Managing Calm vs Root Causes

Last week, in response to a reporter’s question about what happened to America’s clout in the Mideast as the Israel/Lebanon war continues unabated, George Bush gave the following response:

Bush: It’s an interesting period because instead of having foreign policies based upon trying to create a sense of stability, we have a foreign policy that addresses the root causes of violence and instability. For awhile, American foreign policy was just, let’s hope everything is calm — manage calm. But beneath the surface brewed a lot of resentment and anger that was manifested on September the 11th.

So apparently in Bush’s world view, our invasion of Iraq and Israel’s invasion of Lebanon are designed to address the root causes of resentment and anger of Islamic terrorists. That “managing calm” thing that Clinton tried to do only created a “sense of stability”. He should have been dropping bombs and occupying countries.

Man, if only we had realized this earlier. All that love that Muslims are now directing toward us because of our hard work on root causes could have been ours years earlier. :)

For the record, I am all for addressing root causes. But raining violence down upon entire countries is quite the opposite of addressing root causes, unless your goal is to solve the problem by killing everyone who opposes you.

Maybe Bush should actually try to understand why they hate us. Hint: it isn't because we love freedom. Here's a slice of a speech given by Osama bin Laden in Oct 2004. He may be full of it, but this is how he recruits people. Root causes indeed.

The events that affected my soul in a direct way started in 1982 when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon and the American Sixth Fleet helped them in that. This bombardment began and many were killed and injured and others were terrorized and displaced.

I couldn't forget those moving scenes, blood and severed limbs, women and children sprawled everywhere. Houses destroyed along with their occupants and high rises demolished over their residents, rockets raining down on our home without mercy.

The situation was like a crocodile meeting a helpless child, powerless except for his screams. Does the crocodile understand a conversation that doesn't include a weapon? And the whole world saw and heard but it didn't respond.

In those difficult moments many hard-to-describe ideas bubbled in my soul, but in the end they produced an intense feeling of rejection of tyranny, and gave birth to a strong resolve to punish the oppressors.

And as I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon, it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressor in kind and that we should destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted and so that they be deterred from killing our women and children.

And that day, it was confirmed to me that oppression and the intentional killing of innocent women and children is a deliberate American policy. Destruction is freedom and democracy, while resistance is terrorism and intolerance.

Mennonite Tour de France Winner Participant

Since, this is a self-identified Mennonite blog, I would be negligent not to mention the new Tour de France winner, Floyd Landis, is a Mennonite from Lancaster County, PA. This is kind of like finding out that the singer of a catchy new pop song that just hit number one and won a grammy is sung by a Muslim woman originally from Mecca itself. Not that there is anything wrong with it, mind you. But frankly, it is a bit annoying when people emerge from the clearly defined, labeled boxes I like to put them in for my own convenience.

It has been noted in a few places that Floyd did not put his hand over his heart and sing the national anthem during the award ceremony. This should not be unusual for Mennonites who are true to their heritage of not pledging fealty to the state, as such a thing is reserved only for God. It is refreshing to me to see someone not bow to the cultural pressure that is so strong these days to do the exact opposite. I'll leave the propriety of raising a champaigne glass in victory as an exercise to the reader. :)

I found a great blog posting from an Anabaptist named Hugo Schwyzer, who is, naturally, a progressive, since he makes so much sense. He does a great job of explaining the difference between waving a flag and swearing allegiance to it:

http://hugoboy.typepad.com/hugo_schwyzer/...

An exerpt:

Actually, carrying the flag on a bicycle and refusing to place the hand over the heart during the national anthem are both quite consistent with Mennonite principles. To be a Mennonite, classically, is to believe that citizenship in the Kingdom trumps national allegiances. In practice, that means refusing to swear oaths of obedience to any temporal authority; it means refusing to salute flags or to genuflect before earthly kings. But there's an important difference between saluting or pledging allegiance to the flag on the one hand, and waving it on the other!

One can be a radical Christian (a phrase many Mennonites apply to themselves) and love America! It is one thing to love America, another to pledge solemn allegiance to it. To wave the flag can be an expression of affection for one's native land, akin to waving the banner of one's university or favorite football team. (I once had a very large Cal banner that I waved with great enthusiasm.) Floyd Landis may be a Mennonite, but America is the nation of his birth -- there is nothing in Anabaptist theology that suggests he can't be fond of, even proud of, his country.

