PUT AWAY THE SWORD--THE WHOLENESS AND HOLINESS OF THE RIGHT TO LIFE

LET US NOT DISSECT THE RIGHT TO LIFE

ALL LIFE IS SACRED.

THE BODY IS THE TEMPLE OF THE HOLY SPIRIT

JESUS SAYS:
PUT AWAY THE SWORD
PUT AWAY THE HANDGUN
PUT AWAY THE LETHAL INJECTION
PUT AWAY THE VACUUM EXTRACTOR
PUT AWAY THE ELECTRIC CHAIR
PUT AWAY THE CARBON MONOXIDE
PUT AWAY THE NUCLEAR BOMB
PUT AWAY THE M-16 AND AK-47

FOR THOSE WHO LIVE BY THESE,

WILL DIE BY THESE.

A DEATH OF RELIANCE ON DEATH.

AN EXTINCTION OF HOPE.

JESUS GIVES US A NEW COMMAND.

“LOVE ONE ANOTHER AS I HAVE LOVED YOU.”

GOD SHOWS US THE WAY OF HOLINESS,

ASKS US TO TRUST IN GOD,

PROMISING LIFE CONQUERS DEATH.


Michael McCarthy, October 1996

Fr. Brian C. at Holy Trinity Church here in P.H. gave a powerful, inspiring sermon Good Friday this year, on the full implications of Jesus' last words to His church before His death , "Put away the sword." I hope to be able to publish at least a summary of his message sometime soon--best homily I've ever heard from the parish pulpit on the true social & personal challenge of peacemaking. [You really would have had to have been there to receive the complete blessed impact!] Now with the flames of Pentecost upon us, I bring out above a poem of more than ten years ago, to echo in a small way Fr. Brian's good courageous words.

Celtic illumination by Kathy Brahney

A SURGE NEEDED: NON LETHAL FORCE NATIONAL SERVICE

Peace, in Arabic and Hebrew

If any one of you were among the 70 or so that attended Mary & Tom Mechtenberg's talk this Sunday afternoon on their experiences with Michigan Peace Teams, you are better personally informed about the troubles in the Middle East, and inspired by their insight, to take another step in some direction along your path towards international understanding. Thank you Tom & Mary.

From discussions with local people of all political persuasions comes an idea that encourages young and older, to do something positive and productive for our area, outbound to the rest of the world. This would set up a local agency to help answer the challenge, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." -JFK


PROPOSAL: Alternative Service Opportunity Foundation

• Local group with board and members--purpose to encourage and facilitate citizens of the St. Clair County area to enter national and international service/educational opportunities, such as AmeriCorps, Peace Corps, student exchange, and faith-based service programs.

• Since these organizations have few recruiters in our area, we would bring together members of our community who already have these alternative service experiences, and engage/train/assist them to do outreach in local colleges, high schools, and other public forums, helping young adults and adults to discern which organizations would be good opportunities for them, and then helping them to make the necessary connections.

• AmeriCorps and Peace Corps have financial supports for those who work in their programs, but many faith-based and community programs do not. The foundation could provide small scholarship assistance as incentive towards the practical needs of entering any of these opportunities.

• Board would meet monthly, raising funds for part-time director, and a small scholarship/supports reserve. The director would preside over the activity of volunteer recruiters; some stipend money could be considered. Activity and dollars available would expand in tandem.

• There are many excellent opportunities to learn foreign languages, encounter different cultures, and serve human needs both here in the U.S. and worldwide. Our young people and many retirees are ready and willing. In our area there are few recruiters, nor sign on bonuses, except for the armed services. Our purpose is to expand opportunities for alternative service.

• Some new opportunities that are particular to our area’s experiences {e.g. Port Huron sister city in Guatemala, Michigan Peace Teams, and Middle East—SC4, connections} could be created.

• A final objective. Act as advocates on the national scene, from our local example, for a renewed and multiplied investment in our young people’s positive engagement with the rest of the world. AmeriCorps and Peace Corps, especially, should receive vigorous funding support, and become great sources of national pride, and international interconnected accomplishment.








Please contact us if you're interest in this project. My wife Ande and I have been going to local high schools and SC4 once or twice a year, as alternative service recruiters, but much more is necessary.

"What is power? We see that power has always been used as a force of domination. It is the power of the strong over the weak: it is the power one finds in factories and even in churches. But power is valid only when it is the power of service. That is when power acquires its proper dimension." --- Adolfo Perez Esquivel, Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Argentina

The weapon of the soldier is the M-16. The weapon of the peacemaker is the learning of a foreign language.

