EASTER APPROACHES--LETS'S GO NO DEEPER INTO WAR'S TOMB

NORAD command bunker in Colorado

NORAD blast doors

 

 Below -- photos reportedly from security storage bunker in Kansas

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                        

Easter 2002 -- From an earlier unpublished writing --

          We’ve allowed the election of a government of grey flanneled suit troglodytes, a shadow government under Virginia mountains. Whether above or below ground, they give us the constant high sign of red light / green light homeland security, and a wink to corporate colleagues as they invest our dollars in the business of hi-tech war.  Oil weaponeers.  Ever think how much fuel is consumed in a war where the average flight to Afghan target by each high altitude bombers is 1000 miles, every bomber equivalent to a giant bundle of SUV’s?  And President George Bush Jr. has called this war on terrorism a war of “infinite duration.”  {As quoted in a Times Herald TV section article, 3-8-02, on Ted Koppel defending his news program’s debates on national war policy.}

From a NYT article -- laser guided missiles from 5 miles up have been our Afghanistan war standard.

 

          Our military industrial complex is the modern world’s version of the golden calf.  It now demands perpetual adoration by all politicians and taxpayers.  Weapons, oil, drugs and their laundered or respectable money are the coins of the global realm, and are constantly paid in tribute to the highest bidders worldwide as long as some slight allegiance is made to the powers that be—not democracy.  Witness the ongoing situations in Columbia, Chiapas, Central America, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and the Middle East. It doesn’t matter which side we’re on as long as money wins.

           President Bush’s "axis of evil" points straight back to a heart of darkness and stone here in the high places of the USA. A heart bristling with weapons unable to disarm, unable to offer true charity, justice and mercy.  A heart of nuclear war centurions that mocks a King who refuses to call down destruction on thousands or millions of subject souls, who refuses to come down from His cross claiming the worldly crown of firepower—as they have done and continue to do.                                                                                                                                 

White Cricifixion -- by Chagall

 

           If we believe the Son of God called Lazarus from the tomb, rose from the dead, and promised we will also, then we can cease offering up our copious first fruits to the gods of war, the weapons-of-mass-destruction-and-death military machine.  April 15^th—False god tribute day—soon follows Easter.  The challenge of faith is to find a way to choose life instead.  This Easter Sunday let us pray for the inspiration to so change our lives and hearts, truly respect life, and renew the face of the earth.  Let’s live on the planet with all our brothers and sisters, not under its surface in hardened command centers hoarding our goods and stifling our blessings.

 A few of the 750,000 Communist era bunkers [1 for every 4 people] in Albania -- engineered by former dictator,

 Enver Hoxha -- photo by David Galjaard

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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More than a decade of war has passed and persists, since Easter 2003. What has really changed?  Syria is now the main theater of war.  The death dealing show must go on.  The Department of Homeland Security increases control of our lives, borders, and travel. We must give the Just War Theory a thorough Christian burial, if we want to fully welcome the Resurection—new life.

  

For inspiration on ways to resist and redirect war taxes --  http://www.nwtrcc.org/#

      

LORD, HASTEN TO BRING YOUR EASTER LIGHT TO OUR WAR-TORN WORLD

There is promise of another way of life, from daily scripture of two Monday's ago---

          Reading 1 Isaiah 65:17-21

Thus says the LORD:
Lo, I am about to create new heavens
and a new earth;
The things of the past shall not be remembered
or come to mind.
Instead, there shall always be rejoicing and happiness
in what I create;
For I create Jerusalem to be a joy
and its people to be a delight;
I will rejoice in Jerusalem
and exult in my people.
No longer shall the sound of weeping be heard there,
or the sound of crying;
No longer shall there be in it
an infant who lives but a few days,
or an old man who does not round out his full lifetime;
He dies a mere youth who reaches but a hundred years,
and he who fails of a hundred shall be thought accursed.
They shall live in the houses they build,
and eat the fruit of the vineyards they plant.

