"A Spiritual Perspective on Making War"
Tom White
Sunday, November 16th, 2003
"A Spiritual Perspective on Making War"
Tom White
Sunday, November 16th, 2003
Just a follow-up on the readings…One year after the murders of the Jesuits and the women, following international pressure, the brigade members were convicted of murder. Within a year they were given amnesty and most of them now have asylum in Miami. Three years ago I wan an International Election Observer in El Salvador where I will return in March for a very important presidential election. While there I visited the site where the Jesuits, their housekeeper and her daughter, were slaughtered and also stood at the altar where in 1980 Archbishop Oscar Romero was shot through the heart with an M-16 rifle while saying Mass. In both cases they were killed by a military government supported and supplied by the United States with our tax money!
I really appreciate the opportunity to meet with you this morning. So often it seems, the places we are allowed to speak in this climate of “my country right or wrong,” many of the people, like today, are members of the choir. I think, however, that even you will be astounded by the information and hopefully, as one of your core principles states, I can help make Peace and Justice even a more essential element of your “Christian Mission.”
In the short time we have I would like to accomplish 2 things:
In 1986 I read a book by Capuchin Priest Michael Crosby, “The Spirituality of the Beatitudes” which really brought the Beatitudes to life for me…particularly:
Our policies at home have seen the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. From the promise to ‘leave no child behind” we have gone to leaving groups behind. Our foreign policy has gone from disposable people to disposable nations. This couldn’t happen if all churches, like St. Joan’s, were true peace churches, but unfortunately they are not. To the question of whether starting a war with a lie really mattered, Sr. Joan Chittister said in an article in the National Catholic Reporter: “It matters because dishonesty matters! It matters to families whose sons and daughters went to that war and will never come home…It matters to families in the U.S. whose life-support programs were ended, whose medical insurance ran out, whose food stamps were cut out, whose daycare programs were eliminated. It does matter!”
I really took notice of a recent Pew Institute survey, stating that only 10% of U.S. Christians surveyed said their faith had anything to do with their attitude toward the Iraq war…only 20% surveyed had heard any soul searching comments for the pulpit regarding the war…And what a war it was! It was a war in which we fired 1000 missiles a week at the cost of $1 million each, devastating humans and environment alike. We spent $1 billion a day on that operation. That same $1 billion could have built 6000 new schools, 15,000 affordable housing units or have fed 280,000 people for a year. And that is just the cost of one day of the war.
Kim Ode in the Star and tribune said “If you started counting to 1 Billion right now, $1 each second, you would not get to 1 Billion for 31 years, 259 days.” And that is just 1 Billion! For next year (2004) Congress had given the Pentagon $400 billion to spend which is larger than the military spending of the next 20 nations combined and…that does not include the $87 billion for Iraq or $45 billion for the war on terror…By comparison Great Britain will spend $34 billion, Canada spends $8 billion. Someone said, “and Canada doesn’t have any enemies.”
For every $1 dollar of our tax money spent by the Pentagon next year we will spend a corresponding 14 cents on education and 12 cents on health care…and…the US is the only industrialized country in the world without universal health care. The Pentagon has submitted a budget to spend $2.7 trillion over the next 6 years. That breaks down to $856,000 per/minute…and they’ll spend it unless we demand a change in priorities…The $30 million that was chopped from the Minneapolis school system budget last year represented just 37 minutes of Pentagon spending.
It is an interesting puzzle to me: Why will an American citizen, notoriously “taxpaying” conscious, predominantly Christian, accept without outrage, that 50% of the discretionary portion of his/her tax payments each year will go to a military machine around the world and go ballistic when a mere 3% is spent on social programs here at home!
How flagrantly does that spending and the distorted priorities it represents fly in the face of the very clear message we heard from Micah: ‘They will hammer their swords into plowshares…Nation will not lift sword against Nation. There will be no training for War” I’d like to mention a couple particular experiences that have motivated my activism…For 35 years I have been raising money for St. Stephen’s to support their many social service programs. As the government started pulling money from the programs the soup lines have increased over the past 20 years from 50 to 400 per/night and 40 shelter beds are filled in 15 minutes. The $200,000 we still scratch and beg for each year represents just 20 seconds of our war on Iraq.
From 1990-1993 I served on the Board of the Archdiocesan Campaign for Human Development/Christian Sharing Fund. Each year about 25 organizations presented proposals on behalf of Immigrant groups for self determination, homeless for housing, Farmers to serve on farms and Seniors for affordable health care. They would plead for the maximum grant allowable at that time of $20,000, the amount spent in Iraq in 2 sec.
How can I not oppose and protest a governmental system that last year cut $2.6 billion from food stamps and child nutrition and added $2.7 billion to “military research” and threatens now to cut Headstart (pay now or pay later in prisons) How can I not oppose a system that cut funding for education, increasing class sizes, when the $5 billion for one aircraft carrier would pay the salaries of 65,000 teachers for 2 years. We must challenge a system that has a military presence in 127 countries of the world to protect Corporations and can’t protect a child from being shot off a bike in North Minneapolis.
In 1986 the National Conference of Catholic Bishops introduced a document called “The Basic Principles of Catholic Social Teaching”…Principle #4, “The Option for the Poor”, stated that “As individuals and as a nation, we are called to evaluate social and economic activity from the viewpoint of the poor and powerless!”…What if we really practiced what we preached?
It isn’t only the spiritual passages that speak against war. For my more conservative friends I use Pres. Dwight Eisenhower who on April 18, 1953 said “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who are hungry and not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.” Following that more familiar part of the speech, Eisenhower went to say; ‘The world in arms is not spending money alone, It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”
And we are finally starting to hear something about the aftermath of war: By 1989, only 15 years after the war ended, the number of Vietnam Veterans who died by accident, suicide or combat-connected health problems, exceeded the 58,000 young Americans who had died in that war.
Yes! I think even you may be shocked at the following facts from the World Development Index which show the shameful impact the building of our war machine has had at home…The US now ranks 20th in the world in Infant morality…21st in child morality. We rank 17th in life expectancy…and 22% of our children go to bed hungry every night. One of your own, Joe Selvaggio…my good friend and companion on the journey, can best attest to the fact that in spite of our embargo of 42 years, Cuba enjoys a higher life expectancy than we do and has a lower infant/child mortality rate.
With all that said I guess for me, and many of my friends, it was not a matter of whether we SHOULD get involved, but how could we NOT be involved!
It has been an honor for me to share my journey with you today. Each one of you has contributed to the reputation of Joan of Arc as a place where the voices of peace and justice truly ring out…Many of you here today have kept my passion alive and I thank you for that…To close I would like to read from a poem by Archbishop Oscar Romero, assassinated for opposing the militarism that caused the deaths of 80,000 Salvadorans. The poem, “Prophets of a Future Not Our Own.” I dedicate it to Peacemakers everywhere:
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