Please see January 17, 2010 McCarthy's Weekly for more on the Peace Corps issue.

PEACE, DISARMAMENT, AN END TO WAR—THE MOTHER OF ALL MOTHER’S DAY PRESENTS

In August of 1982 the march in support of the Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty closed down whole streets of New York City. The whole city turned its attention to the need for nuclear disarmament; police were present, but inconspicuous, except for a few on horseback. The giant spindly puppets of the Bread & Puppet Theater towered in friendly anti-war color, over both police and protestors. We'd come from Kentucky where Ande & I lived then, working in an Appalachian clinic and hospital, to march for disarmament when President Reagan was spouting Star Wars.

Our kids, Maura and Sam, just toddlers, got tired of walking, but enjoyed the day, and were so unusually tired out, that my cousin Barbara, at whose penthouse apartment we stayed that night, thought them well enough behaved I believe it gave her some of the encouragement to consider kids of her own. Barb was a highly competent tax lawyer then, for International Telephone and Telegraph. Muffin her poodle and our kids had a good time playing together. Now Barb a single mom, still a most competent part-time lawyer, has a home in small town Ohio, and two beautiful young adult daughters.

Barb, in that pre-cell phone age, had somehow found us coming down from her office to the streets to march for a while with us. The atmosphere in New York then was festive and full of hope. The march ended with a concert in Central Park bursting with people and the stars of the folk singer circuit.

This time New York City barely blinked. The numbers of demonstrators had shrunk from one million to ten thousand, and people were methodically discouraged from joining in. Marchers were begrudgingly granted one lane of the streets [while bicyclists, on an annual cross city ride earlier in the day, had the rule of the whole road for hours]. We were assembled and cordoned off at the march stating point, Times Square, by impatient police who bunched us behind cattle-barrier-like tubular steel fences, that interlocked in 10 foot sections, keeping us in a tight one lane 15 foot wide, four block long, corridor. People were to stand there hours listening to speakers & singers, for most of the corralled packed-in participants, way down an unhearable unseeable distance, while traffic still whizzed by alongside.

ur Peace Action mostly Detroit group had been walking miles already that morning, and needed a rest. [Of the forty in our contingent nearly half were in the grey haired activist/“raging grannies” categories—amazing energizer bunny spirits, flesh with some limits.] Instead, we’d come in on the wrong end of the long assembly line, and were being continually prodded along down the cattle fence by law officers, while other non-march onlookers and pedestrians on the sidewalk were left alone. I incurred the wrath of one of the crowd controllers when I gently placed my hand on her shoulder towering above my own, to get her attention—Please can we stop here? --“Keep your hands off the officer!” Realizing my mistake, and with a sincere “I’m sorry”, a more patient negotiation ensued, and we were allowed to stay put. Maybe the NYPD were on short fuse because of the night before’s incident with the wanabee terrorist “pre 4th of July cookout” bomber [unsuccessful --made his bomb out of camper propane tanks, fireworks, and gasoline mixed with the wrong kind of fertilizer].

Nagasaki some time after 11:02am August 9, 1945--Cathedral ruin on hill was the center of the largest Catholic community in the Far East at that time, building used for A-bomb targeting

When the trip towards the United Nations Building began, our marchers certainly kept up spirits with chants and songs. And neighboring Buddhist monk drummers and young spiked-haired Goth shouters were especially impressive. Then it was back on the bus, our only accommodations two nights sandwiching the one day, for the fourteen hour ride home. Ande and I had made it, but the elders on this disarmament pilgrimage were an incredible example for us, and the valiant teenagers who’d come along. One of the older and most colorful of our Peace Action women said it best from under her very wide brimmed hat as she sat down across the aisle, “The thing about us is that we never give up!”

It’s this spirit that guarantees this Mother’s Day, that one day, all of New York City will suspend its business as usual, in jubilation, and celebrate with the United Nations, the end of all nuclear weapons.

o all of New York City—and throughout our nation—we should begin to more than blink, but keep eyes, ears, and hearts wide open, millions upon millions of awakened world citizens. In a small cool park [Dag Hammarskjold] in the late morning of our long Sunday, a smiling Japanese choir of perhaps 75 young and old, invited us to join them and their three accordion players. A beautiful song, with words written by Ohzu high school students translated to mean: “Our Wish”—from above our heads, come down books & notebooks, not bombs—an end to all war. Then, across the language barrier, “We Shall Overcome.” They gave us gifts of bright postcards & peace cranes.

