Intervention in Libya

Just as I'm nearly always unable to watch violent crime shows (whether "reality" or merely fiction), I've been unable to pay attention to most of what is going on in Libya. Violence is abhorrent to me. I cannot stand to watch the newscasts that show bombs being dropped, and so on. Knowing that we -- the US -- had just started a THIRD war just pains me.

And it's not that I'm incapable of violence. Unfortunately, far from it. I am committed to non-violence, but in part because I know the kind of hate that I feel from time to time -- but I don't like it. I won't give you examples, but you can take my word for it.

I am also committed to human freedom, and I empathize with the folks in Libya who have suffered repression for many years. I want them to have something better. No one should have to live in terror. "Give peace, O Lord, in all the world, for only in you can we live in safety" -- this is part of one of the prayers in the Book of Common Prayer that I say almost daily. People should be able to live in peace and safety because we are all children of God.

But, though I empathize with the rebels in Libya, I cannot support the role the US is playing in that conflict. I cannot support it because, though we might regard Gadhafi and his forces as our enemies, we Christians are called to love our enemies -- even (and perhaps especially) those who would like to kill us and may be actively trying to do so at some given moment. Think Jesus here. He didn't hate (wow!) those who were beating him, spitting on him, insulting him, pounding nails through his feet and forearms, cramming a ring of thorns down on his scalp, and so on. And it wasn't just that he was the Son of God -- a ploy we sometimes use to try to keep Jesus sanitary and out of the way of any real temptation. Nope. He faced temptations with exactly the same tools available to me and to you -- prayer, fasting, scripture. He was tempted in every way just as we are. Which means he was tempted to hate those who hated him and insulted him and insulted his God!!!! Tempted; but he didn't do it. He didn't hate them. We cannot hate our enemies. We must love them. Even Gadhafi.

But, so it has been argued, if we didn't intervene, Gadhafi's forces would have overrun the rebels and made a quick end to the effort to secure their human rights. We could not just "do nothing." Intervention was the right thing to do.

This is the stereotypical argument against non-violence. Non-violence is simply equated with "doing nothing" or non-intervention, and those two (alleged) opposites are juxtaposed as if they were the only two possibilities.

That's simply a lack of imagination, at best, and at worst it is a lust for and trust in violence. Is it true that violence breeds violence? Doesn't history teach us that much? Can we really count on violence to "change the world" (as if creating more violence would really constitute a "change")? The Dr. Phil question needs to be asked here: "So, how's that working out for you?" So long as we keep our historical blinders on, we might think it's working out pretty well.

"Pacifism" does not equal "passivism." Non-violence is not non-intervention. It does, however, require more imagination and infinitely more courage. Could we have sent blue-helmeted UN troops into Libya? Could we have encouraged the rebels to follow the example of Egypt and renounce violence?

"But that wouldn't work!" I can hear the protests already. And they may well be correct. It may not, in this particular case, work. There is equally no guarantee that the violence will "work." So violence is what nations do in place of trusting God.

But it's not what Christians are called to do. We are not called to "solutions that work," or that we think we can secure under our own power. We're not called to make things work. We're called to be faithful to the one we call "Lord" -- the very one who loved his enemies.

Simon Barrow of the Ekklesia Project said a similar thing in this article. He has imagination. And courage. And he points out that it is a lie that violence was our only option. Good stuff.

Christmas in Fallujah

Check out this song/video by Billy Joel.

Chills. Brace yourself.

Mock Violence and Violence

My youngest son turned 9 yesterday. We had a party for him with 10 or so of his friends from school and church – 2 hours in a room full of 8-10 year olds! Aaarrrrgggghhhhh. It was torture -- sort of. Some of those kids are NOT well-behaved! Some of them clearly lack respect for adults and a sense of propriety, and you have to wonder about their up-bringing. But, we lived through it, and the kids all had fun.

One of the gifts my son received was a “dart gun” that shoots foam darts. It has the look of an Uzzi (or so it seems to my non-trained eyes), and can hold eight darts at a time. You can shoot them off rapid-fire – about one per second if you’re fast. It has a rotating loading mechanism sort of like a Gatling Gun. Oh, and the darts glow in the dark! My son is thrilled with this toy. I have to admit it -- it's fun. We'll have fun shooting at characters on the TV screen (the darts will stick to the glass).

I played with guns growing up – played with toy guns, had a BB gun and a pellet gun (CO2 powered) – and later hunted. I bought my own .20 gauge shotgun and received an heirloom .22 caliber rifle from my grandpa. It had the name of one of my uncles carved into the stock, and I carved my own name into it as well. That .22 is the only one I still have – the shotgun was stolen years ago (I still fear a knock on the door late at night by police officers there to arrest me for a shooting with a gun registered to me! I reported the theft, but still. . . .).

I loved hunting, but mostly for the outdoors – tramping in the woods. I stopped hunting when I got married – my wife couldn’t stand the thought that I might shoot Bambi. (But, ask her about her attempts to shoot Mickey!)

So, I’m not anti-weapon. Neither is my wife, who grew up in Texas playing “Cowboys and Indians,” etc., complete with mock gun battles. Neither of us has turned out to be a mass murderer or a child abuser. But we’re both a little concerned with our youngest son’s fascination with weapons.

I wonder what role mock violence plays in the violence of our society – and in the violence of individual lives. I’m sure there are no clear answers to that question. But clearly, lives of people surrounded by violence tend toward violence.

