Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) Update #2

10 October, 2011

Edinburgh, Scotland

Greetings, friends. Firstly, I would like to let everyone know that thanks to your great generosity, I have surpassed the fundraising goal for my delegation to Hebron. Your responsiveness has been both remarkable and swift, and for that I thank you. Now I only ask for my circle of support to share in the updates, and to join me in praying for peace. And to that end, I would like to share my second CPT update.

Our list has been finalized, and there will be 10 members from around the world coming together for November's delegation. Since my first update, 20 September has come and gone, sadly with little movement on the international, political front, and joyfully with a great deal of movement on the social and interfaith front. There is a great difference between path to peace being experienced among those involved in Realpolitik, and those involved in real communities. One such interfaith, peacemaking community is located just outside of Bethlehem and it is called the Tent of Nations. And the difference between the United Nations and the Tent of Nations is one that I would like to focus on for this update.

The narrative of “making peace” that we hear spoken in the halls of the United Nations usually refers to the 1967 treaty, includes the phrase “land for peace” and suggests that one side is willing to come to the table if the other side would only _______ . This tragic narrative that continues to resonate within the marbled halls of nations never seems to bear lasting fruit because it is based on two fallacies. The first fallacy is the belief that real Peace can be made by arbitrating competing claims to human rights through a legal contract. While such treaties are necessary, this method of peacemaking is insufficient. A legal contract will always leave the possibility of conflict because this kind of “peace” is not based on people actually learning to be peaceable, it is based on the authority of a government. And that flaw points to the second fallacy, which is the idea that governments wield the authority to arbitrate peace. From Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century, through John Locke and into the eighteenth century when modern constitutions were born, our political philosophies have been based on this narrative. It begins by suggesting that people are autonomous, self made individuals whose right to pursue happiness will naturally conflict with someone else's. Based on that narrative, you are likely to agree that the might of a collective nation is the only real guarantor of a conflict free existence. So you grant authority to the government to protect your pursuit of happiness, and the government maintains peace through economic or military coercion. The reason that most of us never really question the morality of a national budget that spends exponentially more on military weapons than education, health, industrial or cultural programs is because we generally buy into this narrative that the nation stands between me and the chaos of self interested individuals, many of whom intend to do me harm. So we vest the government with the moral authority to define who is our enemy and declare war on them. By doing so, individuals who normally clamber for rights to autonomy in all other areas of life willingly concede their moral agency and resign their role in perhaps the most important process of all - making peace with their neighbors! This narrative has been an affective way of maintaining the status quo of nations at least since the time of the Assyrians. However, Jeremiah reminds us that when violence is held at bay by the political threat of further violence while people are hungry, ill, uneducated, and displaced we are proclaiming “peace, peace, when there is no peace.”

The good news is, there is another reality that is not based on coercive, national authority, but is based on the narrative of Peace that is at the heart of our faith. The reality of direct non-violence gets little press or practice. And the reason is, it is a reality that challenges everything the national narratives want you to believe about Israelis, Palestinians, Jews, Christians, Muslims, internationals and your role in the path to Peace. I invite you to listen to that narrative as it is being told at the Tent of Nations...

Tent of Nations is the name of a farm outside of Bethlehem, led by a third generation farmer named Daud Nasser. Daud inherited the land from his grandfather who bought the farm in the Ottoman rule. In recent years, Israel has been threatening to take his land, and refuses to allow him to build permanent structures on the farm...hence, the Tent. Every day Daud welcomes Muslims, Jews, Christians, Israelis, Palestinians and internationals to come to Tent of Nations to work together and learn something about sustainable, ecological farming and international peacemaking. He states that the Tent of Nations is about making peace between the land and people, and between people on the land. There in that place, Israelis and Palestinians live and work together as a a living witness of peace and a living, breathing protest towards occupation and the narrative of Realpolitik as the arbiter of peace. Here in this place, “Land for Peace” and its narrative of governmentally arbitrated political demands make no sense. Here, outside Bethlehem, there will be “Peace for the Land”. Why? Because Daud and his Muslim, Jewish and Christian neighbors choose to believe that this faithful narrative defines what is real. There is a stone on the farm. On that stone someone has painted these words in Arabic, English and German: “We refuse to be enemies”