An older man, Kou Tanaka, was second generation survivor of our dropping the A-bomb on his city Nagasaki. He earnestly handed me his calling card. Fortunately, Ande had remembered the “Konishiwa” greeting from our son Sam’s years of Port Huron Northern language classes. The group's translator helped me offer in return the story of Fr. George Zabelka, who we’d known here in Michigan, former chaplain to the Enola Gay bomber crew—his eventual pilgrimage return to Japan, to apologize. Japanese and East Asians had a very large delegation in this NPT disarmament march, and keep coming half way around the world to help us pass this torch of truth, justice, peace down the generations, persistently beside us, until the wish becomes the reality.

Postcard image of Hiroshima monument with peace crane garlands at base--a gift of UTAGOE, Japanese choir group we met.

In a founder of Mother’s Day’s own words, resonating with the message of our May 2 NPT Disarmament march.

Mother's Day was originally started after the Civil War, as a protest to the carnage of that war, by women who had lost their
sons. Here is the original Mother's Day Proclamation from 1870.
......................................

Arise, then, women of this day! Arise all women who have hearts,
whether our baptism be that of water or of fears!

Say firmly: "We will not have great questions decided by
irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking
with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be
taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach
them of charity, mercy and patience.

We women of one country will be too tender of those of another
country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. From
the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own.
It says "Disarm, Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance
of justice."

Blood does not wipe our dishonor nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons
of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a
great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women,
to bewail and commemorate the dead.

Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the
means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each
bearing after their own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
but of God.

In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a
general congress of women without limit of nationality may be
appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient and at
the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the
alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement
of international questions, the great and general interests of
peace.

Julia Ward Howe
Boston
1870





The tone of this courageous woman reminds me of the words of Mary to Elizabeth in her "Visitation" to her cousin--both of them pregnant and filled with anxious expectation & hope.

The "Magnificat" Please read in Luke 1:46-55

Image by Kristin McCarthy {daughter of Fr. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy}

Illuminations by Kathy Brahney

FIGHTING BY DRONES--ACROSS CONTINENTIAL DIVIDES

We're doomed to losing the hearts and minds bodies and souls of occupied Afghanistan. We've taken the shoot-first-ask-questions-later shortcut, and are thus permanently cut off at their mountain impasse. We stretch out an insincere hand across the chasm of lethality. Predator drones are our ambassadors. Somebody fingers an enemy in a land we poorly understand, and someone dies perhaps with family at home in a remote village by remote control from an electronic command bunker in New Mexico. See New Mexico TV report, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eX-XTLX3OmE

My memories of a first encounter with the idea of a killer robot probe come from the second Star Wars movie, The Empire Strikes Back. At the beginning we see the evil empire's hovering killing machine spy robot pursuing our heroes in a desert of snow. From the transcript:

Evading the dreaded Imperial Starfleet, a group of freedom fighters
led by Luke Skywalker has established a new secret base on the remote ice world of Hoth.
The evil lord Darth Vader, obsessed with finding young Skywalker,
has dispatched thousands of remote probes into the far reaches of
space... A Star Destroyer moves through space, releasing Imperial probe robots from its underside.
One of these probes zooms toward the planet Hoth and lands
on its ice-covered surface. An explosion marks the point of
impact....
A weird mechanical sound rises above the whining of the
wind. A strange probe robot, with several extended sensors,
emerges from the smoke-shrouded crater. The ominous mechanical
probe floats across the snow plain and disappears into the
distance.... The dark probe robot moves past the smoldering ruins of
station three-eight and down a ridge toward the Rebel base. It
raises a large antenna from the top of its head and begins to
send out a piercing signal.
The probe droid has spotted Chewbacca who, not thirty feet
away, has popped his head over a snow bank. Instantly, the
probe robot swings around, its deadly ray ready to fire....*

I’ve left out parts, but the meaning was clear. An evil empire fought by proxy with robots, with overwhelming technical tricks, disdainfully choosing not to meet its enemy face to face.