Update: 7/27/06:

Say it ain't so Floyd. He appears now to have failed a drug test after stage 17.

For the record, bike riding, beer drinking, champagne celebrating, national anthem not singing: all pretty much OK by Mennonite standards. Drug taking: Not so much.

America the Invulnerable

I am finally getting around to reading God’s Politics by Jim Wallis, the editor of Sojourners magazine. I started it a year or so ago, but only managed to read the first few chapters. It’s a great read. Here’s a paragraph from Chapter 7 “Be Not Afraid”

September 11 shattered the American sense of invulnerability. But instead of accepting the vulnerability that most of the rest of the world already lives with, and even learning from it, we seem to want something nobody can give us – to erase our invulnerability. We want it to just go away. If the government says more wars can do that, many people will say fine. If they say suspending civil liberties can do that, many will say fine. If they claim spending more and more of our tax dollars on the military and homeland security will do it – at the expense of everything else – many will say fine. But we simply can't erase our vulnerability, not in this world and not with the human condition being as it is. To be prudent and vigilant in the face of danger is good. But when a government offers to take away our vulnerability, it borders on idolatry.

Amen. We are continuing to allow immoral deeds (torture, locking up prisoners without trial, etc) to be done on our behalf so that we can feel safe. Ironically, if we didn't engage in these tactics, we might feel less safe, but our long term prospects for safety would be better, since we wouldn’t be fomenting hatred against us at quite the rate we are now accomplishing.

Taste of Champaign, Where I Annoy Socialists

I went to Taste of Champaign yesterday, which is becoming too big for its own good. Literally gobs of people fill West Side Park for the event, which I walk through every day to get to work. It’s funny how possessive I am of familiar places. What are all these people doing in my park? And where are the drunk guys who usually sit on the picnic tables? Well, technically there are still drunk guys sitting on picnic tables, but the familiar ones have been replaced with city-approved citizens having a good time.

In order to maximize the amount of money that can be extracted from everyone, you have to stand in long lines to get tickets, and then stand in more long lines to exchange those tickets for food at the vendor tents. It is a bit like a casino, where they want to decouple the activity (in this case the very small amount of food you get) from the actual amount of money you pay for it, so you don’t realize you’ve just paid three dollars for 2 nuggets of chicken satay.

I shouldn't complain too much though. It is run by the Champaign Park District and the proceeds go to scholarships for kids. I don’t mind being extorted for a good cause.

Anyway, on three separate occasions I ran into someone from the Socialist Party who wanted me to sign their petition to get on the ballot. I argued with all three of them, annoying them all greatly, and never did sign it.

Before I get shouted down for being anti-democratic (after all, I wasn’t being asked to vote for them, just to allow them to be on the ballot), let me explain. I have nothing against socialists. I'm too much of a realist to be an actual socialist, but I’m actually quite sympathetic to their values and desires to see more equity in society. I’m pretty confident that if Jesus were asked to choose between being a socialist and a capitalist, he’d have a handy parable about why the values of socialism (equality) are superior to the values of capitalism (greed). I just don’t see how running as a third party does anything to help their cause. Quite the opposite in fact – the only way they can affect an election is to help elect more Republicans, and by doing so, increase disparity.

The unfortunate truth is that our current political system is winner-take-all, and the only votes that matter in the end are the ones that are cast for a winning candidate. It seems to me that if they want to make the world a better place, they’d infiltrate the Democratic party and run where they have a chance of getting elected. And if they can’t win primaries, it should be obvious that they can’t win a general election either, and their time would be better spent working on the wider culture rather than running for office.

My question for each of the socialists was this: Why are you spending time helping Republicans, when you could be putting your energy into changing the winner-take-all system by advocating for instant runoff voting or for a proportional representative government like they have in Europe? Only then will 3rd parties matter, and not be counter-productive to what you are trying to achieve.

The ironic answer they gave me was: It is impossible to change *those* things. My response is that it is impossible to get elected as a socialist, but if you are going to fail at something, do it in a way that doesn’t hurt your cause. It should be a lot more possible to enact instant runoff voting, since there are multiple 3rd parties that can band together to work on it.

