I attended a candlelight vigil for peace tonight. There weren't many
of us there. Of those 25 who attended, perhaps half were Christians.
I don't know what exactly made it a vigil...we weren't that vigilant
about anything...but I guess we did show up, met some people, signed up on a list, etc. The woman who called us
together read a great piece by Garrison Keillor. Allow me to reproduce parts of it...it was written in 2003...2003 for crying out loud. Tell me what you think.
Garrison Keillor's Letter on the War
The opposition to this war is not about George Bush, or pacifism, or flabby
thinking by liberals, so much as it is a simple sense of dread at the thought
of the United States of America entering into a religious war against Islam.
The idea strikes Republicans and libertarians as well as Democrats, that our
crusade in Iraq may lead to a place we don't want to go, and that is the Fifty
Years War in which suicide bombers become a routine part of American life and
we are trapped inside a bad movie that doesn't end. A war that my grandsons
will dread as they grow old.
Dread is the feeling that grips the 25% who answer to the word Opposed or maybe
we're down to 15% by now, after day after day of Olympics coverage of the war,
seeing the incredible firepower, witnessing the awesome and inspiring fact that
young men and women are willing to face death in behalf of this country (and
how would we know, except in war?) one sits and watches television reporters
who are giddy as if they were embedded in the World Series of War, Our Very
Own Yankees vs. pitiful Podunk High. But if you are not embedded, if you are
a free American, you may sense that we are floating into a very deep canyon.
We of the 25 or 15 or 7% aren't so visible. The demonstrations don't represent
us at all. How do you march under banners that say THIS IS APT TO TURN OUT TRAGICALLY
and DON'T HIT THAT TAR BABY? The people marching in the streets seem to be a
lot of Democrats happy for the chance to jeer at Bush. I am not one of them.
I went to a vigil on the first Sunday night of the Crusade, and it was straight
out of 1972 ---- same people holding the same candles and singing the same songs
and not singing them nearly as well. And "We Shall Overcome" doesn't
get at what I am feeling, which is: we are caught in the grip of events and
heading toward an outcome that cannot be predicted. We are bombing Baghdad and
every one of those bombs is going to come back to us. Here we are, pushing boldly
into the Middle East with American troops (would Dwight D. Eisenhower have done
this?) to bring democracy to a world that is utterly alien to 99.44% of all
Americans. Does this add up? I wish that George Bush were right and that he'd
be hailed by historians and his tight-lipped face be chiseled into the mountain.
I would sit at the base of the mountain and sell postcards. But I do not accept
his case for this war.
I fear the worst. Our military is tough, well-trained, disciplined, fighting
in behalf of a lot of us loose, happy-talking, impulsive, dreamy people walking
around eating ice cream cones at the carnival, about as disciplined as a battalion
of cats. This is not a militant or religious country. I've been in religious
countries and this is not one of them. You can buy liquor on Sunday anywhere
in America, find pornography in any Marriott and every Walmart, listen to songs
on the airwaves whose lyrics make you wince and turn pale. These are products
of entrepreneurial capitalism, which thrives in our loose jazzy democracy, along
with timeless art and comedy and enormous human kindness, but if we get caught
up in the Fifty Years War against Islam, we will find out how fragile all of
this is. We'll become of necessity a much tougher and more disciplined society,
in which we obey instructions and stick to the message, and that, dear hearts,
is not my country.
The conservative intellectuals who did the think-tank work on our new preemptive
strategy have made a brilliant case for it, that reads well in the pages of
political journals and sounds brave and good on the Sunday morning talk shows,
and now a few tired old liberals must try to express the old conservative objections:
the world is not an abstract construct and as much as you try to reassure the
Muslim world that this is not a religious war, it is one if they think it is.
Everyone knows that 9/11 was a religious attack, and the crusade in Iraq is
our response to it. A religious war is the worst kind, a war impossible to win
and very difficult to extricate ourselves from.
God spare us. God save us from ourselves. A great deal depends on this country
having a genuine election next year, with a real debate that names the dangerous
road we've taken. Flag-waving is no substitute for democracy. Every one of us
honors the heroism of the young who face death; none of us want to demand this
of 57,000 of them in the near future.
Copyright 2003, Garrison Keillor
Reading Keillor's piece sent me looking back to something I wrote in February 2003, a sermon on the Wheat and the Tares from Matthew 13. Grab a cup of coffee or a bottle of Advil. Perhaps part of being vigilant is knowing when to mourn. Here we go....
Our country has entered a darker phase of its history, and most of us are none too pleased to find ourselves in this neighborhood. The Vandals are not yet at the gates of the city, but their hit and run attacks have thrown us all off balance and succeeded in shaking us up in ways we never imagined possible. News reporters breathlessly bring us daily bites that rattle our nerves and rachet up the stress level. Bin Laden has resumed his recording career. A single person with a gallon of gasoline can kill 130 people on the subway. Saddam has a million pounds of nerve gas. North Korea has a missile, as yet untested, that could conceivably reach California, and they may even be producing a little something to put in that missile. Donald Rumsfield has alienated yet another historic ally.
Our quest for a safer homeland has driven us to enact new “Big Brother
test
yo.