 

 

 

NOTES ON UNJUST WAR REMEMBRANCE DAY – MARCH 19

 

No more BP Exxon war extortion.

No more the abortion of war.

Not for oil or foreign soil.

War = abortion = genocide.

Genocide – fast with a nuclear weapon –

slow with bayonet & bullets

and vacuum extractor.

A genocide of the soul

starts generations

before the last body’s

been extinguished.

Starts with the first innocent life sacrificed.

 

ON THE FIFTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE CALL TO MAKE MARCH 19

UNJUST WAR REMEMBRANCE DAY

THE DAY WE INVADED IRAQ IN 2003

IN SEARCH OF THEIR WMD = OIL

 

 

AND INSTEAD OF DEEP HORIZON OIL DISASTER GREEDINESS

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WE OFFER THIS CELTIC PRAYER

 

Deep Peace – of the running wave to you.

Deep Peace – of the flowing air to you.

Deep Peace -- of the quiet earth to you.

Deep Peace – of the Son of Peace to you.

                    From  Chrstopher News Notes

 

– MAY PATRICK OF IRELAND BE WITH US –

 

 

 

St. Joseph, who’s feastday is March 19, help us dedicate to creative work—and repent of war’s exploitation.

PREFERENTIAL OPTION FOR THE RICH---PROTECTED BY JUSTIFIED VIOLENCE?

Robbing Peter to pay Paul, for pre-emptive wars of destruction and debt.

See full article [Citizens for Tax Justice]

 

 

full article [Citizens for Tax Justice]

pend greater than one half of our federal budget on war, borrow from Social Security for war, still rack up debt from unfunded war, create a new Department of Homeland Security as further backup for war.  Then bemoan the situation and demand gross cuts to social security, education, environment, infrastructure—anything that does not serve the interest of the war and security industries.  And this in the country that spends as much on these industries as do all the rest of the countries of the world combined.  This in the country in which its wealthiest 1% has become the class that controls more wealth than 40% of all the rest of its own people.  While the 80% of us on the lower and middle class ends, have only 7% of our country’s wealth [video - graphic representation].  A Wall Street Journal column contends the disparity is greater.  Yes there is class warfare. 

 

More important, this situation of the rich and powerful, detached from the needs of common people and the poor, here and worldwide, is deep social sin.  Jesus cries out loudly against this injustice.  “Woe to you who are rich” and He tells the devastating story of the rich man and Lazarus ultimately separated by the chasm between heaven and hell.  There is so much in the Gospel that warns against hoarding riches.  For the super-rich that’s a huge impediment to salvation.  Yet it’s a message for all of us who live in this richest country on the planet. 

  

To protect our wealth, property, privilege, we believe we’ve the right and responsibility to maintain the world’s largest war machine.  Nation states are designed to operate with the mentality of the war machine [it’s necessary to kill, to survive], but our Christian churches must operate on the faith taught by Jesus.

 

Church + society’s justified violence = the greatest impediment to the New Evangelization.   We continue to misconstrue the basic Gospel truth:  greater love than this no one has than to lay down their life for their friends {not the taking of life in defense of their friends}.   Jesus showed us this way so clearly—telling us to put away the sword, forgiving his enemies, as he died for all of us, on the cross.  Violence is the devil’s tool.  God is love.  Justified violence is the Deceiver’s most potent lie. 

 

If God sends His Son to tell you that the way to salvation is nonviolent love and mercy, why, as in our budget, would you spend more than ½ your resources on war and violence? – why would your church endorse even one farthing, or send even one member off in support of the justified violence of war?  It does not do so for the justified violence of abortion.

“God will not be mocked” can put off for a time--as when Jesus suffered the mockery of the cross.  But God, the creator and sustainer, will never long be successfully ignored.
 

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A past departing Pope understood completely the nature of our nonviolent merciful loving God.  The church and society wasn't interested in what he was saying.  On April 22, 2011, six years into his reign, Pope Benedict XVI proclaimed---

“It could be expected that, when God came to earth, he

would be a man of great power, destroying the opposing

forces; that he would be a man of powerful violence as an

instrument of peace. Not at all! He came in weakness.

