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Last Sunday evening as one
congregation member stood in silence at the Peace Vigil in
Nathan Philip Square a sense of futility swept over her. War
was coming and nothing she could do would stop it.
A week ago another member
wrote to tell me how very angry he has been about the
impending war. He is not alone. My running partner has been
filling the morning air with his diatribes, and anti-war
petitions with signatures.
As this week unfolded Prime
Minister Chrétien stated that Canada would not be supporting
the attack on Iraq. There were two responses on the talk
shows. A majority said ‘I’m proud of Jean Chrétien,’
while a minority felt just the opposite: ‘I’m ashamed of
our country for not supporting our major ally.’
As the U.S. again raised the
border alert to Orange and the lineup at the border grew
longer, the pages of the "Globe and Mail" were
filled with business leaders worried about the economic cost
of Canada’s decision to stay out – the loss of goodwill,
more trade impasses, the loss of jobs. Just how this will play
out in the economy and more importantly our lives we don’t
know, and it makes us anxious.
And the Jewish community and
others worry about whether Israel will be attacked worsening
an already terrible and intractable situation.
Watch cruise missiles slam
into Baghdad and despite talk of precision hits we cannot help
but agonize and grieve over the loss of innocent life, the
maiming and trauma.
We await terrorist reprisals
and the fallout from a destabilized Middle East. We cancel our
trips. Our anxieties mount because of the uncertainty this war
has created in the world and therefore in our lives.
And the anxieties are with
us still as we gather here – some anxious to hear a ringing
condemnation of the war. And others who support the armed
action against Saddam Hussein’s regime wonder ‘Is there a
place for me here?’
Our feelings make a sham of
our attempts at rational discourse. Directing moral outrage at
someone who does not agree with you may feel good but it’s
not a conversation. Your first point will be heard as ‘you
immoral jerk,’ and then none of your subsequent reasons. No
one engages in a true dialogue when his or her reasoning and
worldview and sense of morality is being impugned. Why pretend
you’re having a conversation when what you really want is to
vent emotion? Admit how powerful your feelings are, and how
much they influence what you think and do.
When I check in with my own
feelings I notice that my anxiety rises when those close to me
fight because I am driven to fix it. I’m anxious because I
know the experience of feeling the outsider is painful and don’t
want to visit it on individuals who come here seeking solace.
Despite this I feel the pressure to be a moral leader and give
righteousness a voice. And as it is becoming obvious, the
nature of my anxiety has had a hand in shaping this sermon.
Yes, it is an anxious time
for all of us, and I think, in part, this arises from the fact
that we don’t understand. We don’t understand and in hopes
of doing so we turn to the media and are transfixed. We watch
the story unfold, and still we don’t understand because in
the media’s drama-driven myopia of the moment the story
always begins ‘today’ rather than ‘once upon a time.’
But events rarely make true sense in the immediate context,
and so we watch and watch and still don’t understand. To
understand what is unfolding in Iraq we must look at the
United States’ origins, mythology, sense of destiny -- that
is its self-understanding -- and our own misunderstanding and
errant expectations.
The U.S Army is calling this
war "Operation Iraqi Freedom" because they
understand the appeal of freedom, have mastered its rhetoric
and truly believe they are ridding themselves of a threat and
the Iraqis of a tyrant. Freedom and democracy are fundamental
U.S values. Values that evolved slowly since a beginning in
which they pertained only to white, land-owning, men. It is a
triumph that freedom has come to include all. But what they
don’t acknowledge is that from the beginning freedom was as
much a means to an end as an end in itself. Two other ideals
were just as fundamental – moral rectitude and economic
self-interest.
In the 17th
century when the Pilgrims arrived in New England they came and
used their freedom to establish religiously inspired
government. A few excerpts from American historian Perry
Miller capture what the Puritans were about: The
"Puritans did not think that the state was merely an
umpire… The state to them was an active instrument of
leadership, discipline, and, wherever necessary, of coercion;
it legislated over any or all aspects of human behavior…"
"There was no idea of the equality of all men."
"The government of Massachusetts, and of Connecticut as
well, was a dictatorship and never pretended to be anything
else; it was a dictatorship…. of the holy and
regenerated." [Errand into the Wilderness, Perry Miller
p. 142]
The New England Puritans
came as close to being a theocracy as any Islamic state and
its roots in North American run deep, predating the American
Revolution by 150 years. Their religious fervor is the source
of two trends in U.S society that have grown strong of late:
Its moral conservatism and its sense of "manifest
destiny." It was to be a "city on a hill" and a
"new Jerusalem" to the Puritans. In the Civil War
the primary issue was not slavery but preserving the Union.
Why? Because as Lincoln said, the union is "the last best
hope on earth." And in Bush’s recent State of the Union
message he proclaimed, "the liberty we prize is not
America’s gift to the world, it is God’s gift to
humanity." Seeing the American experience as a reflection
of the will of God is a given in the United States.
