Inside
NCR
These thoughts come on March 19, the
day of the war deadline. Even in the middle of the country, people are jittery.
By the time this reaches you, we’ll all know much more about the war plans
and how they go. Will it be a relatively easy walk to Baghdad? Will there be
street fighting? If the planned bombing is to be several times more intense
than it was in the first Gulf War, how much of Baghdad will be destroyed? What
will be the extent of civilian deaths?
Questions.
The air is full of them, so are the op-ed pages, the grocery
stores, the post offices, the schools. We all know that something momentous is
about to happen.
CNN drones on. Retired generals, security experts, military
analysts are everywhere. We are “flown into” the weather in the
Kuwaiti desert, given regular updates on the night skies.
Questions and waiting.
I had calls from some friends, most lamenting that war seemed
inevitable now, the 48 hours ticking off easily in some places, more nervously
in others. One spoke of how the North Jersey hospitals in her area were said to
be among the best prepared in the country to handle cases from a terrorist
chemical or biological attack. It was small comfort.
A call came from Mary K. Meyer, who runs a Catholic Worker house
for migrant men in one of the poorer sections of Kansas City, Kan. Mary K. is
in her 70s, a deeply prayerful woman and deeply involved in justice issues.
She’s been to Iraq twice in the past five years. She knows about people
who are desperate and who have already suffered immeasurably under
dictatorship, sanctions and persistent U.S./British bombing for the past 12
years. This day, her voice has tears in it.
Odd what comes to mind at times like
these. On the night before the deadline day, I recalled a Gerard Manley Hopkins
poem I had read several nights before in Poetry as Prayer, part of a
series by Pauline Books & Media. The poem, “God’s Grandeur,”
is the kind of lament searching out hope that can provide solace in troubled
times. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” it begins.
But the grand notion gets ground down in the next verse:
Generations have trod, have
trod, have trod;
And all is
seared with trade;
bleared, smeared
with toil;
And wears man’s
smudge and
shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot
feel,
being shod.
Maria Lichtmann, expert on the spirituality and poetics of
Hopkins, writes that he is describing what he saw as the ruin of Earth through
the lens of the Industrial Revolution of 19th century England. The sense of
mourning for the Earth is what struck me. I couldn’t help but wonder how
much deeper the lament might be today, not only in the face of environmental
degradation that has come at the hands of progress, but at the utter violence
to nature and to life that is about to be unleashed.
In recent months some have written to question why NCR has
run so many stories that question the war and so many opinion pieces opposing
the military option. Why not more of those who would find justification in the
use of violence against a bloody and oppressive dictator who has been one of
the thorns in the world’s side for more than a decade?
It is a fair question and one that certainly gets consideration in
editorial meetings here. If there is a quick answer, it would lie in what we
believe is the mission of NCR, in the conviction here that compassion
and forgiveness are central to the gospel message and to working out the
demands of justice.
The cultural machinery at the service of military might, the vast
proportion of our treasury devoted to maintaining and developing that might,
the industries, the academics, the thinkers and planners, the lobbyists, the
endless line of young lives poured into the effort is staggering. The current
military budget is $382.2 billion. More than a billion dollars a day. More than
any other nation in the world. If President Bush gets his way next year, the
budget will jump to $399 billion. The increase alone since 2001 is nearly
double or more than double the military budgets for such countries as Japan,
Great Britain, Russia, Germany and China.
Look at your local press, local television stations, the national
and international networks. They have become megaphones for the Pentagon. War
as ratings. Retired generals parade across floor-size maps discussing
strategies. The latest weapons systems are extolled and celebrated. One has to
watch long and listen hard to catch a tough question. The gods of war clearly
have center stage.
From our little corner of the world,
we look out and see that things, indeed, are out of balance. The arguments and
justifications for war are everywhere. The administration needs no help in
getting that message across. There is reason to raise questions about the
legitimate use of force and how to respond to evil in the world, but our
investment in military solutions is so out of balance to any other approach
that any serious discussion of alternatives to war is left languishing on the
sidelines.
So, given the economy of our pages and the limits of staff and
energy and resources, NCR turns to those who might raise a question,
even in the atmosphere of overheated nationalism that has prevailed since 9/11.
We will hardly begin to budge the balance, so much is arrayed against options
to war.
When so much money and brainpower is
poured into pursuits of war, little is left with which to imagine a different
approach to the world. President Dwight Eisenhower knew that and expressed it
eloquently in his famous 1961 speech warning of the effects of an uncontrolled
military-industrial complex. “Every gun that is made, every war ship
launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense a theft from those
who are hungry and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This
world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its
laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”
No longer is this world in arms just
spending the hopes of its children, it is increasingly reaching deeper into
their childhood to turn them toward military pursuits. That is why, although we
had a second cover prepared for the outbreak of war, we decided to stay with
the cover you see on this issue. Six months ago we asked Claire Schaeffer-Duffy
to begin working on a series on military recruiting. While the numbers may not
be huge by Defense Department standards, the steady and remarkable growth of
the presence of the military in our youngsters’ classrooms should be a
point of deep concern, not pride.
That military training should become the easy solution to lousy
schools is reflective of the fatal lack of imagination that begins with a
bloated defense budget and easy resort to war. It filters on down to kids
desperate to get on with their lives.
It is obvious that the children in these schools are willing to
subject themselves to a rigorous regimen as a way to bring order into chaotic
circumstances. Too bad all we have to offer is a doorway, ultimately, to more
violence.
The war has started. And still we
wait. For “shock and awe,” for the most horrific part, for some
resolution. We are left to pray and to hope for our youngsters in the field,
for their quick and safe return. How many are in the deserts of Iraq and Kuwait
because they needed money for school? Our thoughts also envelope the Iraqis,
the women and children who will face the awesome bombardments with little but
their homes to shield them.
Hopkins turns toward hope:
And for all this, nature is never
spent;
There lives
the dearest freshness
deep down things;
And though the last lights off
the
black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink
eastward, springs
--
Because the Holy Ghost over the
bent
World broods with warm
breast
and with ah!
bright wings.
Such hope seems distant at the
moment. For this is a time of deep sadness, so overwhelming is the evidence of
deep human failure, to use the words of Pope John Paul II. Our politicians
regularly seek God’s blessing on America, particularly in times of war.
Perhaps it would be appropriate also to beg God’s mercy.
-- Tom Roberts
My e-mail address is troberts@natcath.org
National Catholic Reporter, March 28,
2003
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