We are a nation at war. In spite of the fact we Americans think of ourselves as peace-loving people, we seem to be at war more than we are at peace.
We have one war going in Iraq from which we are supposedly trying to extricate ourselves. We have another war in Afghanistan and there we're trying to figure out how we might free ourselves. And now, we're opening up another front in Libya.
The intention of this skirmish with Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi is to prevent the slaughter of innocent civilians. We hope it will be short-lived, but as they say, “the road to hell is paved with good intensions.”
Of course, there are many other nations with civilians at risk. We choose to be engaged in Libya for many complicated reasons, not the least of these reasons in oil. The problem is every act of war opens up unforeseen developments. Every movement to disentangle finds us getting more involved in the conflict.
War is never a benign activity. It is always a malignancy at some level. We may ignore the reality of the wars taking place in our name, and skip over reading about them in the newspaper.
But the wars' realities are affecting the soul of the nation and they are weakening any moral authority we might have in the world.
We're also fighting these wars on borrowed money because we refuse to tax ourselves at the level necessary to pay the bills. It would seem that if a war were really worth fighting, we would find it necessary, and even our patriotic duty, to sacrifice for it.
The unspoken truth is we really don’t believe the wars are necessary. Only the politicians and the profiteers who lobby the politicians believe the wars are in our national interest.
The cost for these wars is now over $12 billion per month before Libya is calculated in the mix. As Congress proceeds to end or reduce spending on vital domestic programs, the war bills keep rising. Our infrastructure, once the envy of the world, is falling apart. Our education system is failing, and we have one of the costliest, and most inequitable, healthcare systems in the world.
Because we refuse to enact a draft requiring all to serve, we send the same soldiers back to the front over and over again, causing serious emotional damage. We don’t enact a draft because if everyone had to serve the nation, it would not be so easy to engage the country in all these military expeditions.
Wars are undermining our spiritual health as well. Being in conflict creates more conflict, and as we experience ourselves in conflict over and over again we begin to assume all relationships are essentially conflictual. No one is to be trusted, and without trust, we really cannot be engaged with others in any positive way. Everyone else is either an enemy in reality or a potential enemy.
There are several realities we most confront if we are to free ourselves from a present and future of continuing warfare. First, we must face the truth there are circumstances in our world, horrible circumstances of suffering and oppression, that require our compassionate assistance. Secondly, we must understand at times we are, in part, a factor in the suffering and oppression.
We contribute to the circumstances of suffering by our acts of war, our exploitation of the environment and our wasteful use of natural resources. And finally, we must begin to think creatively about how we might act with compassion without alienating others.
There will be wars and rumors of wars, as scripture suggests, but it also says the peacemakers will be blessed and they will be called children of God. Who do we desire to be as a nation? Do we want to be at war and always engaged in war talk, or do we want to be a nation doing its best to make peace? Our fate truly does rest within our answer to that question.