So, I didn’t sign the petition. I’m glad they are free to collect signatures and free to run if they collect enough, and that I am free to not help them waste their time on tactics that are at best doomed to fail, and at worst actively harmful to the cause of equality.

How To Weaken Our Nation

So, this is another variation on the common theme of War is Bad, which I've been warned makes me boring and obsessive. I guess this should be considered (yet another) cry for help.

Two items caught me eye recently:
1. There is a new report about the unexpectedly high number of post-traumatic stress disorder cases the military is seeing:
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/...

2. The CIA determined that Osama bin Laden wanted Bush re-elected, which is why he released that tape a few days before the election:
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/...


So, here's a thought experiment:
Suppose you wanted to hurt the United States. Not just a one-time tragedy, but a whole series of things that will cause long-term damage to the country.

Here’s a laundry list of what you might want to accomplish:

• Kill or physically injure tens of thousands of Americans.
  
• Require us to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on another country where things mostly just get blown up.
  
• Weaken our military by getting them bogged down in a war of choice, making it harder to defend the country against real threats.
  
• Remove hundreds of thousands of qualified people from the workforce (say, via National Guard), forcing companies to find temporary replacements.
  
• Inflame hatred of our country (for example, put soldiers in impossible situations where they fear everyone around them is a terrorist and can’t help but eventually kill unarmed civilians, including children and babies).
  
• Weaken our international standing and turn the world against us (for example, scorn international treaties and organizations).
  
• Weaken our national values (for example, advocate for torture as a valid interrogation technique, imprisonment without trial for foreign nationals, and wiretapping as an appropriate intrusion into privacy)
  
• Weaken our ability to respond to natural disasters (for example, send people and equipment and money to an occupation effort in another country).
  
• Finally, release tens of thousands of traumatized husbands, wives, mothers and fathers into the population that will strain the healthcare system and cause a ripple effect of stress and dysfunction on families for at least a generation.
  

Before thinking that I’m some tin-hat conspiracy theorist, note that I’m not saying Bush wants any of these effects to happen. It is just that he totally played into the hands of Al-Qaeda by starting this war, and continues to do so by refusing to disengage from it.

What’s so depressing and ironic about all this is that it isn’t Al-Qaeda that weakened us. They executed a specific attack on a specific day. Our reaction of fear, revenge and arrogance has caused far more harm to the nation than 9/11 did.

A Corny Theology

There’s a question that eventually everyone asks at some point in his or her faith journey. It doesn’t matter whether you came to your faith early or late in life, whether you prefer singing four-part harmony to guitars and drums, or even matter whether you like to sit in pews or seats. Eventually, the question eats at all of us: How is having faith in God like growing corn?

Yes, admit it, this question has haunted you for years. It certainly has haunted me since moving to Central Illinois. But, finally, after fasting for thousands of hours (in very small time segments) and meditating faithfully every night just before falling asleep, I think I have a workable answer. I’m sharing it here, in the hopes that we can finally put this question to rest, and all go back to arguing about which Bible translation is the best, or placing bets on whether certain people we know are going to make the cut into heaven, which we all know to be life-affirming ways express our relationship with the Divine.

If you have the goal of stuffing your face full of corn come autumn, the first thing you need to have (aside from corn seed) is certain beliefs about corn that will guide your actions towards this desired result. Note that this specifically excludes the idea that you can simply buy your way into someone else’s corn. (In fact, scholars believe that Martin Luther would have included this in the list of grievances nailed to the door at Wittenberg, had corn been available to him at the time).

So what do you need faith in to have a personal bountiful harvest of corn? Basically, you need to believe that if you plant a bunch of corn seeds into decent soil after the last frost, and you keep them watered and they get decent sun, that they will grow out of the ground, pollinate, and produce corn, which you can then pluck off the stalk and eat and make corncob pipes with and make dolls out of the husks and still have enough left over for all the ethanol we need to save our country from its dependency on oil. Yea, verily, verily, I say unto you, corn is a good thing.