Here’s an example. Tony Lagouranis’ duties in Iraq included the interrogation of prisoners at various locations, including the infamous Abu Ghraib prison. The article found here describes his experiences and his fears about how what he did and witnessed being done to prisoners will affect him.

Human beings are creatures of habit. Even those of us who abhor “ruts” for our lives have habits of daily activity. We wake up each morning and know where to find our toothbrushes, combs, underwear, shampoo, and countless other things – most of which we could and perhaps to) find with our eyes shut. We go through these daily functions without thinking – to the point that we may not notice we’ve done them: have you ever forgotten while in the shower whether you’ve washed your hair? You think about it, and you just really can’t remember whether or not you’ve done it. Then you do it again, and perhaps the action itself reminds you that you’d just done it. We just do these things by sheer habit, without thinking.

What about how we respond to annoyances around us each day? Do we build up habits of action that we perform without even thinking? Habits of anger, retribution and revenge? What if my “small” habits shape how I would respond to a real crisis situation?

The good news is that I am not enslaved to my habits. Habits of action can be changed and even conquered, but not without doing some deliberate thinking about them and conscious planning of how we will respond to specific situations. The cycle of child abuse can be brought to a halt – we are not enslaved by the pattern of behavior we learned from our parents (though certainly it can be an incredibly strong influence). Mr. Lagouranis may have difficulty overcoming in his personal interactions the abuse he committed and witnessed in Iraq, but it is still possible.

What about my 9-year old’s fascination with weapons? We’ve explained to him that as Christians we believe killing is wrong, and so he is not to point his dart gun at any person for any reason. And he can’t shoot the dog, either. He is, however, allowed to shoot at Oprah when she’s on TV. Oh, and Precious Moments figurines are always "in season."

Dr. M. L. King on Viet Nam -- and Iraq?

No, Dr. King was not speaking about Iraq, but about our nation's propensity toward solving problems violently. However, his predictions about future generations are uncanny -- here we are, forty years later, faced with an almost identical situation. Why? Because we have not solved the moral problems to which he refers. You can listen to the speech and read the entire text here (American Rhetoric.com). Thanks to Sojourners' "Daily Verse and Voice" for the information.

Martin Luther King, Jr.:

Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence

[April 4, 1967 at a meeting of "Clergy and Laity Concerned"]

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

. . . . it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. And so we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. And so we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

. . . . As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their qestions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be [i.e., will live up to its commitment that all people are created equal] are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood, and because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially for his suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them.

This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls "enemy," for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called "enemy," I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately, the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horrible, clumsy, and deadly game we have decided to play. The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways. In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality . . . we will find ourselves organizing "clergy and laymen concerned" committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end, unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy.

And so, such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.

. . . . the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken. . . . we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin . . . the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

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. . . . With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores, and thereby speed the day when "every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain."
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On Being Peacemakers

See this statement from Sojourners called "Confessing Christ in a Violent World." Good stuff. Let us pray for the grace to live it.

http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=action.election&item=confession_signers

God is Not an American

There is a wonderful group on Facebook, "God is Not an American." I love it because I so often see evidence that many, many of the people around me think that he/she IS American, and that s/he loves to underwrite the American "foreign policy" agenda and can't wait to sign onto the next Republican party platform. Admittedly, I do see Democrats that have a parallel attitude, but generally speaking, it seems to be more prevalent on the Republican side of the aisle. Of course, some Republicans might say it's because Republicans believe in God and Democrats don't, or some other such silliness. I won't even dignify that with a response.

Now, if you believe as I do that God is a lover of all human beings equally, then grab your barf bag and click on this link. Watch the video. Do you see what I see?

I see people who cannot tell the difference between their Christianity and their patriotism -- they think they are one and the same. I see people who assume that God is indeed an American, and that God always supports America, and that the gospel of Jesus Christ supports the work of our military when it kills our enemies.

Is there not a tension here between the words of Jesus, "Love your enemies and do good to those who persecute you," and the idea that we sometimes have to kill our enemies? "Tension" is certainly too soft a term. There is no "tension," there is conflict. However, this video demonstrates how easily the gospel of Jesus can be perverted to the extent that many feel absolutely tension, let alone sense a conflict here.

Now, I don't object to the existence of a group of Christians who might lobby representatives of our government on certain issues. I don't object to government employees praying or studying the Bible. What I object to in this video (and in American "Christian" culture in general) is the assumption that the gospel aligns perfectly with our American agenda. Here's an example.

Manifest Destiny. America was "meant" to extend "from sea to shining sea," and anything or anyone that stood in its way was opposing divine intention and was therefore subject to divine wrath, which "we" were more than willing to execute (pun intended, but not intended to be funny!) on God's behalf. It was genocide, and the first peoples to reside in this place barely survived. It was an atrocity -- to the point that I have to put the quote marks around "we" when I talk about it. Whether or not my ancestors participated, as a white male I have reaped the benefits of what was done. It was done because "we" were Christian and the native peoples were "pagan savages" who were worthy of slaughter. (For a more complete exposition of how "Manifest Destiny" worked in American history, see the book by Richard Hughes, Myths America Lives By. Bibliographical information and a review by yours truly can be found by clicking here. Review originally appeared in The Christian Chronicle.)

I'm not sure what to do about this issue except to keep talking about it. Anybody got a flak jacket I can borrow?