Tuesday, September 11, 2001

Kevin C. Morris

While still stunned and stumbling through the smoldering haze - graves un-dug and tears yet shed - America appears to have departed down an uncertain path, led by an un-elected president of questionable capabilities, visibly overwhelmed, and obviously puppeted by a cabal of un-elected government officials, including (not surprisingly) his father, George the First.

Just hours into this mind-numbing nightmare, George the Second's Cold Warriors (Rumsfeld, Cheney, Powell), chose one short, yet powerful word, guaranteed to gain them unprecedented and virtually unchallenged and unchecked political, economic and military power. Craftily designed to inflame, though not enlighten, this little four-letter word may lead the American public and the world down a steep, slippery slope to sure destruction.

Perfectly scripted, President Bush clumsily evoked this talismanic term four different times in his address on the evening of the eleventh, and has since proclaimed that America will "rid the world of evil." And with that one magic word, America and the world has set out on a path to war -- undeclared and unlimited -- against yet another indefinable, unidentifiable, unlocateable enemy like communism and drugs. In just days of this incalculable tragedy, George II began amassing power: receiving a $40 billion down payment on a limitless war, unanimous Congressional approval to "use all necessary and appropriate force," near-universal international support of total war, 35,000 reservists called up, civil liberties broadly curtailed by request of the Attorney General, all with sweeping popular approval from a nation stilled stunned and stumbling through the smoldering haze, graves un-dug and tears yet shed.

Capitalizing on the people's sheer grief and rage, irreversible decisions have already been made and actions already taken, the consequences of which we haven't even begun to imagine. Like sheep to the slaughter, we're being herded hastily by the previous century's warlords into what they so lustily refer to as "the first war of the twenty-first century." All this under the vague but utterly impossible pretext of "rooting out evil" and evil-doers who at this point we only suspect, and using terms ironically similar to those of the perpetrators of this heinous crime: "by any means necessary."

Oh when will we ever learn the futility of war and the evil of absolutism from all sides. "By any means necessary" mirrors the maniacal mindset of madmen like Osama Bin Laden, Hitler and McVeigh who were willing to perpetrate the same evil they saw in their enemies. By evoking such a lofty theological notion, we like them, have committed ourselves to a path of extreme zealotry.

"By any means necessary" justifies the evil acts we have committed and plan to commit in the implementation of a so-called just war, just as it was used to defend the holocaust we witnessed on the morning of the eleventh of September. Warning of this perverse worldview during Friday's Prayer and Remembrance Service, Rev. Baxter, Dean of Washington's National Cathedral, admonished that "as we act, we should not become the evil we deplore."

But before the bullet escapes the barrel, before we are too far down this road to retaliation, I'd like to awaken the silent pacifists among us with the words Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke in 1963, twelve years before the fall of Saigon: "Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction. The chain reaction of evil -- hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars - must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation." Peace, you ask incredulously, the pain and bitterness so palpable it throbs in our throats? What about the innocent victims? The cowardly criminals? To this, I reply with the words of Gandhi, the tiny man who defeated Great Britain with soul force, "I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent." For no matter how well they slake our thirst for revenge, war and violence come at too great a cost.

In the calculus of the old world order whose central theme was mutually assured destruction, only evil trumps evil. Therefore, in the macho name of conquering evil, we are suddenly willing to accept the evil of government-sponsored assassination, collateral military damage, callous capitalism, racial profiling and thousands of innocent victims, while paying the hefty price of squandering our scarce national resources and fundamental civil liberties. With the agenda dominated by former hawks and a wide-eyed windup doll as our leader, the alternative of peaceful reconstruction has been dismissed and belittled with no thought or public debate. Haven't we learned from the wars of the last century in which millions died, the seeds sown springing forth today?

So may we adopt a new world order in this new millennium and choose the road less traveled to peace and not destruction and, squinting through our streaming tears, remember the words of the man President Bush considers his favorite philosopher, "Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the Children of God." For peace is neither passive, nor a surrender.