Entranced by clouds breaking blue,
I lost track of time.
Evening came.
Scrubby runt trees blackened.
Leaning close, branches clacking, rasping,
“Don’t you know where you are?”
Sweat down my back.
“N-No.”
“Pay them no mind” came a reedy voice over my shoulder.
Glowing golden heads lit a winding path.
“Stay close. We will show you the way home.”
“With many others, the news last week that President Obama had received the Nobel Peace Prize left me dismayed. Out he stepped from the Oval Office to accept the prize, then back in he went to continue his preparations to send tens of thousands more troops to Afghanistan. There, under his orders, they’ll drop bombs, follow their drones, make sweeps through villages and terrorize children. Not my idea of a peacemaker.
In fact, he’s conducting two wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, and rumors continue of an attack on Iran. Obama’s war budget exceeds that of even George W. Bush. No peace can come from this, only decades more of brutal war, poverty, terrorism, and fear.
A new president, a shiny peace prize dangling off his neck -- but little has changed. I understand why Europeans support him so earnestly, but his administration maintains our imperial war machine. It wreaks havoc, wastes billions, breeds terrorists, rewards corrupt bankers, and plants the seeds of our own economic collapse. Over 4,000 American lives have been lost, and who knows how many Iraqi and Afghani. A day of war in Iraq costs us $720 million. On the Afghani conflict, since 2001, we’ve spent $223 billion.
It baffles many of us that the head of such a warlike juggernaut should win a prize ordained for those who make peace. But then I remember: Gandhi never received one; neither did Thich Nhat Hanh, Dorothy Day, nor Dan and Phil Berrigan. On the other hand, they handed one to Henry Kissinger and, in 1938, they thought seriously about awarding one to Hitler.”
Father John Dear SJ – Conflator of the Gospel, Peace, and Non-Violence
Father John Dear SJ, peace activist and brother conflator, visited the Peace Abbey last month to receive The Courage of Conscience Award. You can read about his visit here. To see other recipients of the Courage of Conscience Award, click here.
Barrack termed his Nobel Peace Prize a call to action. I’d say so – especially since there’s been none to date on the peace front.
The irony must be armpit deep in the West Wing as Barrack tries to balance receiving the Peace Prize (which Gandhi never even received mind you) with the following:
It was a lovely day in Reading Center. I joined the great folks of Reading People for Peace at their monthly peace vigil. My best friend Brewster was there of course.
I asked him if I could take his picture. He asked “Doesn’t that thing have a wide-angle lens on it?”
“Well – yeah,” I replied.
B: “Won’t it make my nose look huge in these closeup shots?”
R: “Nah – nothing to worry about.”
B: “You’re sure?”
R: “Positively.”
B: “Okaay.. go ahead.”
Sorry Brewster, you were right..
“War memorials and museums are temples to the god of war. The hushed voices, the well-tended grass, the flapping of the flags allow us to ignore how and why our young died. They hide the futility and waste of war. They sanitize the savage instruments of death that turn young soldiers and Marines into killers, and small villages in Vietnam or Afghanistan or Iraq into hellish bonfires. There are no images in these memorials of men or women with their guts hanging out of their bellies, screaming pathetically for their mothers. We do not see mangled corpses being shoved in body bags. There are no sights of children burned beyond recognition or moaning in horrible pain. There are no blind and deformed wrecks of human beings limping through life. War, by the time it is collectively remembered, is glorified and heavily censored.”
Celebrating Slaughter: War and Collective Amnesia – Christopher Hedges
Iraq US War Dead – 4,347
Iraq US Wounded – 100,000+
Iraqi Dead – 1, 339,771
Iraq Coalition War Dead – 325
Iraq Contractor War Dead – 1395
Afghanistan US War Dead – 856
Aghanistan Coalition War Dead 573
“Thousands of unburied dead wander the Argentinian pampa. They are the disappeared from the last military dictatorship.
General Jorge Videla and his henchmen used disappearance as a weapon of war on a scale never before seen. He used it, but he did not invent it. A century beforehand, against Argentina’s native peoples, General Julio Argentino Roca employed the same masterpiece of cruelty, which obliges each victim to die and die again and go on dying, while his loved ones lose their minds chasing his elusive shadow.
In Argentina as in all the Americas, the Indians were the first ones disappeared. They disappeared before they even appeared. General Roca called his invasion of Indian lands the “conquest of the desert.” Patagonia was “an empty space,” a kingdom of nothing inhabited by no one.
After that, Indians continued disappearing. Those who surrendered and gave up their land and everything else were called indios reducidos: reduced to the point of disappearing. And those who did not surrender and were defeated by gunfire and sword blows disappeared into numbers, becoming the namless dead of military body counts. And their children disappeared too: divvied up as war booty, called by other names, emptied of memory, they became little slaves for the murderers of their parents.”
From “Mirrors – Stories of Almost Everyone” by Eduardo Galeano
(Thanks for the tip Diana!)
According to an article in the Telegraph, the Afghan ‘government’ is being pressed by the US Armed Forces to triple the size of their army. The goal is somewhere around 240,000 troops. The Afghan ‘government’ is seriously considering a draft.
This should move things along nicely.
There’s nothing like a bolus of disgruntled, under-trained, under-lead conscripts being injected into what is now a highly unpopular war to change the direction of it. Just wait until even more young Afghans come back to their villages in boxes. Wait until the desertion rate skyrockets like it did with the ARVN in Vietnam who lost nearly 20,000 troops a month towards the end of that disgrace. Oh yes, oh yes, oh YES, a draft is just the thing to precipitate the end of this blunder.
I stand by this position for the United States as well. I think my country should re-enact the draft. No deferments other than medical disability. Everybody goes – men and women. Women should be in combat roles. We should start televising the killing and the dying as well. Every night as families around this great land sit down to their hamburger helper and mac ‘n cheese, they should be treated to Hi-Def summaries of the day’s bloodshed. Every night. Caskets should be filmed when they are unloaded from the cargo planes back from Germany. The country needs its nose rubbed in the gore. Otherwise, we will all just be heads down on “justleavemealoneiamtryingtogetthroughtheendofthisday”, the war will drag on, and the burden for this terrible mistake will continue to born by a relative few.
Bring on the draft – here and in Afghanistan.
hoo-ah.