The Tent of Nations shows us how faithful individuals can choose to be moral agents who embody the real, transformational way to peace. The narrative of faithful peacemaking challenges the narrative of the nations for this simple reason – Realpolitik is not a given reality, it is a social narrative that you can choose to believe, or you can challenge it. Jesus touched the sick, learned the name of the outcasts, ate with prostitutes, and talked to those who were designated as his enemies because he knew that the presence and power of God's Grace and Peace were ultimately more real than legal boundaries and social mores. Having faith means that you bet your life on a particular narrative. As a follower of Jesus, I bet my life on the fact that the Prince of Peace knows the way to Peace. This Way demands that we refuse to believe that the narrative being perpetuated in the halls of nations is ultimate. It invites us to narrate our lives according to the ultimate reality of God's Kingdom that is present when we exercise the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. It is a reality that I've experienced.

It is the reality for thousands in the Holy Land who choose to embrace the reality of God's kingdom in the face of the narrative of international conflict. While leaders of nations hold out “peace” as a reward for meeting their demands, there are dozens of community led non-violent acts of Peacemaking happening right now up and down the separation wall. My CPT delegation is but one. Israelis who are Arab and Jewish and Palestinians who are Muslim and Christian are seeking one another, meeting one another, educating themselves as to what it means to live peaceably with the different 'other' as neighbor. This way of peace does not depend on the authority of nations. In fact, it requires the nations to, as Isaiah says, “shut their mouths” and learn from this new narrative that has been told from the Prophets to the salt flats of India, the buses of Birmingham, the dust of Soweto, and the streets of Liberia. This is the real narrative of peace.

Thank you for your support, and your continuing prayers for peace.

And may the peace of Christ be with you,

Chad

If you are interested in hearing stories that provide a different narrative, you can read CPT's updates from Palestine at http://cpt.org/work/palestine and visit http://www.tentofnations.org

Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) Update #1

1 September, 2011

Edinburgh, Scotland

I bring you greetings along with the first of my CPT updates from Edinburgh, Scotland. A month ago I began circulating information about my participation in Christian Peacemaker Teams' November delegation to Hebron, and many of you have expressed your support for this ministry. As part of my circle of support, I want to send around fairly regular updates in the run up to November, as well as releases during my time of service. It is a joy to share these thoughts with you.

Here is an update on the current situation in Hebron. A great deal of attention has recently focused on the 20^th of September when Palestine will petition the UN for recognition of statehood. Of course, this day is symbolically potent, but it will also be a day on which the reality of sustainable and just peace will either progress, or once again be stalled. The best case scenario is that in the run up to the 20^th, a modicum of status quo might be maintained. However, that appears not to be the case.

The month of August saw an increase in provocation and violence. Israel authorizing the building of 1,600 new apartments in disputed East Jerusalem, with plans to authorize another 2,700. With the West Bank already being settled by more than 500,000 Israelis, authorization for new development in disputed territories exacerbates tensions. In anticipation of the Palestinian declaration of independence on the 20^th, Haaretz is reporting that the IDF is equipping Israeli settlements with stun grenades and tear gas. In settlements near Palestinian villages, Israeli forces have delineated two security lines. If the first is breached by demonstrators, tear gas and stun grenades are authorized. The second has been labelled the 'red line'. There are signs that tensions are rising. CPT workers in Hebron just reported that last week, six children between the ages of 5 and 9 were arrested by soldiers of the IDF for playing with toy guns in the streets of Hebron. These toys were gifts that they had received as presents for Eid al-Fitr. I agree that giving toy guns to five year olds these days is dubious at best. But as one CPT worker reminds us, imagine your five year old child arrested on Christmas day for playing with their toy gun in the street. That's what happened in Hebron this Eid.