Note however, that there are number of other things that you can also believe about growing corn that are harmless, and yet yield the same results. For instance, you are entirely free to believe that corn only grows when you plant it while dressed in long flowing purple robes of silk, or that you must bow in silent prayer after planting each row, or that your field is the only place in the world where real corn grows. As long as you plant it at the right time in the right soil in the right environment, it will grow and be just as fresh and yummy when you harvest. Your dancing around each stalk when the temperature reaches 90 degrees causes no harm to the process, assuming you don’t crush any of the stalks. And Farmer Bob and Farmer Joe can disagree all they want about whether corn likes to be sung to or whispered to – the corn really doesn’t care in the end, as long as you do the necessary things it requires.

However, there are some beliefs about corn that do cause problems. If you believe that corn yields are best when planted in snow on top of rocks in mountains, or that herbicide is really the best watering technique, you’ll find yourself hungry come harvest time.

More interesting perhaps, are beliefs that merely cause your corn to underperform. Suppose you are morally opposed to weeding of any kind. This may be a fine moral position in many respects, if it is based on respect for all life, even annoyingly persistent life with no obvious value. But your corn will suffer, since it has to fight with the weeds for nutrients and attention. Or, perhaps you believe that some corn is immoral and you know it just by looking at it, so once a week you scour the fields looking for the bad corn to yank out of the ground. This will obviously give you less corn, although to be fair, it will probably make you feel better about the corn you have left in the end. And, of course, Farmer Bob will insist that it has more to do with the kind of dance you do during the full moon than anything else.

I think the most interesting beliefs about corn are the ones that work in your location, but not so well in others. For instance, you may believe that corn must always be planted on May 1st or it won’t grow. Given frost patterns in the Midwest, this would work well here, but try it too far north, and most years frost will kill the corn. Or, perhaps you live on a beach in the tropics, and corn doesn’t grow so well there no matter what you do, even after your singing and dancing, which only seem to work with the bananas. The bananas, however, are quite delicious. But, of course, bananas are said to be evil, so it takes some courage just to try them out.

What does this all have to do with faith in God? Well, it must be that those with the most faith in God are the ones who grow the most corn.

No, wait, that can’t be right. How about this: our beliefs about God are like beliefs about corn, in that some of them help immensely in our faith journey, some we hold very dear, but are actually irrelevant in the end, and others are very much a hindrance to a rich and abundant spiritual life. And while the basic nature of God does not change, like the basic principles of growing corn, we have to be careful to recognize which specific beliefs are foundational and which are relevant only to our own location and environment.

Although we can argue endlessly about which beliefs are the best, the proof really lies in what kinds of fruit (and vegetables) we bear based on those beliefs. Or put another way, what matters is what kind of people we become when we feed ourselves with the right kind of spiritual food.

And don’t worry too much if you can only grow bananas. They are actually very good for you, despite their troubling lack of similarity to corn. They are yellow, after all, which I believe to be the holiest, most nutritious and most sincere color of food. But be careful to cook them over low heat while wearing a tin foil hat or else the aliens will replace their nutrients with mind-controlling chakras. Laugh if you must, but I've never been controlled by aliens after preparing bananas that way.

The Flat Tax and the Middle Child

Being a middle child, fairness is a big deal to me. I’ve been socially bred to desire and see fairness spread to all corners of the earth. It is pretty much a fool’s errand though. I long to be power hungry and controlling like eldest children or fun and irresponsible like youngest children. But alas, I’m stuck here in the middle, trying to make peace with everyone, and apparently mostly failing at it, given the general state of our conflict-ridden world.

The Flat Tax turned up in a lunch conversation yesterday, and it got me to thinking about fairness, especially as it relates to taxation.

You remember the Flat Tax, back from the olden days of the 90s. It almost seems quaint, now that we’ve mostly bankrupted the country by eagerly giving away large tax cuts to the wealthiest among us. In the days before compassionate conservatism, the wealthy used to have to work hard to transfer their tax responsibilities to others. A favorite tactic was whining that higher income is taxed at higher rates, and pointing out the unfair burden they must bear as a result. A Flat Tax, where everyone pays the same percentage, would be a much more equitable and fair way to pay taxes. Never mind that everyone’s income is already taxed at the same rate within each bracket (meaning that the first 7K of everyone’s income is taxed at 10%, and it is only the part above 325K that is taxed at the highest rate of 35%). It is unfair that the part of one’s income that is used to buy vacation homes is taxed at a higher rate than the part that is used to buy bread.