Although this is only from a popular film, probably seen by few Afghans, we stand convicted by our own cultural court, and if Afghan & western Pakistan citizens were the jury, they would certainly concur. The outrage at U.S. fighting tactics and attributed innocent deaths, along with U.S. pressure on his government, culminated in our man in Kabul, President Karzai, threatening to join the Taliban himself [4-6-10 USA Today report]. Certainly political posturing, but Karzai well knows the feelings of his people, and what it takes to remain in office. In Pakistan, where our Predator drones are based for clandestine missions in both countries, only 9% support this with 67% against. They regard our presence and actions there a violation of their sovereignty. [for further discussion of this CIA assassination program see http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/04/world/asia/04drones.html ]

More important to the Muslim people of this Central Asian area {called by some Pashtunistan, ancient tribes not accepting a border dividing their people between Afghanistan and Pakistan} is a concept of honor and shame which would regard fighting remotely by drone as incomprehensibly dishonorable. The fact that IEDs and suicide bombers are now being employed by some factions recently is a sign that their honor concept is weakening, or being overcome by the retaliation of “an eye for an eye.”
4-19-10 Afghan villagers said a funeral prayer for the four victims of a shooting on Monday by NATO soldiers near the Pakistani border. [not by drones this time] For story see http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/22/world/asia/22afghan.html?ref=world

The problem is compounded by the fact that our military has farmed this program out to soldiers of fortune. When its already most difficult to know who’s really friend or enemy in this area, we’ve turned the task over to “hired guns.” Their companies, like Blackwater {now renamed Xe}, apparently don’t require even the personal standards of Paladin, from the old western bounty hunter TV series Have Gun, Will Travel. Partial article appears below.

New York Times March 14, 2010

Contractors Tied to Effort to Track and Kill Militants

KABUL, Afghanistan — Under the cover of a benign government information-gathering program, a Defense Department official set up a network of private contractors in Afghanistan and Pakistan to help track and kill suspected militants, according to military officials and businessmen in Afghanistan and the United States.

The official, Michael D. Furlong, hired contractors from private security companies that employed former C.I.A. and Special Forces operatives. The contractors, in turn, gathered intelligence on the whereabouts of suspected militants and the location of insurgent camps, and the information was then sent to military units and intelligence officials for possible lethal action in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the officials said.

While it has been widely reported that the C.I.A. and the military are attacking operatives of Al Qaeda and others through unmanned, remote-controlled drone strikes, some American officials say they became troubled that Mr. Furlong seemed to be running an off-the-books spy operation. The officials say they are not sure who condoned and supervised his work.

For full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/15/world/asia/15contractors.html?pagewanted=all

nother way is possible, a completely different way. I’ll sum up and change direction with a personal reflection on one gift in the midst of the indispensable gracious love I receive from Ande, children, family and friends that keeps me going in these troubled and hopeful times. At daily mass a couple of days per week—Holy Communion, Eucharist, meeting my God creator, in community. United in my center for a moment in time, vibrant warm reminder of eternal wonder of all creation contained within my infinitesimally small yet of some still valued self – all interconnectedness of universal timeless God the perfection of every person—at once—a resurrection gift, reborn out of suffering. I don’t feel this echo with the almighty-minuscule-forever, every time. This week I did. It’s still there always regardless.

Illumination by Kathy Brahney

*To read more of these sections of the Empire Strikes Back transcript, see http://www.blueharvest.net/scoops/esb-script.shtml

WILL APRIL 15TH BECOME THE NEW ELECTION DAY--WAR OR PEACE, VOTE WITH YOUR CITIZEN TAX DOLLARS?

For full size copy: see http://www.fcnl.org/

"Let them march all they want, as long as they continue to pay their taxes."

--Alexander Haig, U.S. Secretary of State

Commenting in 1982 on the march in support of nuclear disarmament U.N. Special Session on the NonProliferation Treaty [largest demonstration in NYC history] -- Renewed demonstration on same issue--May 2, 2010--Consider coming with us.

April 15, Federal Income Tax Day, has come and gone again. Sic transit pecuniae. People here in the Port Huron area, who have hoped and worked for more peaceful prosperous times, can review and settle past accounts, with an eye towards a more demanding future.

small group had invested in an IRS tax redirection idea, Iraq Peace Bonds, to not pay a portion of their tax due until the Iraq war ended. This protest was an attempt to put money where their mouths and hearts had been—against this war and the war industry. In April 2007 a presentation of a $1,300 check was made to the St. Clair Co. Library.