The fact that the IDF is readying a military response stands in sharp contrast to the non-violent organizations that have taken root in local Palestinian villages. CPT works closely with Palestinians who have been engaged in teaching creative non-violent resistance. For instance, a Palestinian shepherd came to graze his sheep on his family's land, and because he took his sheep too close to the separation wall that cut his family's land in half, IDF soldiers fired on his sheep. Two of his sheep were killed and several were wounded. The shepherd refused to fight or even seek justice for the killing of his sheep. Rather, the next day, the shepherds from his village all got together multiple herds and returned to the same land, only this time they had come with too many sheep to resist by force. The soldiers stood down and the Palestinians went about their life's work. The situation was defused with the creative courage of peaceful, non-violent resistance.

In a season when anticipation and fears are heightened, the children of Israel and Palestine need to see the reality and promise of peaceful, non-violence. As CPT regularly asks, imagine if we spent as much time and energy training youth with the courageous skills for mediation and peacemaking instead of drafting them into the military and arming them with tear gas, stun grenades, and bullets. It takes CPT $15,000 a year to train and house a peacemaker on site. Compare that with the fact that the US spends approximately $150,000 per year to keep one soldier trained and on site. If we devoted as many resources to waging peace as we did preparing for war, we could put ten times as many trained peacemakers on the ground in conflict areas working with local communities. We could equip ten times as many hands and fee to accompany a Palestinian or Israeli child to school and worship, showing them the way to peaceful coexistence, and ensuring that there is a generation who believe that violence is destructively naïve, while the path to a just peace takes true courage.

So, in these days leading up to the 20^th of September, I ask that you keep well informed and pray. Pray for the Israeli, Palestinian and UN leadership. Pray for the Israeli soldiers who have been armed, put on a Wall and given orders. Pray for those Palestinians that are teaching their neighbours the way of non-violence. For the children who see these two options, pray that they choose life. And pray for peacemakers everywhere.

Peace to you,

Chad

I suspect that as Christians – well, let me be more accurate – I hope that as Christians, many of us woke up with that feeling of conflict in our hearts. In the wake of death, we have witnessed our fellow citizens gather into jubilant mobs that could easily be an image from the streets of Iran on September 11, 2001. That should help us pause to reflect on what it is we Christians are celebrating. We have heard messages that interpret the assassination of Bin Laden as justice. Hopefully, we might pause and ask, while we know in our hearts that the hunt for Osama Bin Laden was a just cause if ever there was one...can Christians really celebrate any kind of justice that requires death? Basically, what I want to say is that uneasy feeling that you must feel in your heart, and the reverberations from that dissonance in your mind...that means that we are not dealing with a cut and dry issue of faith – a status confessionis where we can simply go to scripture or doctrine and say yes or no. No, what we have is a real moral conundrum. Justice. Assassination. Thou shall not murder. All who live by the sword will die by the sword. You have heard it said, an eye for an eye, but I say to you, love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you. Do Justice, love mercy and walk humbly with your God.

I want to begin with the notion that since the early fifth century, Christians have had a way to deliberate about issues of justice and war. Augustine was one of the first to write about what has been called 'The Just War Doctrine'. There are a few key pieces that must be considered in order to determine whether or not a Christian could participate in an act of state ordered violence. Roughly sketched, if a Christian was to justifiably fight in a war, the combat must be (a) defensive and never pre-emptive, (b) the force used to defend must be proportional to the attack, (c) there must be no harm done to non-combatants, (d) as a defensive measure it must not result in the colonization or subjugation of the enemy, and as such (e) there must be what we would now call an exit strategy. That is a very rough sketch. But there are two lessons to take from it.

First, by Augustine's metrics a Christian might reasonably agree to be a part of the special ops team that executed the strategic assassination of Bin Laden. That single act of state directed violence could be reasonably declared as just according to Augustine's metrics. But secondly, we need to remember a point that is eloquently made by William Cavanaugh, in his article "Terrorist Enemies and Just War".

