Comments by Delphine Blachowicz Herbert at The Interfaith Alliance forum on war and peace, January 17, 2006, Druid Hills Methodist Church. Other participants included The Reverend E. McKinnon White, retired Methodist minister; Darrell Riley, adjunct professor at CFCC and Ocala Star Banner employee; and Jeffrey Askew, Director, Marion County Veterans Services.
Almost every morning I go out about 5 ‘o’clock to bring in the morning paper. I look up at the heavens and acknowledge my tie to eternity. I am very mindful that I see the same stars that the preacher/poet saw during the long nights when he sought out all that is known under the heavens.
King Solomon and his scribes wrote three thousand years ago when the world was still young. He expressed wisdom in simple dualities. A time for war, a time for peace, a time to love, and a time to hate. The earth’s then 50 million peoples learned by watching the stars and the wandering planets and from the mouths of the elders who passed on tribal knowledge through oral tradition. As agriculture increased men gathered into communities. The violent struggles between man and beast were less immediate. So as physical conditions became less harsh, some people were able to accept a gentler view of life espoused by a man born in Bethlehem a thousand years later. Love your neighbor as yourself became a concept possible of serious contemplation.
We now are six billion souls on this small planet. The stars have moved exponentially during the past three thousand years. So has technological change. But, for the most part, our ability to think has not.
We continue to see the world largely in dualities. Those who want to hold on to the past, repudiate change, while those who look to a future in which mankind’s capacity to expand the quest for a better life for all are chastised by those who say we don’t remember history. I would say this roughly defines the difference between conservatives and progressives.
The ever broadening availability of knowledge through the written word and thus the education of the masses should by now have made war an antique concept. With increase in understanding should come increasing civility toward one another and one another’s differing cultures. No one nation should seek to impose its world view upon all others.
Martin Luther King Jr. said in his 1964 Nobel acceptance speech that civilization and violence are antithetical concepts. Nonviolence, he said, is not sterile passivity but a powerful moral force which makes for social transformation. Gandhi, Mandela and MLK Jr. were able to effect political change. But political change is not enough. The world now is tied too closely together. We see our brothers and sisters as they experience the wars, the famines, the destructiveness of nature. If we function within any moral framework whatsoever, we cannot turn aside.
Politicians prate about patriotism. But, mimicking Leona Helmsley who famously said “only little people pay taxes,” they promote false patriotism as a tactic by which the unthinking are cajoled into blindly following those whose allegiance is only to the bottom line, those who serve mammon not the gods of their various religious faiths in their pursuit of power – financial power, military power, power to influence the inmost thinking and actions of those who trade comfort and safety for any expansion of their ability to reason and feel compassion for others. Multinational corporations rule, patriotism is only for the little people. Surely the rush to relocate overseas confirms the lack of corporate loyalty to anything but the bottom line.
I think George Orwell’s 1984 is here. It just took a few more decades to arrive. Many of us insulate ourselves from the world by choice, allowing more and more infantile and degrading television programs to corrupt our ability to think while Big Brother aka known as the current administration colludes with Fox News and other media panderers to shield the truth with veils of calculated omission and deceptions. Only internet junkies read the documents of the Project for the New American Century
wherein dozens in the current administration signed on to the establishment of ever increasing American worldwide domination, even sending a letter to President Clinton in January of 1998 saying that Iraq was an imminent threat to our nation, one that must be vanquished as soon as possible.
Thus 911 was in fact a godsend to this administration whose leader, you will recall, on 910 was the laughing stock of the world, 911 made him Master of the Universe as all the world joined us in sorrow and rage at the great affront to all humanity.
But rather than seek out the perpetrators worldwide, GWB followed the program set forth in 1997 in the Project for a New American Century by deciding to concentrate on Saddam Hussein, a former ally who became his father’s nemesis during the days when George the younger served as White House enforcer. The National Council of Churches in January of 2003 publicly appealed to George W. Bush to really act as if Jesus were his savior by renouncing his rush to war, an ongoing war during which we had been bombing two thirds of Iraq for years beforehand. Millions marched in the streets in this country and abroad. But our compliant press colluded with the White House by y ignoring those who dared question our rush to confront the wrong target and politicians who pander to fear stood silent behind an administration whose principals have no personal knowledge of war.
Almost three years have passed. Thousands have died and many more thousands have had their lives turned asunder. Much of Iraq is destroyed. A theocracy, not a democracy, looms with women once more relegated to the Middle Ages. The world is less safe and peace more elusive as jobless young men of both western and Moslem cultures see violence as their only recourse. The rest of the world is fully aware of the fact that only the United States has ever used weapons of mass destruction so how can we expect others to concede to us the sole capacity to have such power, especially since we now are in fact a rogue nation, repudiating international agreements at will.?
