Vietnam and Iraq

I became interested in psychic phenomena when I was a college student at San Francisco State University. I used to listen to psychic Betty Bethards when she would appear on Bay Area radio shows.

It was through her radio programs that I was introduced to reincarnation, karma, and spirit guides. I was immediately drawn to the subject. It sounded so cool, a much better reality than the one portrayed through the current events of the time.

Nixon was the leader of the so-called free world at the time. He was losing it to Watergate. I was in my last semester of school. My student deferment was almost up, and I was looking at a very uncertain future with possible military service looming out there. Most of my cultural surroundings from Betty Bethards to the Smothers Brothers and the whole San Francisco peace movement were very anti-war, and none of my leaders in the US government had explained in any convincing way why it was necessary for us teenagers to go kill people half a world away.

Betty Bethards was asserting that Vietnam was essentially karmic payback for when the whites stole land from the American Indians. I found that to be a fascinating assertion, even if it was not something someone could prove. To that end, the concept of karma boosted my spirits. I liked how what it really meant to me--that governments didn't decide things in the bigger picture. There was that higher authority. And I loved thinking that Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were not really where the buck stopped. (Yeah, okay it was Truman who said that, but we presumed that to be a presidential policy!)

When I listened to Betty Bethards, woo-woo was new to me. I let it all wash over me in a delicious flow of creativity-on thinking. The only truly bothersome thing to me at the time was that I had to trust in a psychic's say-so. And some of them, like Sylvia Browne, took advantage of that one-up relationship. Cha-ching. "You want a reading? $300 please." (That was in 1970s dollars, mind you.)

It wasn't until all the near-death experience research started piling up that I saw that I didn't have to rely on psychics. Other people were telling their stories about the wonders beyond mortal consciousness. Today, with the World Wide Web, there's a grand cache of info available for anyone interested in life after death.

In some ways, the world scene today with the prolonged war in Iraq mirrors what I experienced as a student in the Vietnam war era. Unlike that war, though, we have substantially more communication options today. We are seeing and hearing much more about the personal lives of the soldiers, many of them still in their teens. Especially since so much of our rationale for going to war has turned out to be smoke and mirrors, hearing these people's intimate stories about war casualties is all the more touching and gripping.

And I go back to some of that early pondering--is there more to the Iraq war than what we see in physical terms? What kind of involvement in it do spirits have? Was this war actually a planned event, speaking in spiritual or karmic terms, or is it a free will choice the participants are making?

As I watch news stories about the war in Iraq, I overlay it onto what I read and hear from NDErs. If death is a transition and not a termination, it changes everything. It essentially makes a whole new war. It still bothers me that we don't check this out more thoroughly. We're spending around $200 billion to fight this war. I'd like to spend a few million more to see if it's really smoke and mirrors.