The fact is, the just war doctrine was never intended to be used by a nation state to justify war. Augustine never intended to imply that violence was just. The just war doctrine was a metric, a checklist, designed to help Christians determine whether they were faithfully justified to participate in armed conflict. In other words, confident that his sins of murdering his enemy would be justified by Christ's forgiveness, a Christian could participate as a defensive combatant. But his theological concept was never intended to be, and should never be used as a means to absolutely justify the act of war itself, by any Christian, and certainly not a political nation state such as the US or group such as Al Qaeda. The reason is this – Vengeance is the Lord's, not yours. Justice is Divine. An act of violence can never be Restorative.  Augustine also wrote that unless justice is done to God's Ultimacy, then there is no justice, and we can not faithfully claim to have rendered Ultimate Justice. Basically, Augustine is saying in matters of self defence, we have to humbly submit to faithful Wisdom – not attention to any one doctrine, but the Holy Spirit's task of working faithful wisdom in us.

In pursuit of Wisdom, some have rightfully recognized that the book of Proverbs teaches, “Rejoice not when your enemy falls…lest the Lord see it and it displeases Him.” In the book of Exodus, when Moses leads the Israelites across the Red Sea, Pharaoh's army is drowned in the sea. They drowned. Now, we know it was God's will to deliver the people from slavery, because it is against Divine justice that any part of creation should be subject to anything other than the Creator. The soldiers of Pharaoh's army sank under the weight of their armour, and inhaled water into their lungs. This must be a relatively slow, agonizing, fearful death. The book of Exodus tells us that on the other side, Miriam played the tambourine and the Israelites danced and sang, chanted and rejoiced in the death of their enemy for the triumph of their cause of freedom and justice.

There is an ancient midrash, a Rabbinical exposition, on this passage. Remember, these Rabbis are the teachers of the Jewish faith, the adherents of which have been the greatest victims of terrorism the world has ever known from the Bronze age to the present day. And the Jewish Rabbis, reflecting on the Israelites rejoicing at the death of their oppressors wrote that God silenced them saying, "My children are drowning, and you would utter song in my presence."

Hard as it is to imagine, the fact is that Osama Bin Laden is part of the Creator's creation. When Adam and Eve were exiled after trespassing the simplicity of keeping the garden in peace, he clothed them with animal skins to protect them. When the offspring of Adam and Eve murdered his brother out of sheer jealousy and want for power and was subjected to a life of fearful wandering, God placed a mark of protection upon him. When Sarah exiled Hagar and Ishmael out of fear of competition, Abraham gave them a skin of water, and God made a spring to well up to nourish the outcast child. Did the punishments fit the crimes as charge? Were they just? Some yes, as in the case of Cain and Abel. But some no, as in the case of Sarah, Hagar, and the infant Ishmael. But in all of these cases, just or unjust, God strove to protect the life of both parties. Why?

Even in the confidence that comes from the sentencing of a murderer upon whom justice has been rendered by a jury of their peers, we do not think much about the silent pain and loss of hope that lies in the heart of the murderer's parents. Was their child at fault. Absolutely. Is the punishment just? According to the law, yes. But the loss remains along side questions. What went wrong? Why my child? What made them hate or fear so much that they would kill? Could it have been different. Though obviously violent and opposed to peace and life, the murderer represents a loss of hope for the parents. And for the Creator, we cannot imagine the depth of sorrow over the viciousness of a terrorist. And so, while Sarah, Joshua, Miriam, and our friends rejoice, it is good to be humbly reflective long enough to listen for the voice of God, quietly in the background pleading for our reverent silence, “My child is dead, and you would utter song in my presence.”

In terms of the Christian life, humility is one of the cruciform virtues most needed in our age. We must remember that we humbly stand before the Creator along with all of creation. And while the sins of Osama Bin Laden will surely, surely be different from mine, I know that God grieves for my sins, and that God grieves for Osama's as well. And while I can strive, as a Christian to seek to affirm temporal ways that make for life, freedom, and justice, I must never believe that what I have morally determined to be justifiable can ever fully represent Divine Justice. For nothing comes closer to full blown blasphemy (that is claiming to know and speak for the heart of God) than claiming the privilege of rendering Divine Justice. That is, after all, what got Jesus crucified – claiming to have the ability to forgive, that is, render Divine Justice. Of course, his Divinity is another matter – but it was his claim to know the heart of God and exercise Divine authority to render justice that was decried in the temple as blasphemy. And so, too, should ours if that is in fact what we are suggesting.

