It’s scary how easily it seems to be assumed that what the state syas it is doing, it is actually achieving. The “larger purpose”; the long-range, “real-world” matters are being taken care of by the magistrate, and it has become in our political climate

Only with the emergence of nation states, according to Giddens, are states circumscribed by borders, known lines demarcating the exclusive domain of sovereign power, especially its monopoly over the means of violence. Attempts to consolidate territory and assert sovereign control often brought about violent conflict. More importantly, borders in the nation state system include the assumption of a ‘state of nature’ existing between states which increases the possibility of war. Our fellow citizens are limited to all those presently living Britons, Americans, Germans, etc. The dominance of state soteriology has made it perfectly reasonable to drop cluster bombs on ‘foreign’ villages, and perfectly unreasonable to dispute ‘religious’ matters in public

Cavanuagh, Theopolitical Imagination, p. 43

There seems to be virtually no willingness to truly consider the lives of other people in other lands. All is presented to us as “neccessary for our security”. “Security” is posed to us in terms of force, in terms of economics (another form of “force” or coercion), and in terms of “the way the world works”. Violence is often justified as “this is the only language they understand” (which , when you look at it, seems to be proving that point about not the recipients of that violence, but of the ones using that justification.)

A simple “exchange program” where American families are transplanted into Iraq would dispel the myth of “over there” and that “behind the scenes” activity really doesn’t affect us. A simple placing of “our own kind” in the jeopardy under which we have placed thousands of Iraqis would shed some light on just how much insanity we have consented to via our complicity (as a nation, and sadly, as a church).