I gave my inner middle child some coffee and donuts and told it to mull this over. I’m not sure whether it was the sugar or caffeine, but it came up with a surprising but logical result. I think I could actually be on board with the Flat Tax, with one major condition. If it is unfair to tax people at different rates, then let’s solve the problem by just mandating that everyone make the same amount of money. Flat Income. Flat Tax. Fairness Achieved. We are all guaranteed to pay the same amount in taxes every year. This is much fairer than a Flat Tax, which only mandates that the same percentage be used. It is a foolproof solution to the problem of tax inequity.

I guess this idea isn’t really too surprising though. After all, it is really just the natural conclusion one would draw when calling for fairness in social policy. Frankly, I'm a little surprised that wealthy people would be advocating for this kind of thing. Seems a little socialist and radical to me. I’m also pretty sure it wouldn’t work very well in practice. But, hey, I don’t want to start poking holes in the logic people use to justify their stances. That would be unfair.

I think the lesson here is not to try to use fairness as an argument to a middle child, when, in fact, what you are arguing for is the right to be greedy. It is like arguing that you deserve more icing because you have more cake than anyone else. Middle children naturally see through such moves, and it makes us snarky.

Karen Armstrong Interview

Karen Armstrong is always the bridesmaid in my trips to bookstores. I often almost buy one of her books while browsing (A History of God, Through the Narrow Gate, The Battle for God), but always leave the store with some other trendier, sexier book in tow instead. Then I wake up feeling cheap and unfulfilled the next day.

There’s a great interview with her in Salon at http://www.salon.com/books/int/2006/05/30/armstrong
You may need to sign up for a one day pass at Salon to read the interview.

Here’s an excerpt:

You're saying these ancient sages really didn't care about big metaphysical systems. They didn't care about theology.

No, none of them did. And neither did Jesus. Jesus did not spend a great deal of time discoursing about the trinity or original sin or the incarnation, which have preoccupied later Christians. He went around doing good and being compassionate. In the Quran, metaphysical speculation is regarded as self-indulgent guesswork. And it makes people, the Quran says, quarrelsome and stupidly sectarian. You can't prove these things one way or the other, so why quarrel about it? The Daoists said this kind of speculation where people pompously hold forth about their opinions was egotism. And when you're faced with the ineffable and the indescribable, they would say it's belittling to cut it down to size.

Paradox of Power Sermon

Here's the text for the sermon I delivered today at First Mennonite in Urbana. Note that it was written to be read aloud. Comments and arguments are most welcome :)

It takes 47 seconds to be corrupted by power

First Mennonite has gone to the bottom of the barrel during Pastor Larry's sabbatical, and asked me to deliver the message this Sunday. Posts have been light here because I've been working on my sermon, which I'll post here next week.

In the meantime, enjoy this cartoon from Reuben Bolling:

Paradox of Peace

Sometimes I think life is simply a series of paradoxes that God uses for entertainment to befuddle us. Here is a good one from James Loney, one of the Christian Peacemaker Team members who was kidnapped and held captive in Iraq a few months ago.

Loney gave an Easter sermon entitled "From the Tomb", where he describes his capitivity. It is well worth the read, and isn't very long - see http://www.cpt.org/archives/2006/apr06/0026.html.

Here’s an excerpt:

I am learning many things from my captivity, and have a universe of things to be grateful for. Among them is a new and deep appreciation for the women and men who wear the uniform of military service. I likely would not be writing this today if it were not for them. Thus, I am confronted with a great paradox. I, the Christian pacifist peacemaker, am alive, am free because of the very institutions I believe are contrary to Christian teaching.

Christ teaches us to love our enemies, do good to those who harm us, pray for those who persecute us. He calls us to accept suffering before we inflict injury. He calls us to pick up the cross and to lay down the sword. We will most certainly fail in this call. I did. And I'll fail again. This does not change Christ's teaching that violence itself is the tomb, violence is the dead-end. Peace won through the barrel of a gun might be a victory but it is not peace. Our captors had guns and they ruled over us. Our rescuers had bigger guns and ruled over the captors. We were freed, but the rule of the gun stayed. The stone across the tomb of violence has not been rolled away.