It is for this reason that Gandhi, inspired by the teachings of Christ and Tolstoy's interpretations of them, relied on a maxim that would be echoed decades later by Martin Luther King, Jr., that while there is a Truth for which I am willing to die, there is nothing for which I am willing to kill. This is the way of Gandhi's and King's non-violence. Not pacifism, but direct non-violence. And more fundamentally, this is the incontrovertible Way of Jesus. This is the Way of the Cross. On having just walked this way through Lent to the remembrance of Christ's passion, we should feel afresh this reality that gives us much more clear insight for the news of this day than any moralization about justifying violence.

For it was not the act of violence that inaugurated Christ's reign. Rest assured, redemptive violence is a myth. For more on this notion, please click here to see my blog from Good Friday in years' past. But in the meantime know this. Redemption was not a result of the crucifixion. Redemption was a result of Christ's faithfulness to God's vision for life, even in the face of death. We can never fully claim and should never be tempted to believe that an act of violence can ever represent restorative, Divine Justice, or lead to Divine Peace. There is no act of violence that can bring peace – Divine Peace, that is. Any justice that is the result of violence can be maintained, but it must always be maintained by the threat of more violence. This is Pax Romana. It is the peace of empires. Click here to read a good reflection by Chris Hedges on this matter. But like Rome in the time of Christ and the British Empire in the time of Gandhi, America's maintenance of peace through acts of violence might be moralized as justifiable given circumstances of terrorism and therefore celebrated, but it can never be confused with God's Justice. I do believe that while publicly relegated to naivete, this Truth is nervously understood in the circles of Realpolitik, for alongside the good and wonderful news about the bravery, accuracy, care and precision of our soldiers, travel advisories and fear of retaliation are delivered in close pursuit.

The point is this. The reality is that Christians can faithful engage in moral deliberation as we try to justify this act of violence as something painfully necessary. But we fail to do so as Christians if we conflate temporal and Divine justice, which we do whenever we are chanting U-S-A while invoking God through the playing 'Amazing Grace' on the bagpipes in Times Square. After all, we have just killed one of God's own creatures. As Christians, we must never celebrate an act of violence against a life, even that of the vicious terrorist Osama Bin Laden, for he, too, though marred by the ravages of sin and fearfully wandering through this life, still somehow, mysteriously bore an image of God. As Christians, we have to give thanks for the news of this day with the quiet humility that is the fruit of that feeling of conflict in our hearts and that faithful dissonance in our minds that reminds us we have to faithfully wrestle with this reality. And along with Augustine, not be comfortable, but struggle to justify this single, proportional act of violence that we know falls far short of the Way of the Prince of Peace.

May we be so faithful as to take strange comfort, while not yet uttering

songs in his presence.

http://www.moralityofprofit.com/land-labor-and-life-nature-and-the-evolving-morality-of-the-market/

Then send your friends to visit!

If you want a copy of the actual paper, leave a little message below and I'll email it to you.

Peace,

Chad

‘Showing your butt’ refers to that moment when you decide to take a strong stand on an issue and you clearly don’t know what in the world you’re talking about.  Normally, you resort to a knee jerk reaction based on what you knew before, or perhaps nothing at all, which is why the phrase refers to the fact that your posterior is not covered.  So, without good reason you engage in a foolish display of whining, followed by the immediate proof that you are completely off base, or worse, that it was your own doings that got you into whatever predicament you are protesting.  At that point, the dutiful (and normally correct) parent would look at you and calmly declare, ‘well you just showed your butt, now didn’t you?’

After watching various fits and spurts from politicians, community leaders, and average Joes (plumbers included, I’m sure) in the wake of the BP tragedy, I have this overwhelming urge to cross my arms and calmly say to my American friends, ‘well, you just showed your butt, now didn’t you?’  Why, you say?  Well, let me explain.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve seen two kinds of reports, depending on the political slant of the interviewee.  First, we have seen the predictable government bashing from the political right – ‘The government is not doing anything to help, which proves once again that Obama is aloof, and the government is uselessly wasting our tax dollars.’  Secondly, we have seen the predictable corporation bashing from the political left – ‘We have to regulate, and fine the corporation, so, let’s have a congressional hearing to figure out how to regulate these things and fine BP.’  Predictable, right?  We are either going after the government or the corporation.  And before I move on to my point, I want to say that besides both of these positions being woefully ignorant, they stooped to an even more base level by employing the language of violence.