He came with only the strength of love, totally without

violence, even to the point of going to the cross. This is

what shows us the true face of God: that violence never

comes from God, never helps bring anything good, but is

a destructive means and not the path to escape difficulties.

...This is Jesus’ true message: seek peace with the means of peace and leave violence

aside.” 

          For a remarkable insight into Pope Benedict's inspiration and recent decision, above and beyond the media controversies, see Fr. E. C. McCarthy's complete article.
 

 

 Illumination by Kathy Brahney

More ---

John Perkins, author of Economic Hit Man, on how wealth extends globally.

http://vimeo.com/12483678

Ed Asner’s look at the crash of 2008--Tax the Rich An animated fairy tale. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6ZsXrzF8Cc

What, and exclusive who’s is -- the plutonomy?

http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2007/01/08/plutonomics/

 

 

 

THE NEW EVANGELIZATION---RECRUIT NOT WARRIORS, BUT PEACEMAKERS

We welcome the young energy of Occupy Port Huron at the Jan. 30th opening of Season for Nonviolence 2013.

They double our numbers at the end of that evening.

I pray at daily mass for a multiplication of national service opportunities for our young people—a nonviolent national service that serves God first, and country second.  An AmeriCorps, Peace Corps, and missionary services---bigger than the armed services.  We are not called to be soldiers by Christ, but servants of each other.  When we judge another an enemy, we determine that they’re guilty and not innocent.   We use that to justify the violence of war.

But there are always innocents living in the homes of the enemy.  An innocent can never be killed intentionally.  Yet abortions and infanticides are conducted every day in war.  Can even one of them be justified?  The targets of our smart bombs include the babies at the breast, and in the wombs, of terrorists’ wives at their household tasks.

 

The mind that kills the innocent in the womb by abortion is the same as the one that kills innocence in war—we didn’t mean to—their lives were just in the way of our greater purposes, our need to protect our interests.  Jesus never justified killing, not for benefit of God nor country, nor personal convenience.  His life, death and resurrection teach the opposite reality—God is infinite love, God is infinite mercy.

There is real risk in following Christ’s way.  Onward Christian soldiers means courage, but no reliance on guns bombs or vacuum extractors.  We can’t spread the Good News until we trust in His Way.  How can we evangelize young people when we delete the Sermon on the Mount?  How can they believe, or respect life, if all they see is the invitation to participate in an endless stream of preemptive wars on our church and society’s behalf?

So read and pray the Gospels, and then do all you can to recruit new peacemakers for national and community service.

The Sermon on the Mount by Cosimo Roselli 

 

 

 

Click on images to enlarge

OUR KILLER DRONES—FRIEND OR FOE?

Slate Magazine’s 2-21-13 article

{from an April 27, 2009 letter to National Public Radio}
Thank you for your insightful 4-27-09 NPR report that included Pakistan’s reaction to the U.S. use of Predator drones in their country.  The claim was made by a former Pakistani ambassador to Afghanistan, that our drone attacks increase the public support and power of the Taliban in Pakistan.  We in the U.S. should understand why this may be so.  In this part of the Muslim world, honor is often more important than life itself.  Our automated battle tactic is a source of shame.

In our classic cowboy movies, our stars Ronald Reagan and John Wayne would have been appalled at the dishonor of “shooting the bad guy in the back” by machine without warning--without the courage of meeting the enemy face to face.  These drones operate like a hanging judge and lynch mob made mechanical.  The condemned may be terrorists who have sent out suicide bombers who’ve killed also with appalling dishonor—or perhaps the drone’s victims are mothers and children.  The intelligence of the CIA may, or may not, have been accurate.  But as my conservative Republican father has repeated many times: two wrongs never make a right.

