of study was the reading of Basic Call to Consciousness, written as an address to Western civilization in the 1970’s when the Iroquois were still under threat and domination by the powers that be: the Canadian government and New York State legislature. Basic Call is still relevant in its astute analysis of the values that drive Western societies and how they lead to the destruction of the very basis of life.

In Basic Call to Consciousness Americans have a useful guidebook on how to strengthen our own democracy by broadening our bill of rights to include the natural world and all the life in it as sacred because, everything emanates from our common Creator. Practically, the document gave the early constitutional authors further reason to formulate a bicameral congress and institute a process of checks and balances. For example, the Peacemaker charged the women of the tribe to act as arbiters of peace by choosing the male leaders and representatives and removing them should their thoughts and actions stray from the sacred purpose of the Great Law.

I remember being shocked to find this gem of a small book in whose pages lay all the wisdom needed to solve entrenched political, economic, and relational problems here and abroad. But I realized the document was politically dangerous in the U.S. precisely because it would prevent greed and avarice from being the dominant drivers in our social and cultural enterprises. In fact, when my teachers suggested I read it, the book was out of print and hard to find. But I eventually did find a used copy at the Bohdi Tree bookstore in Los Angeles. It was considered an occult book and probably still is by a society that relegates any true challenge to its economic values as dangerous and suspect.

Today you can find Basic Call to Consciousness on Bookshop.com to support independent book stores. I consider that progress!