Bobby Jindal airboats out into the bayou with a vacuum cleaner and says, ‘we are at war’ for our livelihood, and even we aren’t going to wait on our government to prosecute this war.  Great…another war.  Instead of rallying the better angels of volunteerism, the American way seems to be vigilante justice – Mexicans by land, oil by sea.  And Jindal really threw out the red meat, because then the cries started to mount – Jindal looks presidential, prosecuting this Gulf War on Petrol, and why isn’t our actual president mad???  So, a few days of this comparison, and what happens?  Obama goes on NBC and starts talking about kicking ‘asses’.  Evidently this is how we appease conservative critique now – go on national news and start to swear.  So, violence is added to our predictable equation.  How do America’s leaders react to the worst environmental crisis in the history of the world? 

Half of the country wants to blame the government and answers problems in the only way we seem to know how to handle ourselves in public anymore – wage war.  The other half of the country wants to kick BP’s 'ass'.  And the only action the government has actually taken is to argue over whether or not the EPA should be granted the power to set limits for measuring pollution…Do you think maybe that’s a good idea at this point?

But even in the predictable morass, there was reaction that was creative, and yet amazingly unpredictable.  One reporter said it best when, like me, they saw the two sides drawn and began to plead with someone to fix the problem because after all, they asked, ‘What did we do to deserve this?’  Now, I hope you can already see where this is going, but this needs to be said.

For a moment, I want to suspend my critique of people like Palin, who said, ‘see, that’s why we need to drill in ANWR,’ and Boehner who said, ‘see, the government is too slow,’ as well as Jindal’s awe-shucks-we’re-gonna-wage-a-good-old-fashioned-bayou-butt-kickin’, and Obama’s attempt to appease people by showing off some well scripted rage on public television because for some strange reason an ‘ass-kicking’ president is comforting to Americans.  Let’s set all of that nonsense to the side and focus on the most surprising reaction of them all – ‘What did we do to deserve this?’

Forgive me for stating the obvious, but ‘What did we do to deserve this?’  The truth is, this problem is neither the US Government’s nor BP’s.  What did we do to deserve this?  As a nation, we are the largest petroleum guzzling, oil demanding, processed food buying plastic wrapped people in the world.  Why do you think BP is out there milking every last well for maximum productivity to the point that they took shortcuts?  Well, it’s certainly not because the Brits want to destroy Spring Break in Panama City.  It’s because Americans demand that much oil, and we pay them for it.

The height of irony in Jindal’s ‘war on oil’ was the fact that he was propelled out into the wetlands by a combustible engine, with workers covered in plastic moon suits, holding plastic pipe vacuum cleaners that ran on gas to pump oil out from behind those plastic booms floating around the Gulf.  All of those engines use gas and bleed oil into the Gulf, and that every bit of that plastic which is being used to suck the oil off the surface is made out of oil.  I don’t know when the day will come when people will actually start to make these connections. 

And here’s another reality – BP is not a British company.  I know, it has British in the title, but it’s not a British corporation.  It’s a private, trans-national corporation.  This crisis does not have anything to do with that farcical myth about disinterested foreign verses morally upright ‘Made in America’ companies.  The fact is that millions of Americans as well as Brits have their retirement bound up in BP stock.  So by financially kicking BP’s proverbial posterior, do you know what we are really doing?  We’re driving down their shares which will decrease the livelihoods of millions of Americans and Brits.  Then, at the same time, we continue to use just as much oil as we did last April.  So while BP folds, what do you think will happen?  The same folk who brought down government or big business will continue to lead plastic wrapped lives and drive to their local polling station to vote for free-market economic policies that allow trans-national corporations to operate with complete sovereignty all because it keeps their personal pensions up and the cost of gas down, and Shell, Exxon – whoever, doesn’t matter, different named company – will gladly pick up the consumer demand and keep pumping away.  I’m not a fortune teller, I’m just sayin’. 

