I just finished watching the film Why We Fight. It is amazing. It reminded me of how I felt marching in Washington DC with thousands of other people to protest the start of the war in Iraq, or talking about the war from the pulpit of my home church and getting into trouble for it. Or the peace rally we held in the sanctuary that got in the newspaper (and got some of us in some trouble).
I won’t go into trite slogans about peace or how neo-conservatives are the Antichrist. Doubtless you’ve heard them, and you agree or you don’t. But I don’t think Jesus Christ has any damn thing to do with ripping apart the bodies of children with shrapnel from cluster-bombs and bunker-busters, and I think that the Church too easily commits the crime of not saying so. And watching an Iraqi hospital worker weep on camera as he shows you a room with a heap of civilian corpses that my tax dollars helped kill is pretty damning.
I think I’ll write about this topic some more, but I’m a little upset and very very tired.
>unfinished 
Doug,Thank you for your article. Thank you for sharing your anger, and for taking the risk to speak out about the attrocities of the war on Iraq. You will continue to get in trouble for holding the establishment to account for its vocal or silent support of injustice, but you know that already.I ultimately lost my position as pastor in a church where I preached one sermon against the bombing of Afghanistan and the rounding up of Arab-American males following 9/11. Had I not preached it, (particularly with the Spirit hounding me to preach it) I’d consider myself to be a fraud.Here we stand. We can do no other.May the peace of Christ be with uou,Mark
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I hear you Doug and this anger is one of the most difficult things to deal with. On the one hand, the anger is what signals to us that there is an injustice we need to address. The anger fuels us to be prophetic and to rightly declare evil to be evil. At the same time, we know that we cannot dehumanize the ones who are the focus of our anger or else we are just adding evil to evil. The call to love your enemies when those enemies are clearly guilty of injustice is very difficult indeed.At times I feel very impotent. I want to scream and cry and shout “No Bombs!!!” but not only am I not heard, but I am always afraid of letting my anger get the better of me and drive me to say or do uncharitable things. So I am left asking, is the only thing I can do to mourn amidst the rubble?
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Thanks Doug,We have to talk about this. I am glad you are doing so. Anger is not such a bad thing in and of itself. Augustine wrote that Hope has two beautiful daughters: Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are and Courage to change them.Peace,john
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Bill Moyers has produced a 90 minute documentary entitled <>“Buying the War”<>, which will air on PBS on the evening of Wednesday, April 25 (perhaps 9:00 until 10:30). It exposes not only Bush administration lies that led to the war against Iraq, but also the media complicity in those lies. Apparently, Moyers even takes PBS to task. Tell everyone you know and set your VCRs and DVRs to record!There is a review of the documentary on the progressive news service CommonDreams.org: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/04/14/518/. Also, there is a nearly five minute clip from the show on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5Kngf803dQ.I’m hoping this documentary will light a fire under a lot of butts, who (I pray fervently) will rise up <>en masse<> to start rattling the cages of Congress.Yours in Christ,Mark
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