Flight
The Los Angeles Catholic Worker newsletter, The Agitator, is edited by Jeff
Dietrich, long time Catholic Worker. Recently, Jeff
wrote an article titled Biblical Anarchism
upholding the tradition of withering criticism of government. Jeff
quoted Jacque Ellul’s reflection, that the
Hebrew and Christian scriptures “always challenge power, especially the
power of the state...They [state] attempt repeatedly to take God’s
place...invariably consider themselves the incarnation of authority.”
The Bush
administration personifies the illusion/delusion of being guided by the
divine, celebrates American Exceptionalism which
given the tragedy of Iraq may be a myth finally put to rest. The passion to
continue relentlessly to end the Iraq war can be difficult to sustain.
Hearing eye witness accounts of the plight of Iraqi
refugees puts a human face on the victims, who have lost everything a human
being holds dear: family, friends, home, profession, country, hope. There are some heroic people who put their lives on the
line to help them.
Iraqi’s
people are in terrorized flight creating the fastest growing
displacement/refugee crisis in the world, until recently a scandal quietly
ignored. The numbers are too overwhelming to ignore; The N. Y. Times and locally the American
Friends Service Committee lifted the veil. Two million Iraqis fled the
country, 1.2 million in Syria alone, another 750,000 in Jordan, both
countries struggling with this massive human incursion. The U.S. this year
has accepted 69 Iraqis. We took the torch from the Statue of Liberty and put
up a No Admission sign. Within Iraq there are an additional two million
internal refugees seeking safe haven amidst the horrific violence, 50,000 a
month seeking refuge. “One hundred or more dead people every day and
night is an outrage . . . I know of no other place on earth where so many
people are killed, massacred and tortured to death as in Iraq.” (United
Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, Jan Egeland, Dec. 2006).
To
acknowledge a refugee crisis is to acknowledge collective mayhem on the
ground. Frank Rich in the New York Times of May, 27 quotes John
Bolton, Bush’s former appointee to the U.N., as saying the refugee
problem is not our responsibility, “Our obligation was to give them new
institutions and provide security. We have fulfilled that obligation. I don’t
think we have an obligation to compensate for the hardships of war.”
Iraqis have neither institutions nor security. School enrollment has declined
50%; the Association of Psychologists in 2006 found 92% of the children have
learning impediments, a generation traumatized. How did we get create such a
morass?
Andrew Bacevich, career military, Vietnam vet, retired Colonel,
devout Catholic, professor at Boston University, in his book (The New American Militarism, How Americans Are
Seduced by War) details the evolution of U.S. foreign policy after
Vietnam till the present, a book worth reading. Bacevich
spells out part of the seduction.
“Conservative
Christians have conferred a presumptive moral palatability on any occasion on
which the United States resorts to force. They
have fostered among the legions of believing Americans a predisposition to
see U.S. military power as inherently good, perhaps even a necessary adjunct
to the accomplishments of Christ’s saving
mission. In doing so, they have nurtured the preconditions that have enabled
the American infatuation with military power to flourish. Put another way,
were it not for the support offered by several tens of millions of evangelicals,
militarism in this deeply and genuinely religious country becomes
inconceivable.” Please note that last word.
This is
just one insight in a profound, complex evolution of the militarization of
America. Colonel Bacevich, no pacifist, has opposed
the Iraq war; nevertheless his only son joined the
Army. Andrew Bacevich and his wife were informed on
this recent Mother’s day that their son was killed
in Iraq.
There
is a trinity of disparate voices calling us to abandon this pursuit of global
primacy through war. Soldiers, patriots, if you will, like Bacevich, are in opposition to this militarization. “America
will surely share the fate of all those who in ages past have looked to war
and military power to fulfill their destiny. We will rob future generations
of their rightful inheritance. We will wreak havoc abroad. We will endanger
our security at home. We will risk the forfeiture of all that we prize.”
The
second group pleading to our dulled sensitivity to cease and desist from war
and consumption to save mother earth are the environmentalists. My friend,
Lee Hoinacki, like Wendell Berry, prefers that we
use the word Creation to face the issue. “God said, ‘Let the
waters under heaven come together in a single mass, and let dry land appear.’
And so it was. God called the dry land ‘earth’
and the mass of waters `seas’, and God saw
that it was good.” It is “good” and most of us never
dreamed we could lose the gift!
Lastly
our mystics/prophets like Willigis Jager, Wendell Berry, and the followers of Dorothy Day,
call us to nonviolence and transformation. The most revolutionary act has
become the refusal to kill.
Jager
: “Whenever we begin to cling to a form, such as this body, we
violate the structural principle of creation, which is to be born, to live, to
die, and to rise again. Whenever we hold fast, we contravene God, who is not
static but dynamic. That is the actual sin of humans: they clutch things.
They don’t surrender to life, rather they
cling to an idea of life.” Jesus did say, “I have come that you
may have life and have it more abundantly.” We need to help one another
discern what is life. Timothy Radcliffe, an English
Dominican priest, suggests we look again at Gandhi, “It may seem odd to
look to a Hindu, but . . . he probably tried harder to live by the Beatitudes
than any Christian in the 20th century. The only picture in his room was of
Jesus, with the inscription, “He
is Our Peace.”
Joe Bradley