John Lennon: All we need is peace
All We Need Is… Peace
Posted on July 14, 2008 by Marcus
In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck, snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto and convinced John to do an interview about peace. 38 years later, Jerry has produced a film about it. Using the original interview recording as the soundtrack, director Josh Raskin has woven a visual narrative which tenderly romances Lennon’s every word in a cascading flood of multipronged animation. Raskin marries the terrifyingly genius pen work of James Braithwaite with masterful digital illustration by Alex Kurina, resulting in a spell-binding vessel for Lennon’s boundless wit, and timeless message.
OMG! This video is phenomenal. We’re on the precipice of forty years after these words were first uttered and they are just as fresh, just a new, just as true today as they were then. Thank you, Jerry Levitan, for sneaking into John Lennon’s room, recording the interview, keeping it and publishing these wise words now.
Visit Susan Corso’s spiritual blog or subscribe to Seeds at www.susancorso.com.
A Beatles fan since 1973, I was a senior in high school when John Lennon was assassinated. It strengthened my commitment to gun control.
“In all the round world of Utopia there is no meat. There used to be. But now we cannot stand the thought of slaughterhouses. And, in a population that is all educated, and at about the same level of physical refinement, it Is practically impossible to find anyone who will hew a dead ox or pig…I can still remember as a boy the rejoicings over the closing of the last slaughterhouse.”
---H.G. Wells A Modern Utopia
Back in 1995, I had written a manuscript entitled Life and Liberty, discussing parallels between the pro-life and animal rights movements. Endorsed by pro-life activist Carol Crossed, it was circulated widely among member organizations of the Seamless Garment Network (now Consistent Life), a coalition of peace and justice organizations on the religious Left. At one point, I received an anonymous letter from a group of Christian monks who dismissed animal rights with a single word: more.
St. Thomas More, the patron saint of politicians, of course, abolished the killing of animals in Utopia. In the late '90s, when my friend Albert and I formed Allies Of Peace as a pro-life and pro-animal group within the Seamless Garment Network (and went on to distribute pro-life and pro-animal literature within the SGN), I asked him how he, as a Catholic vegetarian, responded to the accusation that animal liberationists are "utopian." Albert replied that all social progress seems "utopian" until it becomes part of the mainstream.
I asked the same question of Reverend Frank Hoffman, a retired Methodist minister and a vegan. Frank replied, "I don't think it (vegetarianism) is 'utopian'," and proceeded to give the example of the vegetarian lioness, Little Tyke, whose background is well known in Christian vegetarian circles. (See the web link below.)
www.vegetarismus.ch/vegepet/tyke.htm
In 2002, I asked Bruce Friedrich of PETA, who is a practicing Roman Catholic, and who wrote the preface to my own book, They Shall Not Hurt or Destroy, this question. Bruce replied, "Jesus was 'utopian'," cited the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount, and said Christians are called to live their lives with the understanding that the kingdom of God is at hand.
The late Reverend Janet Regina Hyland, who wrote the foreword to They Shall Not Hurt or Destroy, who was raised Catholic but instead went over to the Protestants and became an evangelical minister, and was the author of God's Covenant with Animals (available through PETA), cited the biblical prophecies of the coming kingdom of peace in Isaiah 11:6-9:
“The wolf shall dwell with the lamb and the leopard shall lie down with the kid and the calf and the lion and the fatling together And a little child shall lead them.
“The cow and the bear shall feed their young shall lie down together and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
“The suckling child shall play over the hole of the asp and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder’s den
“They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain For all the earth shall be in full knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.”
Regina said, "...that's out there in la-la land. But that's Scripture!"
Joanna Macy, author of Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age, makes a similar observation in her foreword to John Robbins' Pulitzer Prize nominated Diet for a New America (which makes veganism seem as mainstream as recycling). Depicting the advantages of America moving towards a vegan diet, she writes:
"The effects on our physical health are immediate. The incidence of cancer and heart attack, the nation's biggest killers, drops precipitously. So do many other diseases now demonstrably and causally linked to consumption of animal proteins and fats, such as osteoporosis...
"The social, ecological, and economic consequences, as we Americans turn away from animal food products, are equally remarkable. We find that the grain we previously fed to fatten livestock can now feed five times the U.S. population; so we have become able to alleviate malnutrition and hunger on a worldwide scale...
"The great forests of the world, that we had been decimating for grazing purposes, begin to grow again. Oxygen-producing trees are no longer sacrificed for cholesterol-producing steaks.
"The water crisis eases. As we stop raising and grinding up cattle for hamburgers, we discover that ranching and farm factories had been the major drain on our water resources. The amount of water now available for irrigation and hydroelectric power doubles. Meanwhile, the change in diet frees over 90% of the fossil fuel energy previously used to produce food. With this liberation of water, energy and fossil fuel energy, our reliance on oil imports declines, as does the rationale for building nuclear power plants..."
Joanna Macy goes on to admit, "This scenario is wildly, absurdly utopian. It is also clearly the way we are meant to live, built to live." What could possibly make it a reality? "It is this very book!" Paul McCartney also says, "If anyone wants to save the planet, all they have to do is stop eating meat. That's the single most important thing you could do. It's staggering when you think about it. Vegetarianism takes care of so many things in one shot: ecology, famine, cruelty. Let's do it!"
Finally, in one of his first civil rights sermons at the Holt Street Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said: "If we are wrong, Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer...If we are wrong, justice is a lie!" These words apply equally well to the struggle for animal rights. Bruce Friedrich told me back in the late '90s that Dexter Scott King--head of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolence in Atlanta, and (the late) Coretta Scott King are/were vegan.
Having animal rights dismissed as "utopian" didn't faze me. Instead, back in 1995, I told James Dawson (who used to publish Live and Let Live, a pro-life/animal rights/Libertarian 'zine), that I prefer being labeled a “dreamer” to being labeled a "Nazi"--i.e., the old myth that “Hitler was a vegetarian.” As Roberta Kalechofsky of Jews for Animal Rights points out in her 1996 article, “Nazis and Animals: Debunking the Myths,” Hitler “had a special fondness for sausages and caviar, and sometimes ham,” as well as “liver dumplings,” and the Nazis experimented on animals as well as humans in the concentration camps.
To those who would deem animal liberation “utopian,” I think it’s fair to compare it to nuclear disarmament—a political position seriously advocated by great thinkers such as Albert Einstein (who also advocated worldwide vegetarianism) and organizations like Greenpeace. I prefer vegetarianism be regarded like world peace, as a universal ideal, rather than seen as a sectarian dietary restriction, like “keeping kosher.” As John Lennon said:
"You may say I'm a dreamer But I'm not the only one I hope someday you’ll join us And the world will live as one”
John & Yoko were known for pulling all kinds of crazy stunts in the name of peace. In one of his first solo records, "God", John said, "I don't believe..." and attacked all religion. But shortly after his assassination, Yoko made a statement saying that while John was often critical of religion, in the end, he loved, appreciated, and believed in it all.
posted by vasumurti on 10/30/2008 8:44 pm