That does not matter to the killer drones.   It has to matter to the people of the U.S., or we become a chief perpetrator of terrorism technology ourselves—against the Pakistani nation, in the eyes of the world, and in our own hardened hearts.         Yours truly, Michael McCarthy

THE USE OF KILLER DRONES CONTINUES TO ESCALATE

From first use in Iraq & Afghanistan, to Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and other places little mentioned,  these airborne droids are on a roll, even into our own friendly skies {thus far for surveillance only}.

There is still some current debate about our use of lethal drones, but the necessity of ever more sophisticated weapons of war, and war itself, despite the inevitable deaths of the innocent, is never doubted.

A perpetual Cold War on Terror.  We keep Le Guin’s abused child {see previous Weekly} in a terrible closet, because we won’t answer the Gospel call to be peacemakers.  This closet is cramped and miserable, yet extends all over the world.  It’s built by our consumer society and maintained by our war industry—the suffering of the innocent protects our way of life.

Drones may or may not give a more distant, precise killing, and thereby “save lives” but this presumed success promotes increasing reliance on these facile death machines.  We should know better.  Basic humanity recoils at their shameful devious impunity.  Who orders death by drone, and on what factual basis?  Who knows precisely who needs to die by remote control?  The accusers never have to face the accused, they just blow them away by intercontinental button push.
 

The drones are a psychic echo of that despicable floating killer robot dispatched from the death star of the Evil Empire, trying to kill Luke Skywalker on the ice planet.  It was so easy to understand in that Star Wars movie.  Why don’t we recognize the evil when it becomes one of our U.S. government’s major foreign policy tools?

 

PRO

Slate Magazine’s 2-21-13 article is subtitled, “Drones, war, and civilian casualties - How unmanned aircraft reduce collateral damage.”

CON
Slate, 10-18-12,  Drones attacks in Libya - An unprecedented expansion of presidential power.

 The detached use of this technology is not without personal consequence.  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/world/asia/air-force-drone-operators-show-high-levels-of-stress.html?_r=0

 

here were not sufficient reasons to unleash a war against Iraq. To say nothing of the fact that, given the new weapons that make possible destructions that go beyond the combatant groups, today we should be asking ourselves if it is still licit to admit the very existence of a 'just war.'"

                                                Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, May 2, 2003 {Pope Benedict XVI}

Let us pray, at this time of choosing the next pope,  that the Holy Spirit continues to enlighten our church to open its doors and windows fully to God’s unconditional, nonviolent, merciful love. 

More of my droning on drones.

http://mccarthysweekly-paxvobiscum.blogspot.com/2010/04/fighting-by-drones-and-robots.html
http://mccarthysweekly-paxvobiscum.blogspot.com/2011/01/road-less-traveled-towards-peace-and.html

HOW I BEAT THE BOOGIE MAN, IN 1956

A good part of my early grade school years were spent in a small Minneapolis bungalow home at the end of a city road of such homes that ran into a blacktop playground, and an open field.  It was an idyllic place I thought, and summer-winter we four kids were long hours outside {giving some peace to our mother}.  Yet we did spend a fair amount of time in the cement-floored basement, two center support polls, couch in between them facing a black & white TV on the far cinder block wall {where I’d watched my first politics, something about Senator Estes Kefauver and I Like Ike}.

At night a dream would sometimes come, confining me in that basement with a grey ghost-like, no more than an floating sheet--but in fast pursuit of me in what was usually my round-and-round the polls roller skates path.  It would then become a desperate dash to avoid doom.  Each time round it gained.  How could I be moving so incredibly slow and stiff?  Finally I’d dive into the space under the stairs, and curl myself as small as I could.  This was no safety—there was the hot-cold vibrating assurance that the specter would soon be upon me. 

hen I’d remember at last minute the only escape possible.  Grabbing both eyelids firmly I’d pull them up.  Not instantaneously, but like scales falling from before me, I’d see the dark threat dissolve.  Eyes wide open I’d be awake, fear subsiding, my surroundings focused in as they were really supposed to be—the truth I expected, even though just the faint images of my darkened bedroom.  My heart and breathing settled back again to normal, and gradually I’d go back to sleep—somehow not bad-dreaming again that night.