Of the eleven people involved there have been no reported dire consequences. One has still maintained funds in escrow, with no IRS attempt to demand payment. My wife Ande and I had the $300 we'd not paid, and contributed for peace [over 2 years to a peace tax escrow account where that money still exists], electronically subtracted from President Bush's second nationwide tax rebate check program. No prior notification of a tax debt, nor demand for payment—just effective U.S. agency to agency math action.

heckmate for the government this time, but we're re-positioning. And no others had this done to their rebate checks. No one received threatening collection or lien notices from the government, which have been fairly common for tax resisters in the past. Perhaps it's the individually small dollar amounts involved. Perhaps some in the IRS are somewhat sympathetic.

The regular letter we've sent, along with [electronically in our case] filing our 1040 forms, to the IRS [c.c. our Senators and Representative] do help our cause. It appears that with no real end in sight to our wars, despite the election of President Obama, and the rising power of corporations now masquerading in the political process as extremely well-heeled persons, we will have much more to do to bring true change. Will April 15th Tax Day become the new Election Day--war or peace, vote with your citizen tax dollars? Vote up or down with your taxes, because on the second Tuesday in November the ballot box is already stuffed with corporate campaign dollars?

An updated version of this Letter to the IRS and Elected Officials is included below. Please thoughtfully and prayerfully consider sending it or similar to the IRS & Congress, even if you've already done this year's taxes. For more information on the details of these efforts to re-direct tax money for peace please contact the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee, http://www.nwtrcc.org/ . It's very good for the spirit to do this in community with others in your local area.


"I feel that the supreme obligation of every Christian, taking precedence over absolutely everything else, is to devote themselves by the best means at their disposal to a struggle to preserve the human race from annihilation and to abolish war as the essential means to accomplish this end." --Thomas Merton, 1962

To the IRS and Elected Officials:

I am scandalized by the amount of my tax dollars being used for war. Every month almost $9 billion is being spent on the unjust war in Iraq--no definite end in sight. Now we have re-surged in Afghanistan’s impossible endless war, spending $1,000,000 per new soldier deployed. Approximately 50% of federal income taxes are being used for current and past military expenses. Corporations, many with military ties, are now, by U.S. Supreme Court decision, to be considered persons. As such they will be able to pour even more money into elections, putting them firmly in control of our politics. Democracy is in danger.

I believe in the peaceful purposes of taxation for the common good, but when these funds are used to invade and occupy countries for private company access to oil resources, and when we bail out reckless financial firms, then only evil can come from this abuse of power. It is therefore moral and patriotic to begin withholding and redirecting these monies used in unjust war and propping up corpulent corporations. If instead this money were invested in peace initiatives and aid programs we could truly build a better and more secure world.

I feel so strongly about this that I am in the process of arranging to not pay $______ of my taxes owed to the IRS for 2010. I will either set this money aside to pay when it will not be used for these wars, or will give this amount to programs that help build true peace and security. I will settle this account, when we end our occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

I understand that the IRS may use its enforcement procedures to collect this money from me, but I hope that you will instead join me in this refusal to pay for unjust war. Civil rights in the South began to build community, when people started to find ways to cross the line together. Here we have a civil right and duty of peacemaking.


Signature ____________________________________

Date ____________

Name [print] _________________________________

Address ________________________________________

Street City State Zip

Letter illuminations by Kathy Brahney

PLAN{T} A GOOD WAY TO CELEBRATE-- EARTH DAY --APRIL 22, 2010

NOW YOU SEE IT, NOW YOU DON’T, DISARMAMENT

There were hopeful news stories this week about a new STrategic Arms Reduction Treaty signed between Russia and the U.S. in Prague. Our President Barack Obama has stated one year ago, the intention to go further, to abolish all nuclear weapons worldwide. He convenes a summit this week of 47 world leader to discuss how to limit nuclear material and technology so it doesn’t get in to the “wrong hands.” Iran, North Korea, and Syria were not invited, and Israel’s Netanyahu excused himself.* As the 4-10-10 AP story headlined, “U.S.: Al-Qaida exemplifies new-age nuclear threat.” In the first week of May the countries of the world will convene at the United Nations, as they do every 5 years, to try again to implement the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty {yet to be signed by Israel, to the dismay of everyone else in the Middle East}. We purport to see well the speck in the evil-axis others’ nuclear arms programs, while we still ignore the huge nuclear weapons plank that distorts our own vision, and is a scandal to the rest of the world.




