From The Half-Red House

A video columnist for the Washington Post visited Peterborough and talked to anti-war activists, including me and other folks at our vigil late last Summer. The resulting report is “balanced” (i.e. it includes pro-war and anti-war videos from three parts of the country). I also wonder at the title of the Peterborough vigil, “Anger on the Left”, but I hope it is widely seen. Here is a link to the “column”
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/interactives/nationdivided/?wpisrc=newsletter&wpisrc=newsletter)

Last Saturday, about an hour after the end of our weekly peace vigil, I happened to walk back past the Town House and saw a lone young man of about 18 holding a hand-drawn sign saying “Go Bush”. I stopped and asked him what his sign meant: did he mean that he approved of George Bush or that he wanted George Bush to go (away). He said, it means “Go Bush!”. with the emphasis on the last syllable, as in a football cheer. In six years of post-9-11 peace vigils, I had not seen a lone protester appear in Peterborough to support the war before, and I was curious. This young man was being very brave in support of his beliefs.

I asked him what he specially liked about the President, and he replied, ” He’s a Christian.” How did he decide to come to the Town House and hold this sign today? Had he known about our peace vigil? He said he didn’t know about the peace vigil, but that he had gotten off work early and wanted to express his support of the President. What kind of work did he do? He worked in construction, lived in New Ipswich, was a member of Our Redeemer Lutheran Church.

Then I asked what he thought of the Iraq War. He said war was necessary and inevitable, that we needed to defend our country. I asked if he thought the United States was under serious military threat from any country in the world, and he replied that yes, the threat was from terrorists. “They” came over to our country and killed three thousand  Americans on September 11, 2001. We had to go “over there” and fight “them”, or presumably they would wipe us out.

In his eyes, the enemy was clearly a powerful, united “them” that included the Iraqis. I didn’t try arguing, but just pointed out that the war had cost not only thousands of American soldiers’ lives, but probably more than a million Iraqi civilian lives. He replied immediately, “I don’t care about Iraqis. They all hate us and want to kill us. They hate our God.”

That last statement required a response. I said that Muslims worshipped the same God as Christians. I noted that the people in his church were known for praying frequently and that Muslims probably prayed even more frequently. He said their God was not his God; his God was Jesus Christ our Savior. I mentioned that, as I understood it, most Christian denominations recognized a God with at least three different aspects, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. He said yes, that together these aspects made up the true God. I pointed out that Muslims accept the Old Testament , honor Jesus as a prophet, and believe that they are worshipping the same true God as the Christions, a God who has many aspects. I said that devout Christians and Muslims have much in common and should be able to speak with each other and work out differences without resorting to warfare.

Realizing that his pro-Bush sign might indeed be ambiguous, he turned his sign around to reveal the words “Pray for Our Troops”. I said that while I thought we would have to disagree on the benevolence of the Bush administration and the wisdom of the war, we could both agree that the soldiers in Iraq needed our prayers. I said that I thought most people in the world who pray say words very similar to the Lord’s Prayer, asking protection from evil for themselves and their families and promising to forgive the sins of others in exchange for having their own sins forgiven.

Encounters like this don’t happen frequently, and they need to be honored for the rare gifts they are. Starting an argument about the fact that the 9-11-2001 attacks  were not carried out by Iraqis, that they were condemned by virtually all Muslim religious authorities, and that the relative military strength of the Islamic nations is tiny in comparison with the military strength of the US, would have been counterproductive. What is needed is some opening of minds and hearts to each other across these divides. The fact that I am nominally a Christian, and that I have some familiarity with the Bible that his community reveres, that we live in adjacent towns and know some of the same people, can be a building block for trust that may lead to a future exchange of ideas. I hope he doesn’t have to go to Iraq himself to find out the truth of the political ideas his community as passed on to him. Nobody deserves to die for lies and prejudices.

It is such a tragedy that the innate bravery of young men such as this one is funnelled into supporting and participating in mass violence.

Dennis Kucinich has introduced a second bill to impeach the Vice President and introduced it in the House Tuesday as a “privileged bill”. The bill is numbered HR 799 (His first impeachment bill, which is still mired in committee, was numbered 333), and you can see a video of his speech at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJYbgouqlMw
The bill is well-researched and supported with undeniable evidence of the Vice President’s past misdeeds and duplicity.

When an attempt was made to “table” the bill (i.e. kill it), an overwhelming bi-partisan majority kept the bill alive, but, in a cynical political maneuver, the majority of Democrats voted to refer the bill to the Judiciary Committee, which avoided a floor debate.

A debate on impeaching Cheney would inevitably also be a debate on the policies he is now pushing… using lies to get the US into a war with Iran, privatizing and shrinking legitimate social welfare functions of the government, and whittling away at constitutional rights domestically.

My congressman, Paul Hodes told me a few weeks ago that he thought impeachment of the Vice President and the President would be a distraction and a waste of time when important issues were before the House and the current administration has only a year left. He has since taken the laudable position that war funding should not be included in the budget unless it was tied to a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. Nonetheless, he pooh-poohed the notion that Dick Cheney and other administration officials plan to attack Iran before the 2008 election and declare martial law. Hodes asserts that things are under control, that we poor iuninformed citizens shouldn’t worry, and that Congress would have some say in the matter, If he and a few other Democrats, including Vermont’s Peter Welch and Massachusetts’ Niki Tsongas, had voted against sending the bill to the committee, it might now be on the floor, and Congress would actually be having its say on these important intertwined issues.