I' m not against war. I was an Army combat photographer and press officer in Vietnam, and at the time I believed in what we were doing. I love my country and wave my flag, but I am scared to see us lose our way. We are being herded into what I see as a wildly inappropriate response.
The mass murders of Sept. 11 were not acts of war. They were crimes. The perpetrators do not represent a country or a religion. They are psychopathic criminals who deserve stern justice before an international tribunal.
Although these murderers represent the views of many around the world who see our military and economic policies as greedy, destructive and evil, we have no legitimate "enemy" to war against.
The Afghans are not our enemy. The Afghan people were earlier victims of the Taliban, and the country already has been bombed back to the Stone Age by the Russians during the war in which we trained Osama bin Laden. Arabs and Muslims are not our enemies. The overwhelming majority of the world's Arabs and Muslims are as outraged over these murders as we are.
Our experience in Vietnam taught us that we have no idea how to fight a guerrilla or terrorist war. All we can do with our oversize, billion-dollar weapons is slaughter thousands more innocent civilians. Our president's advisers have treated this situation like a bad cowboy movie: "You're either with us or against us."
But for years, U.S. policies have been criticized worldwide as helping create economic injustices that fuel this hatred. Not all nations will dumb down to our command. What then?
The economic implications of this Infinite War Against All Evil are staggering and suspicious. Our nation's financial reserves would be drained, including the Social Security piggy bank this administration has been so eager to tap. The result will be an economy of the very rich few and the desperate many.
"The blood of martyrs is seed," the Christian Tertullian said 1,800 years ago. He saw that having Christian martyrs would make Christianity grow. Osama bin Laden knows this, too. He is luring us to water the seeds of even more radical anti-American martyrs. If we are suckered into it, he will beat us twice.
As our political leaders use the media to spur us on to kill, our nation's political and religious climates will become more fascist and violent. We saw an early example in the interview between Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, when they agreed that America's feminists, pagans, gays, lesbians and secularists "make God mad" and are partly responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks.
Did Falwell's God really mean to slaughter devout Christians among the more than 6,000 innocent Americans of many faiths and beliefs? Falwell and Robertson are America's and Christianity's Taliban. Both camps preach hateful little religions with a narrow, bigoted and vengeful God.
No, it isn't a time to turn the other cheek or negotiate spinelessly. The killers and all who helped them deserve death. I'm so angry I could pull the trigger myself. So could many others around the world.
But lunging toward the nearest trigger reduces us to the level of the cheap, little men who turned our planes into bombs. It isn't worthy of Americans. It isn't worthy of people of faith, whether Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Unitarian, Buddhist, Taoist, Sikh, Hindu or the thousand other roads by which our fellow humans travel toward compassion and understanding.
"Infinite justice" isn't possible without infinite vision and wisdom. Right now, our vision and wisdom are inadequate to help us find any stable justice. As citizens of the greatest country on Earth, we must do far better than mindless, bloody vengeance. Any idiot can pull a trigger. Only a great nation can stop and think first. We are that great nation.
Davidson Loehr is the Minister of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin.
© Copyright Cox Interactive Media, Inc.2001
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