If only
George Bush had been Amish
The world may have been spared
from an uncontrollable urge to kill in the name of an all-loving
(yet, no doubt, rather ill-tempered) God
October 15, 2006
iranian.com
The Amish response to the brutal slaying of five
of their own offspring in an old fashioned, one-roomed school house
was a blueprint
for how President George Walker Bush should have responded to
the slaughter of nearly 3,000 of our own citizens in the tragedy
of September 11, 2001.
The merciful decision to forgive a deranged
man who, for whatever reason, chose to project a self-inflicted
sense of hate upon a classroom of nothing but innocent children
was exactly as God would have had it, exactly how he would have
responded if it had been one of his own children who had been
slain.
Something like that of “the cross” when
his son, Jesus, spoke the immortal words, “Father forgive
them for they know not what they do!” A message for the ages,
one for all of mankind to hear, even to understand. A reminder
that hate might well rule the day, but, in the end, only love
has the genuine capacity to heal a world caught up in the agonizing
grip of pain and suffering.
However, such was not to be the case
for our president as he chose not to travel the path of peace,
but rather a way traversed
by
men determined to mete out justice according to an eye-for-an-eye,
clenched-fist law of lex talionis, one that led a world of onlookers
to condemn what turned out to be a shameful display of “shock
and awe,” a merciless attack (by the greatest military power
the world has ever seen) upon a country of folks preveniently bombed
into a near stone-age existence, proving our country to be that
of a true bully, one motivated by national glory and corporate
greed, all in order to prove to the world who the boss really is,
who it is that shall have “the last say.”
However,
as it turns out, having “the last say” depends not
so much upon who is able to throw the final punch, but rather who
it is that is most wise, who is able to impel folks to be a friend
of he who happens to be crowned as victor.
Almost as if the world
had been caught short in some sort of sleeping (counting its peace
dividend) slumber, 9/11 pounced upon the body-politik
as if slapped in the face. Everyone, except for those of Al-Qaeda
(and a complement of heedlessly, inattentive Bush administration
officials), was shocked, stricken to the core of their being, put
on notice that the world had been irrevocably changed, modified
to such an extent that nothing would ever be the same, that a new
world order would from this point on be required.
If only the Bush
administration had done its homework. If only they had been prepared.
If only George Walker Bush had been, as he had so routinely claimed
to be, that of a true Christian, a resolute, born-again believing
follower of the Lord Jesus Christ, the world may have been spared
the unfathomable travesty of a “nation of believers” driven
insane by an uncontrollable urge to kill in the name of an all-loving
(yet, no doubt, rather ill-tempered) God.
If only George Walker
Bush had taken the time to read the same Bible as that of the Amish,
a simple pastoral community wanting
to carry out the merciful requests of a loving God, a people who
took to heart the words of one who so clearly taught that the wisdom
of the world is no more than mere foolishness to God, that the
urge to take revenge upon those who might choose to hurt another
is nothing short of folly, that the decision to strike back is
like pouring kerosene on a lighted fire, a catalyst that transforms
enmity to into a certain desire to kill.
If only our president would
have had the capacity to comprehend that having been attacked,
the world, for the first time since
the days of Pearl Harbor, seemed to feel sorry for us, were more
than ready to help us. We had the world in the very palm of our
hand, and all that was required was to simply place the so-called
terrorist problem in that of their own lap, and, out of an empathic
concern for us as a people, they would have immediately come to
our rescue.
The United Nations had placed inspectors in Iraq,
no weapons of mass destruction had been found, and, for the cost
of
merely one week of war in Iraq, we could have financed the work
of a phalanx of inspectors for decades to come. And with the balance
of money having been spent on a war lasting longer than that of
our involvement in World War II (an amount nearing one half trillion
dollars!) we could have paved “the roads of the world” with
the glittering gold of gracious and benevolent concern for others
by constructing medical clinics for the sick, schools for those
without education, water wells for those living in parched lands,
and by feeding the tens of millions of staving children around
the world... random acts of kindness that would have
generated enough good will to last until the end of time.
And all of such while having pretended to be a noble, Christ-centered,
nation, aided and abetted by a sanctimonious undercurrent of jack-booted,
xenophobic apologists having marched their way into the bloodstained
jaws of empire, we will one day be taken to task, forced, by all
of humanity, to take responsibility for having allowed ourselves
to have become a venerable “den of thieves,” a nation
condemned for having led the world into an apocalypse of horrors,
an astonishingly brutal abolition of the world... as we now know
it.”Comment
About
Doug Soderstrom, Ph.D., is professor of psychology at Wharton County Junior College in Wharton, Texas.
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