Not again!

Friends,

I spent the earlier part of this week appreciating the relative respite from high drama in the news. The State of the Union was quickly forgotten, and the news cycle sort of became a “seventh inning stretch”  before the next crisis. And then I woke up this morning finding the crisis has already arrived with the U.S. and Israeli attack on Iran. My heart sank. Not only do I detest war but it horrifies me that my country, once again, without the support of the American people, or the Constitutionally required approval of Congress, has entered into another tragic, likely prolonged and immoral venture of death and destruction. 

But the attack on Iran has special, personal interest to me. On my way for my two year teaching assignment to India in1965 my Iranian college classmate arranged for me to visit his family in Tehran. I spent three or four days with them, toured the city and countryside, met their friends, ate delicious dinners seated around a common meal, and experienced a level of hospitality and warmth I could only have imagined. When I left, the young girls in the family filled my pockets with jasmine flowers, and I have loved jasmine ever since. So, yes, that visit was long ago, during the Shah’s autocratic rule similar to what persists today. But my association with Iran will always be personal and appreciative, and I would expect that same level of hospitality exists today.  (If you would like to experience a sense of Iran, especially the youth, you may want to watch a 2009 hour long documentary by travel guru Rick Steeves.   He acknowledges he was somewhat limited in what he could cover, but you get a fairly intimate and candid sense of the people and what they think.) I always try to think of all those around the world in personal, humane terms: generally loving people, living daily lives in their homes, at schools and colleges, at work, preparing meals, but also often suffering terrible deprivations and grief during times of oppression and war.

So here we are again: our leadership is exercising immoral power to establish an egotistical and false image of personal strength. I think of president Bush standing on a ship gloating over the success of the war in Iraq, and how empty that gesture has become. Declaring war is actually an example of a weakness in the inability to negotiate and avoid war. A true leader of character and compassion will use war only as a last resort and self protection, and even then it is an act of resulting in much immorality and evil. So now we are expected to abandon our efforts to confront Trump’s dictatorial ambitions and fall in behind him and support the war he has created and shift our concerns to the well-being our our service personnel and honoring their courage and valor. It’s a very old but effective ploy, and I expect it will be true again this round. Instead of headlines questioning the integrity and competence of the Trump administration, the economic struggles of many families, the presence of the ICE threats, challenges to voting rights, and climate issues, among a list of many other concerns instigated or ignored during the past year, we will now be reading White House announcements about how “grateful” the Iranian people are to be “liberated” by the U.S. bombs. 

OK, I’m deeply affected by the attack on Iran, and angry. I don’t need to apologize. But at this point I don’t know exactly what to do with my anger. Writing this all down helps me, but it also passes a lot of my angst on to you. What will help us all is if as many of us as possible unrelentingly name the immorality and folly of this attack on Iran using some of the reasons I note above. We need to let our federal representatives know they are derelict of their duty in Congress if they allow the president to declare another tragic war without Congressional debate. We need to remind them that when the people have the opportunity to express their opinions about war, as we did under the Obama administration when he said he would not invade Syria without Congressional approval, and we not only had the opportunity at that time to contact our members of Congress to object, we were actually successful. And prior to the war on Iraq literally millions of people across the U.S. and the globe demonstrated in opposition to the war. Their opposition was ignored with the result of what has been described as an “endless” war in the Mideast that is now part of the ongoing tragedy of this attack on Iran. 

I just keep believing humanity has had enough of wars and wants them stopped. But here we are with Trump using war to shore up his miserable leadership and failing support. Let us do what we can to practice stopping war by stopping this one, and, by our mistakes and failures, to learn how to prevent the next. 

Blessed are the peacemakers. Let us all commit to learning how to become the most effective peacemakers we can be.

Peace,
Tom