February 18, 2015
A CNN poll has come up with an astonishing statistic: 62% of the American people want the US to be neutral in Middle East conflicts!
For fourteen years this country has been sending its young people into Afghanistan and Iraq to kill or be killed. We have been fighting dictators, defending the oppressed and creating chaos. We have been sending drones into places our chosen enemies might be hiding. We have been launching bombers to blow up people who chop off heads. We have kept sending a lot of money and military equipment into the forever bloody conflict in the “Holy Land.” And now this poll!
So, do I believe the poll? Yes! Yes! We are starting to get it. We see! The problems are complicated and confusing. There are many possible views. There are too many factions fighting one another. We don’t know who they are, what they want. The opposing lines are not clear. They divide and digress and converge and waver and change colors. And evil is very evil. It gets worse, never better. War is filthy. All of it.
We have had allegiances, you and I. We have individually taken sides. Could it be that we are part of the problem? That we are starting to see that? That a window has opened, and some light has come in?
What a propitious moment this seems to sit down and figure out what we really stand for, to state in positive words what we love and believe in, what we are willing to sacrifice for those things, even who we want to be in the world.
May I begin?
1. I want the Jews of the world to have a safe place. I am not willing that they should take the homes of the Palestinians to get their safe place.
2. I want the Palestinians to have their own nation as they have a right and as they were promised by the western powers a lifetime ago. I am not willing that they should kill people to get it.
3. I want the Palestinians who fled from the Israeli army in 1948 and in subsequent wars to be allowed to return home or to be properly recompensed for their losses (because this seems to be as close as we can come now to justice.)
4. I want a nuclear free WORLD.
5. I want an end to the culture of violence that controls this world and its people. And I am willing to adjust my own attitudes and actions to contribute to this end.
6. I want the U.S. to be known as the world’s peacemaker, not the world’s bully. I am willing to contribute my own resources to the accomplishment of this goal. I am not willing to contribute anything, least of all my grandchildren, to the cause of war or to the cause of one people dominating another.
Hurriedly, I have written. And there is much more to say.
Ignore my words, if you can. Start over. What do you really want? Write your own list. Post it here. Tell everybody. Put it on a billboard. It is time to do this. There is hope!