War And Peace
Israel pushes into Lebanon. Hezbollah fires more rockets. Thirty some people die in Iraq. American troops are having their tours extended. More die in Afghanistan. The British police arrest some twenty people for planning to blow up planes. What is going on?
It is all a part of the War on Terror. President Bush on TV recently said that it is all about people who despise our way of life. But what is this war on terror about anyway?
There have been so many wars. In my early years in the church, there was the war on poverty, but it never touched the poorest of the poor in my parish. Then there was the war on drugs, which has been a dismal failure. Now there is supposed to be “no child left behind,” but millions live in poverty and degrading conditions. It strikes me that all of these were the same war, tackling problems with the same adversarial mentality, and none of them have really dealt with the underlying cause.
Every large city had a war going on between gangs of disaffected youths and the establishment. These young people are trying to find some kind of meaningful way to exist in impossible conditions.
I think that many in the Middle East are also struggling for ways to find their own destiny, their own meaningful way to exist in the impossible conditions which we in the West have largely created. We haven’t been able to solve he problems with gangs in our cities - will blowing people up, overturning governments, and proclaiming that we are engaged in a war on terror help very much in other countries? I have my doubts. Something much more thoughtful and creative is needed I think.