I'm learning that there are many kinds of prisons and many kinds of tombs. Prisons of the mind, the heart, the body. Tombs of despair, fear, confusion. Tombs within tombs and prisons within prisons. There are no easy answers. We must all find our way through a broken world, struggling with the paradox of call and failure. My captivity and rescue have helped me to catch a glimpse of how powerful the force of resurrection is. Christ, that tomb-busting suffering servant Son of God, seeks us wherever we are, reaches for us in whatever darkness we inhabit. May we reach for each other with that same persistence. The tomb is not the final word.

I’ll be honest and admit that I haven’t totally worked out my own version of pacifism yet. I was always attracted to the idea (and it was one of the things that attracted me to Mennonites), but didn’t know how practical it was. Then this illegal and immoral war happened, and I've been thrust into a pacifist position.

There’s no question that the use of violence taints whoever uses it, and that violence almost always begets more violence. Pacifism as a practice is very good at preventing violence, but once a war starts or a kidnapping happens, it is hard to stop it without being tainted in *some* way. Thus, keeping absolute our very God-centered principles can *sometimes* cause more suffering in the end.

The problem is, most people leap headlong into violence as a solution first, justifying it as necessary to prevent further suffering, without really considering other options. People tend to forget that necessary evils are every bit as soul-threatening as unnecessary ones.

One only need look at the new allegations of outright murder by American soldiers in Haditha, Iraq (see http://edition.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/05/18/murtha.marines/) to see the inevitable result of violence as policy.

"Stripped, Beaten & Mocked"

My friend Dannie Otto gave a sermon on April 30th at First Mennonite in Urbana on torture and Chrisitianity. He was against torture and for Christianity. :)

The url for the sermon is here.

Exerpt:

This takes me back to the current situation of the 28 Chinese Muslims locked up on Guantanamo. For over a year, our military officials have concluded that they are totally innocent of any connection to terrorism. Why are they still locked up in Guantanamo? “Because they have become infamous”. If released to their homeland China, they will be further persecuted for the Muslim faith. If they are released in the U.S. they will be an embarrassment to our government because they will have free access to the media and their story will become sensationalized. They were made infamous by being brought to Guantanamo and now because they are infamous, they cannot be released.

In the transcripts from Guantanamo, the American interrogators were pressing a prisoner on what it is that he had done wrong: “Surely you have done something to justify this treatment. The American government wouldn’t have locked you up her for two years if you hadn’t done something wrong”. The mistreatment itself becomes the evidence that the mistreatment is justified. One can hear echoes of Pilate telling Jesus, “Tell me what you did to deserve death. You wouldn’t have been arrested and treated this way if you didn’t deserve it.” One has to give credit to Beccaria and like-minded persons who argued against torture on these grounds and gradually also convinced the church to oppose its use. It took several centuries but eventually a consensus was reached that civilized nations don’t do torture.

Why We Are Angry

After the election in 2004, I alternated between anger and depression. It isn't that I thought John Kerry would be such a great president, or that he would be able to clean up much of the mess created over the preceding four years. It was that a majority of voters in this country, in choosing George Bush, also chose pre-emptive war based on fear, tax cuts that go largely for the wealthy, continuted environmental degradation, and a host of other choices that undermined our national values. It was a triumph of fear, greed and ideology over fact, science, and law. That so many people could vote for Bush again, after seeing and experiencing the results of his disastrous policies, was simply unfathomable to me.

I've calmed down some over the last year and half. After all, this is politics - it isn't like there is an evil side and a good side. Right now, there is a corrupt side and a bumbling, wishy-washy, too-afraid-to-offend-anyone side. Electing Democrats will make the country a less corrupt place, but not a shining city on a hill kind of place.

William Rivers Pitt wrote an article yesterday on why there is so much anger on the left. It is a response to Richard Cohen of the Washington Post who wrote an article lambasting Stephen Colbert's routine at the White House Correspondents dinner, and then another article complaining about all the angry email he got from the first article. Cohen doesn't like all the anger on the left, and Pitt responds to this.