 

This specific nightmare re-appeared a number of times.  Eyelid evasive action continued to work—but not until after a desperate chase, and finally cornered.  Would that the specter of politics and death, still plaguing our cities and countries across the globe, could be so abruptly vanquished.  Yet, only a child's solution.

{written in the middle of a January 2013 near-sleepless night}

Illumination by Kathy Brahney

 

 



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 Photo by Autumn Lopez

 

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.  Now we see through a glass darkly; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.  I Cor 13:11-12

The short story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" by Ursula Le Guin tells of the misery of one confined abused child as the necessary requirement for the happy lives of all the rest in a great, informed bountiful country.  Our adult task is to discern where those that walk away are walking towards, and how to get there.

 

WHAT KIND OF MENTORS WILL WE BE? -- NO PERSON CAN SERVE TWO MASTERS

AmeriCorps volunteers at work

 

I helped assure, along with others {especially Al’s* hesitant but willing-to-give-her-kid-a-chance mom}, Al’s final steps in boarding a plane to begin a year’s AmeriCorps service. His success made me feel grateful.  Al had persisted for over a year through a laborious application process, with few resources, and at stalemate with his high school graduation {despite good support from alternative school staff.}  His medical problems had held him back in the past, and he would much rather have gone east to the AmeriCorps training center by train bus or car.  Yet he’d made the flight, and now confronts the good daily problems of getting to know his team-mates, and who gets the top bunk.
         * Name changed.
 

Then thinking back on my own 19 year-old efforts to be of service, I remember the kindness, support, and beatnik courage of Fr. Joe {his brother was part owner of Ann Arbor’s first real coffee house, gathering place for 50’s--60’s critical thinkers, right across from the Quad}.  Fr. Joe had been transferred north of Detroit to a migrant mission parish in 1966, and invited me to help with youth ministry in the town and the migrant camps.  We’d met when I was in my first year of college at Sacred Heart Seminary, moderator of a Young Christian Students group at his parish on the Eastside.  He’d been recruited by his global-minded bishop to learn Spanish, and the small group {comunidades de base} church movement, in Puerto Rico.

 June 4, 1972--Fr. Joe gives bread to Cesar Chavez ending his 24-day Fast for Justice -- photo by Glen Pearcy

Now he was my financial and spiritual mentor making it possible for me to enter a new larger world—a world unexplainable without actually living in it months on end.  Fr. Joe, and many others in the camps, made it possible for me to have more than four summers with Mexican-American farmworkers—changed my life, and is still changing.  The experience has given me passable Spanish language, and the knowledge that one can live with less—unlocking new culture doors as I became a Physicians Assistant, and providing invaluable skills for managing life in breakneck U.S. consumer society.

Helped an AFSC group while at St. Nicholas migrant mission

t’s my time, at 65, to look for the ways to open paths for young people, opportunities that envision a more inclusive, just world.  AmeriCorps, Peace Corps, Jesuit Volunteer Corps, City Year, American Friends Service Committee, Pax Christi USA, Habitat for Humanity, Christian Peacemaker Teams, Lutheran Volunteer Corps, a myriad of church mission activities here and abroad.   The list is yet longer, but almost unknown to exist.  Serve your community and country without learning the method of the assault rifle.  All these require time and money to enlist in.  Unlike the military, there is no phalanx of recruiters to guide your way.

 “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country” was assassinated in 1963.   Our county’s unflagging dedication to war upon war has clipped the wings of the Peace Corps, the hopes of the developing world, and our own children’s access to a complete, creative education.  But as Al overcame his fear of flying, and starts AmeriCorps service, another eagle has landed, dropping the arrows from its talons, ready to help build the planet with liberty and justice for all. May God bless his fledgling efforts, and may we support those of millions more.                  

 

 

 

 

 

Illumination by Kathey Brahney

 

  



From Ande's Valentine creation sent to me in 1978 -- a loving "bowl of warm fuzzies" I forever hold dear.