Tag Archives: values

Ninety Lives … For What They’re Worth

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My favorite news source is newspapers, but every few weeks I get my ironing done with the Sunday weekly news roundup shows on television. Yesterday, watching George Stephanopoulos, Inside Washington, Face the Nation, and Meet the Press, I became painfully aware that not a single mention had been made, even in passing, of the ninety lives lost in a Baghdad mosque earlier in the week.

 

Reporters and interviewees droned on about “not one more American soldier,” while George Stephanopoulos thoughtfully rolled his register of American lives tragically cut short thousands of miles from home. Hours were devoted to gleeful analysis of what Libby knew and what Bush didn’t. Bernadette Peters made a generous appeal for one of my favorite causes, adoption of America’s homeless pets.

 

Yet during those three hours on ABC, CBS, and NBC, not a single image or voice was raised to note the horrific loss of those ninety lives in Baghdad.

 

The American media—and Americans in general—are simply missing the point. The point is, respect and support for human life everywhere, not just for Americans. It’s as if, by example, we somehow imagine it to be in our best interest to urge all nations everywhere to adopt our own peculiar brand of tunnel-visioned “me-first” patriotism.

 

Apparently, Americans see planet Earth as a tidy jigsaw puzzle where self-sufficient clumps of humanity are divided perpetually into impermeable nations separated by high, immutable stone walls that God himself built, instead of a tiny and fragile living planet where we are all so interdependent that we share the very air we breathe, and every drop we drink.

 

Nationalism and patriotism are just fine and dandy in their place–a very limited place of proud achievement, unique traditions, and dedication to local civic responsibilities. But patriotism and nationalism go too far when they pander to the illusion that human life elsewhere is somehow less important than the lives of “we Americans”—as if it could be possible that lives in one nation could somehow be of greater value than other lives.

 

Since when do traditional American values speak only for American citizens? Since when do our philosophies declare all men created equal, with Americans just a little more equal than all the rest? Since when does Jesus love the little children of the world, especially American children?

 

What does it mean to be an American, a patriot? If it means some kind of Orwellian doublespeak where we turn our backs on the rest of the world, I don’t want any part of it.

 

Americans couldn’t have been more touched by the international outpouring of empathy when our twin towers fell. Attention was paid. Moments of silence were shared. Candles were lit. Prayers from every religious faith were invoked in every language. Helping hands reached across the waters. Schoolchildren collected pennies for victims’ families.

 

For that one moment, everyone cared—not because of, or even in spite of the fact that the victims were Americans—but because human beings were at one moment peacefully pursuing happiness and the next moment they were dead. Human beings. Not Americans, or Chinese, or Hutus, or Shiites. Human beings, upon whom all the highest moral values of every religious and ethical system have forever been built.

 

Every day, in every corner of the world, far more people die hourly from the consequences of economic and political violence—curable diseases, starvation, poverty,  war—than died in that mosque, or in the twin towers, for that matter.

 

But that’s not the point. The point is, it’s not about Iraqis, or Jews, or Americans. It’s about people who are needlessly dying from human violence and indifference, people whose bodies are mangled and lives shattered. People with faces and names, of every nationality, who once had families and dreams and prayers and work that needed to be done. They're all gone.

 

News analysts have a dual role, to both reflect and create public attitude. This Sunday’s weekly news roundup created and reflected total American indifference to the suffering of human beings in the Middle East. Our otherwise distinguished news analysts were so busy interrupting each other over the fall of DeLay and the immigration gridlock in Congress that they couldn’t spare a moment to mention the fact that last week, the equivalent of a whole Shiite village was blown to hell as they gathered to pray to the very same God America prays to, even if we call Him by a different name.

 

And Americans are by no means unaccountable. Because no matter how you read the tea leaves, our violent hand has left its mark indelibly on that anguished region. The tyrannical power of Saddam Hussein was an American creation. The nation of Iraq itself was an arbitrary western notion forcefully assembled from three historically distinct ethnicities. The very fact that these three mutually-distrustful factions are at this very moment bristling with high-tech arms they can hardly resist using to annihilate each other in a civil war, out of sheer desperation and despair, is almost entirely due to the generosity of the American military-industrial complex and its imported violent solutions to the region’s problems.

