idealistic and ignorant
JournalNews column
It’s not been a good week for pacifists.
In the weeks and months leading up to this war, I’ve remained steadfast in my belief that this should not be happening. Our country should not be so aggressive as to pound another part of the world with such force, to expect armies to stand aside while our military bullies its way to the capitol. There’s an arrogance and a hypocrisy to our nation’s foreign policies that sickens me.
We tell our children that two wrongs don’t make a right, then send them off to battle to kill the evil dictators of the world and the innocents who get in the way. We should not have let the situation in the Middle East degenerate to the point where there is no other option than “shock and awe.”
My pacifism is not a political belief, but a moral one. It’s wrong to do violence. It’s wrong to kill. It’s far better for humankind to exercise its capacity for love and mercy than its bloodlust. I’m not against the Iraqi war. I’m against war.
Is this idealistic? You bet it is, but if we don’t have ideals of world peace, then we — all of us, not just Americans — have absolutely no hope of ever overcoming the part of us that insists on greed and violence.
I get a lot of e-mails and phone calls when I express my utopian desire that we should all just learn how to get along. Most of my correspondants thank me for having the courage to speak out for my faith and my beliefs, but there are those who ridicule me, even threaten me. I’ve been called “ignorant” and “a big fat nothing,” and I’ve received anonymous e-mails from people forwarding stories about journalists getting kidnapped and killed.
Being called ignorant doesn’t bother me a lot, except that I feel sorry for people who have been so hardened by the world that they feel like they can make those judgments about someone they don’t know.
It does bother me that people will call me “un-American” for speaking my mind, because I’m being very American, believing our founding fathers who wrote about “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
The love of “life” — and not just my own — is the foundation of my anti-war beliefs. Dropping bombs and shooting other people only deprives them of their life, so how does that kind of violence harmonize with being a good American?
“Liberty” is my right to express my beliefs, no matter how unrealistic — or ignorant — they may be. To those who say, “America: Love it or leave it,” I have to say: “America: Love it and work to make it better.”
I can only imagine that “the pursuit of happiness” is going to get more and more difficult while living in increasing fear of terrorists and other nations who do, indeed, hate America and Americans. “You just don’t understand evil,” one reader e-mailed me. Maybe I don’t, but I understand that we reap what we sow, that death and destruction leads to more death and destruction. We may take out Saddam Hussein and bring democracy to Iraq, but we’re also giving the next generation of terrorists another reason to hate America.
The only righteous way to fight evil is with love. I saw on CNN that each one of the Tomahawk missiles our military shot into Baghdad cost over a million dollars.
In my idealistic view, I can only imagine how much food a million dollars would buy. And I would rather have a young Iraqi growing up remembering how when he was hungry Americans gave him food than remembering how when he was oppressed, Americans killed his father.