The other element that runs
as deep as freedom in the U.S. is economic self-interest. The
American Revolution was as much or more about this than it was
political freedom. Recognizing this trend Thomas Jefferson
wrote afterwards: "[The people] will be forgotten… and
their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves but in
the sole faculty of making money…" [Notes on the State
of Virginia, William Peden, ed. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1955, p. 161] So why are we shocked when
the question of economic self-interest informs many of its
foreign policy decisions? Supporting tyrants like Saddam
Hussein when it suits U.S. needs is completely consistent when
this is the priority, and it often is and long has been.
But why war now? Last year,
when commentators claimed that September 11 had fundamentally
changed America’s self-understanding, I assumed it was
hyperbole. I was wrong. Why fingerprint Canadians born in
certain countries? Why arrest a Quebecois for crossing the
border to buy gasoline? Why did the U.S. Congress give Bush
carte blanche to attack Iraq? Why the ‘you’re either with
us or against us’ mentality? Americans are very scared.
Think about it. The Pentagon, the heart of the U.S. military
machine, was attacked. The Twin towers, America’s financial
erection, destroyed. Its economy gone limp. Bin Laden still on
the loose. Imagine their sense of vulnerability and loss of
face. That is what the paranoia, bravado, the hostility toward
foreigners and the abridgement of civil liberties reflects.
And that’s the other thing they don’t tell you about
democracy. When people are scared they forget about democratic
principles, and equity of treatment. Internment taught
Japanese Americans and Canadians about the fragility of
democratic principles. Now we are learning again that in the
hierarchy of values the need for security trumps everything
else. This makes the threat, of those yet to be found, weapons
of mass destruction loom larger than 18 months ago.
What does this tell us about
President Bush’s decision to go after Saddam Hussein? Bush
is not an evil man; this is a man being true to his God and
the American context that shaped him. The irony is that his
situation is so similar to the one faced by the Muslim world.
Both the American world and the Islamic world identify as God’s
Chosen. Both feel embattled. Islam asks, ‘how could we have
fallen so far from the glory of the Ottomans, Mogul and Moors?’
The U.S. asks, ‘Why do they hate us, the embodiment of
freedom?’ And both locate the source of the problem with an
external evil. Their rhetoric then polarizes. ‘You hate
freedom.’ ‘You hate Allah.’ The middle ground
disappears, and with it all ambiguity. The other’s intent
must be ill. Best strike first, and so a cold calculated rage
prevails over reason and moderation.
So there is a perspective,
independent of its rightness, wrongness, or Machiavellian
conspiracy theories, from which this war makes sense.
What difference does it make
to us? And what of all the anxieties we feel? Get used to it
because Unitarian Universalism isn’t a faith for those who
can’t live with uncertainly, ambiguity and anxiety.
We affirm a religious way of
being in the world that is very different from the Manichean
view of fundamentalists of whatever stripe, who see the world
in black and white, God vs. the Devil, the army of good
combating the axis of evil. We, Unitarian Universalist, forgo
the comfort and certainty that many find in such a God. The
Divine does not choose sides, but is found in the inherent
worth in each and the bonds that connect each to all. The
challenge then for each of us is to live with the tension of
ambiguity rather than pretending certainty is possible. The
first battle will be an internal one as you notice your
feelings and sift through your ideas. And then, if you’re
honest, it will end with what my colleague Forrest Church
calls the "60% solution."
"The 60% solution"
he writes, "is to act on 60% conviction. As for the other
40%…add them to your balance of humility." You decide,
having felt the division within, wrestled with it and thus
come to know you may yet be wrong. Your personal struggle is
what makes it possible to affirm your own beliefs without
demonizing the other. You accept that the other has the right
to a different opinion because you’ve given yourself the
same consideration.
The challenge for us is to
act without being fueled by the high octane of moral
indignation; which is really about feeling good rather than
seeing protest as a way of respectfully sending a message.
The challenge for us is to
cut through the rhetoric and see past delusion to truth. Pax
Americana shall pass. Empires always have and always will.
Alexander the Great, the Romans, the Moguls and the Ottomans,
the Emperors in China and Japan, the British Empire, the USSR
all have passed and so too will this era of U.S. hegemony. But
democracy shall not pass. Its upward trajectory has sometimes
paused but never ceased to grow more inclusive. Why? Because
it addresses the human need and desire to be free. The
"last best hope on earth" is not the U.S.A. the
so-called land of the free, which has one of the highest rates
of incarceration in the world. What we as UU’s affirm and
promote is neither the U.S nor Canada but rather the "use
of the democratic process," "the right of
conscience" and the "inherent worth" of every
person. These principles can’t thrive apart from freedom.
The challenge for us is not
to give up hope. But hope is about the situation that is
emerging tomorrow rather than the war that is in progress
today. The question the hopeful must ask is ‘what next?’
What can we do to make sure the U.S carries through and
promotes democracy rather than continuing the long line of
policy decisions that have served American geo-political needs
and economic self-interest instead? And how does the
international community aid in rebuilding the infrastructure,
help those whose lives have been broken and bring stability to
the region? It will soon be, if it is not already, to look
beyond protest to begin to figure out how we can work together
for the good of all. And right now is when we get to practice,
by reaching out to one another and listening carefully,
respectfully and with open hearts.
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