 

What will it take for the west to recognize and support the majority of Muslims who repeatedly pay the price of decades of violent occupation and interference with almost inhuman endurance, responding stoically with non-violence, forbearance, order, and faith? What does it take to earn American respect and compassion for this vast majority peacefully enduring the fires of hell through no fault of their own?

 

And what kind of unholy armageddon will it take for George Bush to stand up and say, This is not right. This is wrong. This is evil. This will not stand.

 

Americans claim to have democratically decided to throw $500 billion of our hard-earned taxpayers’-dollars—not to mention our darling children and grandchildren—toward the goal of bestowing freedom and democracy upon our beloved Iraqi friends. Or has a tiny extremist group of neocon warmongers managed to misuse our democratic processes so as to herd American citizens around like sheep, in hopes that when Iraq is similarly safely “democratized,” we will be able to commandeer Iraqi oil by riding herd on those citizens, as well.

 

If this is not the case, if we so love the Iraqis that we're willing to put our economy and our progeny's lives on the line, why can’t we manage to come up with just one silent moment of programming time during three hours of major-network weekly news roundups in order to show the minimum of respect for the ninety murdered souls on whose behalf we’re supposedly fighting and dying?

 

The American media goes absolutely crazy, and the American people spare no expense, when a single American miner can be rescued from an explosion, when an American child is pulled from the rubble of a well or a hurricane, a lost American pilot plucked from the ocean. But we harden our hearts, press our lips together, and look away when the victims are “others.”

 

Our own violent culture is the one which stands to lose the most from this terrible attitude. What is it with us? Are we getting bored? Have we seen too many damn mosque bombings to move us anymore? Is it like, ho-hum, more collateral damage, another suicide bombing, please change the channel to a good Schwarzenegger movie? Is this the kind of coldhearted, narrow-minded, mean-spirited world that American parents want to leave their bereft children alone in someday, a meaningless, terrifying one that hates each other?

 

Perhaps some sense can come from this mosque bombing if Americans and all other nations consecrate the ground of these martyrs by insisting that this be the last bombing, the one which finally turns the violence around, that makes everyone realize that enough is enough. Are we waiting for global thermonuclear war to force us into that decision?

 

It’s time to bind up all nations’ wounds, to care for the widow and the orphan, and to dedicate ourselves to a new birth of freedom from human violence, not just for the people of the Middle East, but for all of us, for all our children, everywhere.

 

The world is not the economic and geopolitical chessboard of some tiny extremist splinter group, with winner-take-all the unfair object of their game. If Americans care about all people, as I know we do, we need to play a different game entirely, one with a golden rule which treats all others everywhere just exactly as we would like to be treated. The object of the game is respect and support for the quality of human life everywhere. 

 

Please send comments to epharmon@adelphia.com

 

 

 

 

 

America the Blind … and the Beautiful

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I recently tried to explain to a friend why I often stand up with our local Women In Black in their silent vigils of mourning, witness, and solidarity with victims of violence everywhere.

 

“What violence have you ever experienced?” she asked me, a little accusingly.

 

“Well, before I was born, my father fought in World War II, and…”

 

“War isn’t violence!”

 

Probably my friend was finding it as difficult to articulate her honest beliefs as I was. Hers might go something like this: “America isn’t a violent culture like so many others. We’re a caring and peaceful people minding our own business, and when we fight a distant war, we’re only trying to cleanly wipe out violent individuals elsewhere who would hurt us and others, terrorists who would otherwise bring violence to our peaceful and porous borders. I’m upset that you would protest war, itself, as unwelcome violence, when our brave soldiers are risking their lives to protect us from a war that someone else started. Why aren’t you protesting their violence, and leaving our poor soldiers alone?”

 

How do I explain myself to privileged Americans like my friend, who, from her comfortable, insulated perch, is persuaded that the violence spreading across the globe is neither America’s fault nor its problem, and that finding a peaceful solution isn’t America’s responsibility?

