I posted this on a listserv long ago. It defined one of my most profound experiences
which had a lot to do with my opinion now.

> Date: Sunday, July 27, 1997 03:57 AM
>
> After putting new toenail marks on my tonsils, I was hesitant to post to
> this list for a while, but...
>
> I realized that most of the information I was being given in school was
> bogus when I was ten years old.  I was at my grandmother's house high on
> a hill next to Fort Leavenworth and had just finished watching the last
> Howdy Doody Show, with the puppets and cast all bemoaning the demise of
> their employment.  For the first time I realized something could end,
> and having been raised in the military, I pushed at my imagination and
> saw a vision... I saw my grandmother's house in ruins, all the trees
> blasted apart, the houses only rubble around me, and off in the
> distance, a huge crater where the Fort had been.
>
> (My IQ was about 200, so I often had extremely complex imaginative
> visions at a very early age.)
>
> The next thought was, 'if the stuff I was being taught was valid, then
> the world would not be on the edge of nuclear war.'. From then on, I
> rejected almost everything I was taught as being just another pile of
> crap. I decided I would seek to understand Universe by sampling all
> kinds of 'knowledge' and subcultures, and their mental constructions, in
> order to find out if any of it could be true or if the subcultures had
> any kind of real knowledge.  Suffice it to say, I drove my teachers
> crazy and turned into one neurotic teenager. (I was one who got up and
> told the geometry teacher that the 'point' was a pile of chock, and if a
> point didn't exist, then how could we make infinite lines of them...)
>
> I started my search in the Army, becoming a Green Beret and even going
> to Officer Candidate School. After finding that the military was the
> source of most violence on the planet, and that the subculture, (as
> compared to most of the solders), was about as nasty as it could get,
> one extreme of human behavior, I dropped out of the Berets and gave up
> my commission. After I was assigned to an airborne division, the
> military ordered my division to Washington to kill protesters in a kind
> of Tien Min Square Massacre long before the Chinese slaughter, and after
> seeing through the propaganda and 'kill and not be held responsible' pep
> speeches by officers, I refused to go. I knew I was facing life in
> prison, but I would not go and kill people who were just exercising
> their rights under the Constitution... not to mention the pure
> immorality of slaughtering innocents.  Remember, the Army after W.W.I
> did kill the vets who protested in Washington, and I would be no part of
> another such killing. This protest, the largest that occurred, was not
> just students, but consisted of all walks of life and many many
> children.
>
> Then I saw something so amazing I still get chills from it. When I went
> back up to my bunk, in a room with 60 other bunks, I saw man after man
> come up without a weapon, which meant that they too had refused to
> participate.  An officer came up and threatened to read the Articles of
> Mutiny, but none moved.  I was called down and questioned, and I told
> them why I wouldn't do it, and then sent back up, and man after man was
> called down and returned, without weapons.
>
> Then the sergeants came up with our passes and leave papers, and it was
> if the whole thing had never occurred. I rarely speak of this, because
> it was like an unwritten, unspoken agreement that it not be told. I
> assumed the Commanding General had told the big brass that the Division
> was unreliable and the solders who would go with guns may well turn on
> their own officers rather than shoot the protesters. But I saw something
> so eventful that I think it is a bit of data you all need.
>
> The men who refused were of all conceptual bent and subcultures; drug
> addicts, acid heads, alcoholics, even 'kill them all and let God sort
> them out' right wing extremists.  Yet, with my own eyes, I saw them
> refuse to do that slaughter.  And beyond that, the same thing happened
> in every barracks throughout that Division... thousand upon thousands of
> men of different conceptual beliefs just refusing to go to Washington
> and kill people despite the possibility of going to prison for life.
>
> I wondered at this for many years, then I read that Nixon, that weekend,
> had ordered the nuclear bombing of Hanoi to end the war once and for
> all. The Soviets had stated that if we nuked Hanoi, they would attack us
> with everything they had, and the generals around Nixon had advised him
> that it was a bluff. KGB files from that time state that they were
> prepared to carry out their Thermonuclear response.  Nixon was in the
> White House because he felt it was the proper place to meet the press
> after a nuke attack on Hanoi, and found himself surrounded by protesters
> in the largest antiwar demonstration yet, and wanted us to come up and
> protect him, and end the war protests by a major show of force,
> (slaughter).
>
> When the Division refused, he realized that the protests might well
> become a mob and go through the fences and defenses of the White House
> like a lava flow through a wood home, so he canceled the Bomb and left
> town. If I, and all those many others, had gone to Washington, none of
> us would live right now to debate our concepts and efforts.  If you know
> the Army, you can understand what an outrageous event it was for so many
> to refuse an order.
>
> I realized that while humans think that our conceptual models are the
> highest form of action generation, that there is something else that
> moves and motivates people on really large scales.  Not just when there
> are slaughters, (look at the Nazis) or wars and such, but when the whole
> planet is threatened... by thermonuclear war, for instance.  I think it
> works in individuals also, and may cause whole populations to change the
> way they think, or at least act, over time.  I consider it to be the
> best evidence I have of the existence of a semi-sentient global field I
> call Gaia, a field that contains all our minds, a synergy of mind and
> biofield.
> Since, like Fuller, (but not from Fuller) I believe that intelligence is
> a phenomena of Universe existent throughout Universe, everywhere it can
> exist, (my definition of 'God'), I don't think some kind of
> 'supernatural' force affected us... I think it was supremely Natural and
> I think it is working in us all the time on some deep level. While my
> explanation of it is conjecture, the event did occur, and it was totally
> extraordinary.
>
> But because of this, I have been working on 'saving the planet' for
> thirty years. I work on it because I know it is required that someone
> work on it, but I also know it is doable. We are far more than we think
> we are, and we did not evolve to fail.
>
> My strategy is not to try to change minds, even by teaching them
> Synergetics, although that helps, but rather to change people's lives by
> altering the technology they have access to on the largest scales. Then
> they more readily change their minds, learn new and more reliable
> paradigms, to fit the new technology they personally use.  I think
> computers are showing this every day, as many people who said, "I don't
> need no damn computer" are busy over keyboards all over the world.
> --
> Peace and Good Health
>
> -Roan