Melinda Pillsbury-Foster
Friday, June 1, 2007, 4 pm PST
This Week's Show
Guest: Col. David Antoon
Col. David Antoon graduated from the United States Air Force Academy in 1970 ans served nearly three tours of duty in Vietnam. During his tour of duty in that war zone he received 3 Air Medals, the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Meritorious Service Medal. He retired from the Air Force in in the early 90s and now flies a 747 for a major airline. He has received two graduate degrees and has lived in the Middle East and has traveled extensively around the world, including the middle east. His last job before retiring was oversight of part of the construction of the B – 2 Bomber.
In the early 80s Col. Antoon became a father, he and his wife, Linda, a former AF Major and neonatal ICU nurse, have four children and it was fatherhood that made him revisit the issues he had encountered while first in the military.
Those issues brought him to confront national policy, the use of war to subsidize corporations, how our money is spent, and the genocide that is presently being carried out against Palestine. His oldest daughter, a Fulbright Scholar, is studying maternal child health issues in the Middle East.
All of us know about the genocide that took place in Nazi Germany; some of us know about the genocide visited on the Armenians in the opening years of the 20th Century and other blood baths that have been carried out for political purposes across the face of the globe. But how many of us are aware that today in Palestine another genocide is underway? Carried out under cover of euphemistic media coverage, carefully worded to disguise an agenda of death, thousands are dying slowly, blown to bits. Children are targeted, shot, maimed. Using a terror that makes Nazi Germany look mannerly and compassionate, lives are being snuffed out coldly as part of a long term plan to eliminate a nation from the face of the Earth.
Will we continue to tolerate a genocide in our midst? What can a father do to stop it? What can a father do when that genocide is distorting the world for the children he loves? One father answers that and other questions.
What the Show is about and being a Spiritual Politician
Bringing government into alignment with the Lessons of Jesus:
The focus of our show is how to bring government into alignment with truth of our spiritual nature. So America started with the idea we are all, inherently free. We are free to choose, free to live, to breath, and to live our lives as we see fit. Government does not own us; government is just a contractor, providing service.
That framework is in alignment with the spiritual truth that each of us connects to God directly, needing no agency as an intermediary. To be free is to be free in the spirit and so in the flesh that temporarily holds the spirit.
When Thomas Jefferson said we were all possessed of inherent rights, existing before government he was extending a spiritual truth into a civic form. It is that Mission Statement from the Declaration of Independence we need to keep in mind.
Because we are free and reject, as did Christ, the use of deceit, manipulation or violence we need to be conscious about our relationships with others and find ways to grow into the sense of connection and community that makes us One in Him.
This is especially true for Christians but it is true for everyone else as well.
Nearly every major spiritual viewpoint enunciates the idea that we are connected to each other and should be good to each other. Christians just have an even more exacting mission. Christians are to love every one, treating them as they would Jesus.
Jesus was very clear about how we were to treat others. He did not say that it was alright to be abusive, deceitful, and violent if we used government as our tool and agent. There was no exception, He wanted all of our hearts, minds and souls. Christ did not lay out any plan of government, but left it to the conscience of the individual, the same way He connects to each of us.
We are Americans but we are also members of a human family that connects us to something truly wonderful and immense.
So our job here at the Spiritual Politician is to look at Government as a human tool we use every day. We need to consider if government is working in a way that speaks that common understanding about our connections to each other and, if it is not, we need to change it.
Americans have had many successes over the last 231 years since our founding and, learning from both mistakes and successes we can consider that question. So here at the Spiritual Politician we look at the truth behind of rhetoric.
Given what is going on today in Government what we may decide to do it reboot the whole system.
To provide the examples of what has gone right and what has gone very wrong we here at the Spiritual Politician have put together several different kinds of segments you will hear on our show from time to time.
Founder and president of the Arthur C. Pillsbury Foundation
Books by Melinda: Links to Melinda's sites:
How the NeoCons Stole Freedom
Shards of Verse Melinda's Poetry
Greed: The NeoConning of America
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