 

And how can I begin to share with my friend and others of like mind, the conclusions that I’ve drawn from a lifetime of study, not only of daily news reporting, but also of the broad field of American history and politics—far beyond the local schoolboard-censored, pride-building high school American History textbook summaries of patriotism we are all encouraged to swallow so unskeptically during our innocent, vulnerable years—often the only history many Americans ever study.

 

I, too, rapturously memorized all the glorious civics-textbook paeans to our truly admirable national ideals and values, during my childhood years on military bases as a “service brat” daughter of a highly-decorated war hero and career officer—and I still hold to all of them, with all my heart.

 

But I’ve also read, in addition, many carefully-documented public records of another long, sad, and well-repressed history of American exploitation, aggression, and injustice, which only recently (thanks to the internet) has become more widely acknowledged—tragic stories of the greatest nation on earth, built upon, not only our many positive qualities and deeds, but also upon military might, invasion, occupation, political oppression, colonialism, tyranny, torture, murder, and all the complex economics of greed.

 

And we’re still at it….

 

And we need to stop. For life on earth itself is at stake.

 

When the twin towers fell, all of America cried out in confusion, “Why do they hate us?”

 

To this day, too few Americans understand why so many around the world resent the beloved storybook America of their childhood experience. Gradually, though, many citizens are coming to a new awareness that our unparalleled economic and military might has as often been used for evil as for good.

 

Americans have wasted a lot of time and lives wallowing in well-intentioned ignorance. We’ve been lied to by politicians and presidents, historians and international tycoons, many of whom themselves were similarly duped. And if we have been too ready to believe them, we can now as willingly move forward, sadder and wiser, to make fewer mistakes.

 

If God expected Americans—or citizens of any nation—to be infallible, he would have made us all that way. The American nation is certainly not alone in having a mixed history. Every other nation, and all other peoples, are equally susceptible to harmful policies and propaganda by the many who would profit from political and religious distortions. The same god, however, who reserved vengeance for himself alone also sent his son to teach of his infinite love and forgiveness. Perhaps people learn best from mistakes; God in his wisdom apparently has decided to let us all make as many as we need to make, in order to learn what we need to know.

 

No solutions to our many current problems can be found in blame, retaliation, or attack. The peoples of our brave new interconnected earth will only move forward together when offered clear moral leadership, strong examples of international unity and forgiveness, and powerful visions of a peaceful future in which people everywhere are free to seek happiness and avoid suffering.

 

We will never overcome ignorance, injustice, or guilt by adding to their sum, just as war can never conquer war, and hatred always increases hatred. Only the light of non-violent cooperation can put out the darkness hidden in so many corners of the world.

 

Senate Bill # 1756 proposes a new cabinet-level Department of Peace, which will help us achieve our highest American ideals. Tell your friends and colleagues about this bill, and call and write your Congresspersons….

 

We can become the world’s greatest exporter, not of war, weapons, and tragedy, but instead, of peace, justice, and the true American way, a way that treats all others as we would wish to be treated, the way of the golden rule, offering acceptance and support for the quality of human life everywhere.

 

Please send comments to epharmon@adelphia.net

 

 

 

 

 

Condoleezza Rice Says Global Harmony Is Not the Business of Government

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At a recent press conference in Great Britain, Condoleezza Rice stuttered uncharacteristically when she was asked about a possible joint commission (of England, Ireland, and Australia) to promote global harmony. Ms. Rice responded that global harmony was not the business of government, but rather, a matter of concern for private citizens.

 

I always thought that the primary business of any state department worth its salt in the twenty-first century was global harmony. Certainly a “secure, democratic, and prosperous world” as pledged by the current U.S. Department of State’s mission statement, implies global harmony. Surely the highly-specialized, expensive training of our immense diplomatic corps specifically prepares them for careers of building and maintaining strong, positive foreign relationships.

 

Considering the many conflicts that daily arise around the globe, promotion of global harmony ought to be someone’s job, someone who is well-staffed, well-budgeted, and high profile, like Rice. I cannot be the only taxpayer disappointed to find out that, despite all that money we spend on the Department of State, no one in government is currently in charge of pursuing global harmony.