Anger is not an emotion that one can live on for very long without damaging their own psyche. However, anger is very useful for short periods of time if it spurs you to action to correct a wrong. Jesus was certainly angry at times, for instance when people were using the temple as a place of business. Good thing those days are over.

In any case, Pitt explains it all so much better than I ever could. If you care to understand anger on the left, go read it here: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/050906R.shtml.

An excerpt:

Why the anger? It can be summed up in one run-on sentence: We have lost two towers in New York, a part of the Pentagon, an important American city called New Orleans, our economic solvency, our global reputation, our moral authority, our children's future, we have lost tens of thousands of American soldiers to death and grievous injury, we must endure the Abramoffs and the Cunninghams and the Libbys and the whores and the bribes and the utter corruption, we must contemplate the staggering depth of the hole we have been hurled down into, and we expect little to no help from the mainstream DC press, whose lazy go-along-to-get-along cocktail-circuit mentality allowed so much of this to happen because they failed comprehensively to do their job.

George W. Bush and his pals used September 11th against the American people, used perhaps the most horrific day in our collective history, deliberately and with intent, to foster a war of choice that has killed untold tens of thousands of human beings and basically bankrupted our country. They lied about the threat posed by Iraq. They destroyed the career of a CIA agent who was tasked to keep an eye on Iran's nuclear ambitions, and did so to exact petty political revenge against a critic. They tortured people, and spied on American civilians.

You cannot fathom anger arising from this?

The World Changed on 3/19

Four and a half years after 9/11, I often still hear the phrases: "Everything changed after 9/11", or "That’s a pre-9/11 mindset".

What this usually means is one or more of the following:

• That we should be able to pre-emptively attack other countries if we are sufficiently afraid of them.
  
• That torture should be an acceptable method of engagement with enemies
  
• That it is OK to kidnap people in other countries and lock them up forever without the right to a trial.
  
• That international treaties like the Geneva Convention are “quaint”, and we shouldn’t have to abide by them if it is inconvenient.
  
• That we should ignore the illegalities of roving wiretaps and just trust George Bush to tell us what we need to know about them.
  
• That the opinions of other civilized countries are irrelevant to how to behave in the world at large.
  

Regardless of which values our country is stomping on, the justification is always the same: “everything changed after 9/11”.

Well, for me, everything changed on 3/19. That is, March 19th, 2003, the day we attacked a foreign country that was not threatening us, and was not protecting terrorists who attacked us. A country that we had to kick international inspectors out of in order to start the invasion. A country that was not even *capable* of harming us, which was reflected in the best intelligence we had at the time, but was ignored.

Our elected representatives in Congress rolled over, our media uncritically beat the war drums, and the masses went along with the whole charade. The possibility that democracy could become mob action became an ugly reality. We let the administration scare us into launching an unnecessary, pre-emptive war. We attacked first. We were the aggressors. We lost any moral authority we might claim for a generation. Our democracy failed, precisely because it was all done with the consent of the people.

It was one thing to have an enemy attack us. It was tragic and shocking, but we had the resolve to deal with it. It is quite another to give in to fear and arrogance, to fail ourselves, to finally attack our own values. Al Qaeda is not eroding our values as a people nor changing our way of life. We are. We are voluntarily giving up our civil rights and our basic decency as a people, and that hurts us more in the end than being attacked by a bunch of crazy fundamentalists.

It isn’t 9/11 that did this to us. It is 3/19, and we did it to ourselves.

Jesus loves them

Wow. I mean, just, wow. This animation is *not* for the faint of heart. It starts out with George Bush's infamous quote about God telling him to invade Afganistan and Iraq, and then shows pictures of maimed and dead Iraqi children with "Jesus Loves Me" sung by a child over the top. I could only watch about half of it, because it is just too hard:

http://peacetakescourage.cf.huffingtonpost.com/animations/wwjd.html

This is said to be made by a 15 year old girl, Ava Lowrey, from Alabama, from http://www.peacetakescourage.com. Amazing. This girl has more courage than all the Democrats in Congress combined.

I wonder if the Jesus Loves Me song is meant to convey that Jesus really does love the Iraqis who have been maimed and killed, or whether it is meant to be an indictment of George Bush thinking God wants him to use war as a political weapon and to use Jesus as cover. I suppose both work.