More on War

Mankind must put an end to war,

Before war puts an end to mankind.

- John F. Kennedy

There is a line where my convictions about non-violence begin to waver.  And it's not, as it is for some, about defending myself.  As a kid with a bit of a temper, I needed to learn at an early age to swallow my pride and walk away from a fight, or else I was going to probably go down a bad road.  I have this hope that, in a real pinch I would have the nerve to choose non-violence, even if it meant my own demise.  That is not the line.

The line is my children.  In one of my arguments/discussions with my parents last weekend we were talking about the situation in Israel.  I was moving along the lines that you find in recent blog entries about the futility and criminality of war in general, and trying to make the point that Israel is not the unquestionable good guy in this situation.  And my Dad, asked me this question that kind of knocked me off my high horse for a minute: "What if it was Caitlyn that got blown up by one of Hamas' RPGs?"  "What if it was her blood out there on your driveway?  How would you feel about war then?"

It was a low blow, because it crossed the line of my convictions.  It was where I realized I would be so angry that I would be perfectly willing to utterly destroy the villains who perpetrated that catastrophe.  I would feel utterly justified in bombing an entire city into rubble in order to destroy the person who fired the rocket that killed my daughter.

Over the course of a couple of days after this conversation I saw pictures, pictures of parents living through the exact nightmare that, even in a hypothetical case, threw me off the rails.  And it was compassion for those parents that has brought me back to the conviction that war must end.  I realized that the hatred and vengeance that must have been created in the hearts of those parents is going to be the seed of the next wave of violence.  Because, as I have come to believe, violence only begets more violence.  Peace by force is by nature an ephemeral creature.  Eventually hatred will win, eventually revenge will find a way.

The failure of human empathy gives the lie to any claim we might have to Christian ethics.  If we are willing to kill other people's children in defense of our own then we are still child killers.  I think we should have a pretty good idea how Jesus would feel about killing children, but even more directly we should hear his words about our enemies: "You have heard it said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.'  But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your father in heaven; for he makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous."

So my question is: Is he actually serious about that?

I think he is and I think he knows something that we really need to figure out as a species or we're going to go on slaughtering each other's children.  The only thing that will end the cycles of violence is for us to care enough about each other, to have enough empathy for one another that we realize that no goal is worth the death of a child.  Until we collectively say, "Never again!" to the holocaust of dead children, no matter who and where they are, we are not even getting a glimpse of the kingdom that Jesus was always going on about.

So here's where I am: I have no desire to see my daughter blown to pieces by a terrorist, and if that were to happen, I'm not sure I could restrain my hatred and my desire for vengeance.  And so I think that we ought not to expect any less from those parents in Gaza or Afghanistan or Iraq, who have had to dig their children's bodies out of the rubble of their own homes.  Our violence is not going to bring peace, unless those parents somehow don't feel the same thing for their children that I do.

And I know that's absolutely not true.

War is just going to cycle us through this whole mess, over and over again.

Somebody stop this merry-go-round, I want to get off.