 

Perhaps Rice thinks the State Department is in the nineteenth-century diplomatic business of exclusively looking out for only our own nation’s interests, a childishly narrow, anachronistic, and frankly impossible goal that it is time to put away. Unfortunately, Rice still seems determined to strategically split up the world into enemies and allies, and to go about flexing and flaunting America’s fast-waning military muscle to unkindly wheel and deal in patronage, espionage, economic dominance, and power struggles.

 

Which is too bad, since, as Albert Einstein once observed, “A country cannot simultaneously prepare for and prevent war.” With Rice and others in our current administration busy preparing for war, who is left to prepare for peace?

 

Rice’s tough-cop, saber-rattling approach to throwing around what little unsquandered moral weight we have left can never promote a peaceful, productive America. The only long-term diplomatic relationship that has ever worked successfully has been one established along the lines of the golden rule—in which all diplomats offer one another the kind of justice which they would wish to be offered, themselves. Unfortunately, although Rice is a smart woman who can surely see no advantage to staying stuck in the past, the golden rule is not in her current play- or style-book. We await her transformation.

 

Our current aggressive diplomatic approaches are grounded in old thinking—in fear, selfishness, and greed, which produce nothing but immensely costly blowback in the long term, and anything but peace and prosperity for American citizens. A golden-rule approach to millennial American politics and diplomacy would be far more effective, and far less costly in every sense.

 

Passing the bill currently in Congress establishing a cabinet-level Department of Peace (Senate Bill #1756) will do much to support all cabinet departments in rethinking their roles in terms of global harmony—which is very much the business of government, and of all taxpaying citizens—perhaps even our most important business.

 

 

 

Please send comments to epharmon@adelphia.net

 

 

 

 

 

A Poem About Women In Black by Eppy

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WHAT WE DO

 

Women in black

Witness violence

Everywhere

In vigils of

Silent solidarity

Mourn all victims

All of us

 

Light candles

For the attacked

Abused abandoned

Tortured murdered

Lift

All who hurt

Within

 

A circle of peace

Illuminating night

Leaving

No one

Not one

Outside alone

In darkness

 

 

Comment: We can’t stop tsunamis, hurricanes, tornados, heartaches, disappointments, and death. We can, however, teach and learn peace, and finally put an end to violence, the most preventable cause of human suffering.

Please send comments to epharmon@adelphia.net .

 

 

 

 

 

Another Holocaust?

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When Hitler painted all Jews everywhere with his hate-filled brush, many people were caught up in his scary “logic,” and the result was a Holocaust. Today’s Jews should be the group least susceptible to the rampant prejudice that is currently damning all of Islam with sweeping fear-based generalizations. The lesson of the Holocaust for all of us is never again should anyone buy into paranoia and bigotry concerning a whole people, culture, religion, ethnicity, or lifestyle.

 

Yet, here we go again.

 

If you don’t like some Muslims (or Jews or Chinese or Hutus …) well, that’s human. But if you hate and fear most (Muslims) because you think they’re all pretty much the same, that’s ignorance and prejudice.

 

It’s simply not true that most Muslims are quarrelsome, narrow-minded, blood-thirsty fanatics out to dominate the world. Yet I have recently heard that repugnant argument for war from Jews and Christians alike.

 

Of course we’re all frightened, Muslims too. But violent extremists are found in every culture. America had its own bloody civil war, not to mention lynchings, attacks on civil rights marchers and labor unions, gang wars, office and schoolyard shootings, rapes, widespread child and domestic abuse, crime, and murder. We have our own home-grown steady supply of trigger-happy nutcases, D.C. snipers, Unabombers, and Oklahoma terrorists, all continually egged on into fear and violence by faithless media demagogues and opportunistic politicians, in just the same way that Hitler once terrified the German citizenry into insanity.

 

FDR gently reminded us that the only thing we have to fear is: fear, itself. During this difficult time, may we have cool heads, loving hearts, open minds, and an abiding faith in the golden rule, so that we may respect and support all of God’s beloved children, everywhere.