Unfortunately, the hopeful news about this START treaty just signed with Russia, to reduce the nuclear arsenal by "up to 30%, has its underside—a nuclear warheads shell game. “The new agreement with the Russians is over launchers and delivery systems, and does not require the dismantlement of weapons.” As with the many previous treaties, a great number of nuclear warheads are not required to be destroyed, only to be stored in warehouses not far from the missiles from which they are removed.

And please read the article in the NYT of 4-08-10: Disposal of Plutonium From U.S.-Russian Disarmament Is Likely to Take Decades.** One reason that full dismemberment of warheads continues to be delayed is that the new reactors supposed to be capable of truly dismantling the nuclear cores of bombs, have not yet been built. Not one has been built. After decades of warehousing nuclear warheads, ours and the Russians, we are still not committed to developing and implementing the difficult technology of truly disposing of these weapons of mass destruction. The possibility persists that those that on paper have been part of disarmament will reappear on modernized missile delivery systems. That is the hedged bet of influential strategists in our government who’ve been given the name “the nuclear priesthood” in deference to their devotion to the unmitigated power of our nuclear arms race dominance.

ur president, and a number these nuclear weapons strategists, have begun to defect, towards common sense— you’ll never convince others not to build them when you continue to rely on them yourself. [ One website with details of this movement: http://www.globalzero.org/, and another movement***--see below] The thousands that lie around in warehouses, as well as those still attached to missiles, all increase the real possibility that a rogue state, terrorist group, or a distinguished superpower, will re-discover a way to explode one, bringing a renewed level of disaster to the whole human race. We must work and pray, in whatever way we can, to support efforts for true effective disarmament, nuclear and conventional. As tax day, April 15, approaches, let’s examine again the connections we all have with WMD and societies that idolize weaponry.

But consider the utterly fabulous amount of money, planning, energy, anxiety, and care which go into the production of weapons which almost immediately become obsolete and have to be scrapped. Contrast all this with the pitiful little gesture: "pray for peace" piously canceling our four-cent stamps! --- Thomas Merton, Trappist monk, 1962. [p. 35 Passion for Peace]

Prayer and sacrifice must be used as the most effective spiritual weapons in the war against war, and like all weapons they must be used with deliberate aim: not just with a vague aspiration for peace and security, but against violence and against war.--- Thomas Merton, 1962 [p.26 Passion for Peace]

*http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/09/world/middleeast/09mideast.html?ref=world

**http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/09/world/europe/09nuke.html

***http://propositiononein2010.blogspot.com/


Illuminations by Kathy Brahney

EASTER COMES--PUT AWAY THE SWORD OF UNHOLY WARS OVER THE HOLY LAND

Coalition jets over buring oil wells in Kuwait during first Iraq War

IN THE MIDDLE EAST / IN THE WEST


An eye for an eye

An ear for an ear

A mouth for a mouth

A toe for a toe

A tooth for a tooth

A finger for a finger

A brain for a brain

A heart for a heart

A bullet for a bullet

A soul for a soul

A Predator rocket and bulldozer, for a suicide bomber.


The spirit of perpetual vengeant homicide and holocaust

Thrives on the ongoing body count

Only to be extinguished by courageous acts

Of forgiveness and reconciliation.


In the West we export the weapons, machines and money that fuel the conflagrations—

Until the stench of human sacrifice tortures our nostrils

Reaches somehow beyond TV sets

And in the face of worldwide asphyxiation the only hope is

To renounce our addiction to the militarized oil economy

To convert our fear to trust, in being all God’s family.


By Michael McCarthy PA-C, 01-23-02

Marsh Arabs in an area of southern Iraq not yet touched directly by first or second Iraq Wars

Certainly our wars in the Middle East continue to rub salt into the wounds of a huge U.S. military presence in this area of the world--and Israel remains our primary foothold--the biggest recipient of U.S. military foreign aid. Since its creation, the unjust displacement of Palestinians remains the open wound that won't allow for peace in the Middle East. The Holy Land is in need of healing no weapons can bring. Israel's "Operation Cast Lead," and ongoing blockade against the people of Gaza is a most recent bad example.

Work and pray for peace in Palestine & Israel this Easter. Let justice and mercy resurrect a right relationship.

For ongoing action opportunities contact: http://www.endtheoccupation.org/ and http://www.michiganpeaceteam.org/

For interesting balanced stories of recent events see:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/10/world/middleeast/10jerusalem.html?ref=world and http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/world/middleeast/03gaza.html?ref=world

Illumination by Kathy Brahney