Here in the United States we are building a military of mercenaries. That is the only rightful term to describe conscripted militiamen and “volunteers” who do so because they find no jobs at home. Fired by constant exposure to Fox “news” and the promise of college or a hefty enlistment fee, few see the humanity of the Iraqis, only the faces of an alien culture. Moslem youth, also suffering from unemployment and the further humiliation of seeing their sacred sites desecrated and occupation forces becoming entrenched , feel they have nothing to lose. They become the insurgents which our citizens will become when the bankruptcy of all our resources forces us to confront, if not armed invasion, the total economic burial of our nation.
Thus we must exit Iraq not only for altruistic reasons. We must exit Iraq in order to begin rebuilding our nation. Our educational system is in profoundly serious trouble. Within 20 years half our student population will be minority youth, the youth that today is backsliding while those in other cultures are making great strides. Our factories, our infrastructure, the very form of our government – all are crumbling.
Nonetheless we cannot close our borders and attempt to shut out the rest of the world.
Unless we blast ourselves back into the stone age, globalization is irrevocable.
It demands that we live in a world where peace prevails. This means investing heavily in education so that greater understanding will lead to tolerance and more appreciation of other cultures. This means cleaning up the financial and international mess that we have create . This means devoting ourselves to international organizations and agreements which, however, flawed keep us engaged diplomatically, not militarily. Yes, graft and corruption have tainted the United Nations but not in any greater proportion than they have in our own country.
As President Clinton said recently at Hofstra College, we must build a world we will want to live in when we are no longer the top dog. How do we do this?
First, by thinking of the seventh generation to come as do Native Americans. Do we want to leave an environmental and financial wasteland to our children?
We must get involved in the political process, not simply throw up our hands at the mess which the present system has produced. Get involved locally. Join and support your political party. Don’t disparage it. Change it.
If the current system isn’t working, perhaps it’s time to reconsider some of the ways we govern ourselves. The Founding Fathers, radicals of their day who recognized the imperfections of the system they put forward, would be aghast to learn that we consider their words and acts tantamount to those of Moses and his tablet. Since 50 percent of us seem to want a king, maybe we should emulate the British , establishing a monarchy without power, and a legislative body in which representation is proportional and faulty leadership more easily subject to recall. Can you imagine GWB confronting a non docile Congress as Tony Blair does his parliament on a weekly basis? Maybe electing jolly fellows well met, who live off their lineage, not their works, wouldn’t seem so appealing.
. Ask your ministers why they are not speaking more forcefully against the war .Tell them you value ALL life, not just the unborn. Ask them how the god of your faith would want you to serve the people in Iraq now. How you should serve the people in Darfur, in Appalachia, in the Sudan, in the bayous of the Mississippi?
Ask your politicians currently in office what “noble cause” we continue to support and at what cost. Ask them what mission was accomplished when Bush preened aboard the carrier in a “commander in chief” jump suit. Ask them to investigate the fraudulent means used to get us into war. Intelligence didn’t fail us. Those with a preconceived imperialistic agenda did. Ask them, no tell them, to get out of Iraq NOW.
Ask the media why there has been no coverage of the fact that the US Conference of Catholic Bishops last Thursday sent a letter to the President stating that it is time to get our of Iraq now and attend to the poverty and other social issues in our country instead. Ask them why Walter Cronkite’s view that we must exit Iraq was not publicized when he first said so on Larry King Live several months ago. Ask them to try to get real news out of Iraq by searching out the foreign press, not rely on those “embedded” with our soldiers. . Sy Hersh, the great reporter now writing for The New Yorker, says almost no American newsman ever moves outside of the green zone in Baghdad and those within are , by military order, tuned to Fox News as is the case right here in Marion County when you go to the tax office, to the Burger King, to many doctors offices. Tell them you don’t want propaganda. Ask them to change the channel. Write letters, search the world wide web for non-corporate viewpoints.
Don’t be afraid of your neighbors. During two street vigils Marions for Peace has held at the corner of 200 and 27th, roughly 80% of those who reacted did so very positively. The fog of lies upon which this war has been constructed is lifting even in conservative Marion County. Come join us – you’ll find it very exhilarating. We’ll now be having weekly vigils from 4 – 6 p.m., each Saturday at 200 and 27th and our monthly meeting take place at the Main Library from 6 to 8 p.m. on the first Thursday of each month.
Peace is not the absence of activity. Peace with your family, your neighbors, and the greater communities is work. Don’t accept the absolute duality of good or evil. All individuals and all societies and cultures are complex. Recognize that with truth and love “the lion and the lamb can lie down with one another and every man shall sit under his own vine and fig and none shall be afraid.”
The stars in the heavens are not static, neither should be our thinking. Just as our ancestors did, we should continue to reach toward the heavens with our higher selves for opportunities to demonstrate at all levels the love which is the fundamental principle of all the earth’s great religions.
Peace, salaam, shalom.
