Has anyone noticed that we seem to be headed for global war number three?
North Korea launches rocket tests on our Independence Day, in defiance of warnings from several nations (including us), but with silent support from Russia and China. Trains in Mumbai are bombed. There’s still a war in Afghanistan, with passive support from Pakistan by hiding terrorists in in their mountains. Iran is building their own nuclear arsenal and thumbing its nose at America while Russia quietly stands behind them. Iran and Syria are supporting, both monetarily and with materiel, the continuing terror attacks on Israel by Hamas and Hezbollah. Saudi, Syria and Iran are supporting the terrorists still wreaking havoc on the Iraqi people under the guise of an "insurgence" against the infidels. The UK says there are at least 20 different terror cells somewhere within their borders. And then we’ve got the 8 American citizens (that we know of) who were plotting and planning terror attacks on their own country. (What are they thinking?!?!?)
If the world isn’t on fire yet, it soon will be; blazing like those out of control wild fires in Southern California.
I have friends who live in Israel. I have friends who live in Beirut (well, not any more; now they are fleeing north or west). Three years ago around this time I had planned to spend two weeks in Lebanon and Syria, and Christmas in Jerusalem. Those plans were canceled by my parent’s deaths. But I had hopes of visiting some day. Even now, everything in me wants to go there and do something. But what would I do?
To see the dead and wounded, on both sides, hurts my soul more than I can express. It breaks my heart to see the devastation and know that the rubble on the screen was once someone’s home, or someone’s place of work and income.
I received an email last night from some of those friends, telling of their narrow escape from Israeli bombs in their own neighborhood. It told of how their friends and neighbors reacted as the bombs fell. Among those were a 20 year-old who had a nervous breakdown even as the the rockets fell and bombs exploded; and a five year-old who, "crawled into a corner with fear on his face and froze there for the whole time.”
Oh, my heart grieves for the children! For everyone who must live through the horror of war.
How blessed, and how spoiled, we are here in America. We haven’t seen a war on our shores since our own Civil War over a hundred years ago. Yes, we were bombed at Pearl Harbor, and yes we were bombed in New York and D.C. One-time attacks — which we swiftly exacted retribution for, btw — that are nothing in comparison to daily, hourly bombing runs of jets and rockets. We no nothing of real war.
Especially my generation.
My parent’s generation knew war. They lived through the first world war, through the depression and through the second world war. They knew what it was to suffer through desperate hunger, extreme unemployment and sorrowful loss of son after son after son. But most of them have now died.
We are left with the Boomers, and my generation and the one after.
Only our soldiers know of war now. And too often they receive our "national scorn" over battles and wars fought far away for freedoms we are so accustomed that we completely forget the rest of the world does not have them. We blame them for the decisions of compassionate leaders who choose to send our soldiers into harms way to liberate and offer the freedoms to others who have never known them in their national/ethnic history.
We whine about $3/gal gas yet buy another gas-guzzling SUV and drive 800+ miles on our various vacations through the year because airline prices are "too high". We cry about high healthcare costs, rising interest rates and increasingly expensive groceries yet we still eat too much (I’m preaching to myself here too, fyi), live beyond our means and insist on getting a battery of tests and a round of antibiotics every time we sneeze.
We obsess on conspiracy theories about JFK (I mean, come on! Put it to rest already), demand our rights be respected and insist on having everything our way, and cry "Global Warming" while at the same time are completely oblivious to the deep ongoing needs of the poor and oppressed of our world, trash any group who stands up for their own beliefs and convictions with the new hip epithet of "religious right" and label them "intolerant" all while driving our SUVs the 20 miles to work and 20 miles back, carry our groceries home in plastic bags (obviously you’ve never been to India or Ethiopia and seen how those plastic bags collect in rivers and lakes and cling to every desert plant; they don’t just disappear when you throw them away people!), and veto every public transportation bill because it’s too expensive or "it will create too much noise and draw ‘undesirable’ people to my neighborhood," or "bring down the value of my home."
Yes, we are a spoiled people, America. But I think our time is just about up. I think the rest of the world is about to give us a good swift kick in the ass.
Oh, we’ll kick back.
And beat the living crap out of them. But we will still pay a high price.
And perhaps, just perhaps, we will finally be humbled enough (or is that humiliated?) to finally see what our forefathers knew their whole lives: we have it really, really, reeeeaaally good; we are blessed beyond measure and its time we appreciated that instead of taking it for granted.
Okay, I’m stepping off my soap box… for now.
Wow……’liked’ this…..and so how do we live focused on Him…..so those that don’t know…aren’t completely undone?? Thanks…
A friend recently let me in on a speech by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His Vietnam speech (or one of them, anyway) from NYC. http://www.drmartinlutherkingjr.com/beyondvietnam.htm
Check it out.
Joe, okay I don’t get it. What is your point? I read the speech — at which at times I found rather offensive because my dad fought in Vietnam and despite the losses we incurred I still feel that we were right to be there. To at least try to help those oppressed by the Chinese-led Vietcong. It was the government’s decision to make it a “police action” effectively tying the hands of our troops that cost us the most lives. Was it a winnable war? No. But morally I believe we ought to have been there or helped the resistence in some way.
I did find one quote that I liked, but I would remove “nonviolence” from it, because I believe there were always be violence in the world and that a nation or a people must stand against what they believe is wrong, and be willing to do so with violence if necessary. Anyway, that quote is: “Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.”
At any rate, I muse be missing something…. How do you see it fitting into my little rant (because it’s all about me, you know!)? Because I don’t.
Becky — I’ve been asking myself the same question. I’m attempting to write a post about it now… do you have any ideas?
Toward the end, he starts talking about true revolution.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. … True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.
A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind. This oft misunderstood, this oft misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I’m not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality.
Now, of course, we leave out the universalist part, but you start to get the point. You were talking about the poor, the needy, the ones who are about to kick us in the butt. But if we were more about this unconditional love that King is talking about, it wouldn’t be so. I think his statements about love and using our wealth and power for the good of others is something we should always remember. That’s the part that I was most interested in you reading. The rest of it, I read, and get a new perspective on Vietnam (I wasn’t there, I wasn’t near it, but my dad was there for 30 days- he tried to volunteer but they kept sending him to other places). But what I wanted to point toward were his statements toward the end about love and the world.
No….just alot of questions…..waiting for your take on it!