Concern to save US troops from creeping cynicism must be paramount:
‘ I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor. ‘
In Iraq, too, virtually “none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved.” Not weapons of mass destruction, not international terrorism, not Swedish style democracy, not social justice, are actually on the agenda of the present administration.
Cole concludes:
Note that Martin recognized love as the principle that all the great religions saw as the “supreme unifying principle of life,” including Islam. His religious universalism might be a starting point for Americans to rethink the Islamophobia that has become so widespread.
We cannot in any simplistic way extract a template from Martin’s sermon that we can apply to Iraq today. We can, however, explore his wisdom for inspiration in how to go foward, end the quagmire, and make amends for the horrors of the way we have waged this illegal war of choice.
The whole article is worth the read. It said many of the thngs I hope were said in at least some siginificant number of American Churches yesterday. I ended up visiting my parent’s First Baptist Church of X , a true mega-church in the Southern Baptist Convention, and so any mention of MLK was , unsurprisingly, absent. But Martin’s vision for “the end” , whish was “reconciliation”, is the key point here. The insnaity of settling differences through widespread death to those unlucky enough to live in the “selected” bombing raid areas — the outrage MLK expressed in 1967 in his Vietnam speech, is fitting to our country’s leaders cholice for war today. Only a twisted culture would consider this approach to be the “way of reconciliation”. Our culture, and the apostate churches who theologically justify such madness, give their allegiance instead to the “way things are” according to our culture and its “technologies of desire”, not to be “the people of God” into which God calls us. This is the blockage that keeps these churches from hearing the teachings of the Holy Spirit, which is a love that transforms and transforms. We can’t do that in an isolated pocket of spiritual segregation, where “spirtual matters” are segregated from the dire need for the gospel of peace and reconciliation; the Kingdom which Jesus procalimed.