 

Jim Wallis Practices God’s Politics

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Jim Wallis’ rich and thought-provoking exploration, God’s Politics, will stimulate a generation of dialogue at the intersection of faith, politics, and contemporary culture. Wallis’ mental exuberance and hyperactivity are easily balanced by his brilliance, generosity, and love. God’s Politics is a must-read.

 

Wallis argues that values based in faith must inspire American politics, and that this right was guaranteed by our founders when they separated church and state. Wallis feels that the very survival of America’s social fabric depends upon the emergence of political and cultural leaders having a clear vision of justice, peace, environmental stewardship, family, and consistent-value-of-life ethics grounded in the traditions of acceptance, forgiveness, and love preached by the biblical prophets (including, of course, Jesus.) To Wallis, faith cannot ignore poverty, injustice, war, and other attacks upon humanity, nor mean-spiritedly criminalize or marginalize minority voices and choices, nor turn away from those everywhere made in the image of God.

 

I agree with Wallis that “faith…prefers international community over nationalist religion…” adding my hope that he will consider advocating for respect and support now for the quality of human life everywhere as the highest possible ethical stance (similar to the Catholic doctrine of the value and inviolability of human life.) Acceptance of this stance supersedes patriotism and nationalism, which, however noble, engender polarizing fears that lead to ethnocentrism, hatred, war, injustice, unfriendly competition, and indifference to suffering in other nations.

 

Wallis offers a wonderful example of a compassionate prophetic voice and life which many will be inspired to emulate. As a rallying cry, though, the concept of “prophetic faith” is not quite universal enough to provide a satisfying ethical framework for political discourse in a multicultural democracy, injecting instead a degree of divisiveness into Wallis' otherwise effective argument, rather than the clarity and commonality he intended. Just deciding which and whose prophets to include would assure a fractious, ultimately irresolvable argument. Furthermore, the words “prophetic faith” unnecessarily threaten many non-religious citizens, while even religious citizens disagree as to which prophets are foundational.

 

Also, although clearly Jesus spoke with a prophetic voice, many Christians would be confused and offended if Jesus were even temporarily and merely metaphorically reduced to the status of “prophet.”

 

Does Wallis’ concept of “prophetic faith” embrace the teachings of the wide variety of major/minor prophets from all major/minor world faiths—say, Confucius, Mohammed, “Buddha,” Mao, Marx, the minor biblical prophets, etc? On what basis would he include or exclude prophets?

 

Will Wallis include other, often controversial, modern-day (dead) “prophets”–Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Billy Graham, Pope John Paul, Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and others in the prophetic tradition? If so, whom, and on what basis? What about present-day prophets—all visionary moral leaders fitting Wallis’ definition of “prophet”—such as Jim Wallis himself, Jimmy Carter, Pat Buchanan, Oprah, Jim Carroll, Marianne Williamson, the Dalai Lama, Pope Benedict, George Bush, Gordon Hinckley, Bono, etc?

 

A promising alternative framework for moral political discourse offering a common unifying vision acceptable to all philosophical and religious bases would be “respect and support now for the quality of human life everywhere,” a belief that Americans already embrace, i.e., “all men are created equal.” The rest of the world would jump at the chance to move in this direction along with the U.S.

 

No successful political movement would dare reject patriotism; however, a political movement could successfully promote “respect and support now for the quality of human life everywhere” as “the highest moral value,” leaving to individual discussion the various moral implications of this stance.

 

Wallis‘ argument in favor of choosing a consistent ethic of human life, with its important implications for poverty, injustice, war, violence, etc., fits in perfectly with the above-declared “highest moral value.” His excellent “test” question—“How are the children doing?” also fits well. So too would “Golden Rule Politics” (see other essays on Golden Rule Politics at www.epharmony.com ).

 

Mr. Wallis is the founder of Sojourners, a network of Christians working for justice and peace. He edits the acclaimed Sojourners magazine, is a powerful and popular speaker, the author of seven books, a Harvard lecturer, and the founder of Call to Renewal.

 

Please send comments to epharmon@adelphia.net