What we are not likely to do is change our actual daily ways of living so that we actually use less oil, wreak less havoc on delicate ecosystems whether under the sea or the tundra, and actually making a difference by the way you live.  Not the government, not BP…YOU.  Eat food from local farmer’s market, or grow it in your back yard.  Sell one of your three cars and take fifteen extra minutes to ride a bike to work.  Don’t own more than one plasma TV, or read a book instead.  I don’t know, there are thousands of peaceful, productive and poetic ways to alter the little things in life that make huge, huge impacts.  Put down the righteous indignation, and focus your energy on those little ways that make for peace.

‘What did we do to deserve this?’  Do we really not know the answer to that question?  America, please, please, please.  You’re my people.  And right now, I’m across the ocean watching you pitch a pure fit and lash out at the first target on which you can land a punch.  Wouldn’t it be great, if for once, America reacted to an international tragedy without violence or violence laden language?  I don’t care if you’re talking about waging nuclear war or commuting to work, we have to stop being so violent.  Pastors, social workers and teachers work so hard to teach our children about bullying to protect their precious little lives, and yet they turn on TV and hear our elected officials, who everyone aspires to be kicking at or warring against something.  It seems these days that if you want to be an elected leader, you have to demonstrate some prerequisite willingness to beat something up.  Barak, Bobby, try this on for size:

“We are in the process of determining what negligence took place so that the loss of human and biological life can be averted and this industry can have a viable future.  The government will work with the private sector to put the necessary economic and environmental policies in place, as well as penalties for future violations, and the remittance of the immediate cost of cleaning up the current crisis.  In addition to this, we need Americans to call forward their community spirit.  For the sake of our friends in the Gulf, we need you who are local to be prepared to come lend a hand once we have talked to Kevin Costner and gotten the right equipment on the ground.  And in the meantime, we need every American household and community to ratchet up your commitment to shared, sustainable living.  This Gulf crisis is the latest sign that we need to continue to push one another towards a society that is less based on oil for our economic and social welfare, and which is the only way we are going to relieve the strain on our complex relationship with the earth and the nations of the Middle East.  We need to decrease the proportion of energy and finances to studying ways to wage war, and devote that proportion to public sector jobs and K-12 education so that more children to study the applied and social sciences so that we can better manage sustainable and ethical technology, and better attend to the welfare of our neighbors.  We need every faith community, social club and neighbourhood to focus on knowing one another, sharing the burdens that our communities bear at this time, and model the way forward in times of crisis.  By your leadership, corporations and governments will respond and alter their practices to the demands of your lives.  If you grow a culture dictated by peaceable and sustainable lives, the industries and governments of the world will respond.  That is the way of democracy.  In short, we need you, as individuals and a people, to respond with urgency, grace and commitment so that we can navigate through this tragedy, and come out having learned something about the consequences of our lives, and the possibilities that we have to better our world.”

Well, I don’t suppose that’s going to be said at this point.  Obama has to call Cameron to make up with our allies…again.  So while he does that, we are going to continue to demand oil, then demand someone’s head when the oil industry gets it wrong.  We are going to demand our government to do everything for the good of the people, but scream ‘Socialism’ if ever they dare try to regulate personal profits or private industry.  We are going to demand that our enemies and all people who want to ‘destroy the American way of life’ stop being so violent, but if those blankety-blank foreigners come near our borders and spoil our beaches, we are going to kick somebody’s ass.  And we are going to mourn the loss of our remarkable ecosystems, and yet continue to drive our cars and gas powered boats all over creation to make sure we get to take in the views while we eat our picnic of processed foods preserved in individual plastic wraps.

And when things go wrong, we can look to ‘the man’ and cry out, ‘What did we do to deserve this?’  We’re showing our butt.  And our kids are watching.

‘Oh, Jerusalem, if you knew the ways that made for peace…’