Our future safety and political freedoms rest upon whether Americans recognize sooner, rather than later, the terrifying truth that our traditional, well-intentioned and well-funded militaristic approaches to national defense and espionage have very limited preventative effects, and cannot keep us safe from the horrors of terrorism or global thermonuclear war during a century of instant communications and easily-accessible lethal weaponry. Furthermore, such anachronistic, adversarial strategies actually provoke increasing threats to our country and our planet. Even as we squander more and more money, energy, and time, they advance the likelihood that our worst nightmares will become realities.
The next big terrorist attack on the United States will determine the direction of our political future. As 9/11 proved, confused and terrified Americans will support any leader who offers them reassurance, whether or not their proffered “plan” for safety is well-founded, tested, logical, reliable, understandable, open to public debate, cost-effective, democratic, credible, or even, in existence.
Rubber-stamping endless homeland defense expenditures primarily insures a politically-necessary illusion of security, since our “homeland” is clearly indefensible. Sending our grandchildren off to fight in distant, unwinnable pre-emptive invasions and occupations is morally unconscionable and fiscally reckless. Bankrolling unwieldy spy bureaucracies undermines the very freedoms such actions are meant to save. Focusing media attention on the weaknesses of our perceived enemies, and rattling our sabers self-righteously in their direction only heightens dangerous tensions. Pursuing “big-winner-takes-all” trade tactics lines a few greedy pockets and hurts everyone else. None of these strategies will keep us safe, and none can solve the real problems of the 21st century.
What we can learn, before nuclear horror humbles us all beyond recognition, is that there is no exclusive way to provide safety for any single nation or group of nations, no way to guarantee peace for only U.S. citizens and their allies. There are no constructive pathways to safety that can be selfishly withheld from some, or from any, on this unpredictable, unmicromanageable globe.
Only a universally inclusive path of international cooperation and non-violence can offer any long-term safety to Americans and our fellow-earthlings. Before the next terrorist attack, we must embrace the ancient wisdom inherent in all religions, that violence engenders only more violence, that war creates new problems without solving old ones, and that hatred begets more hate. Citizens of all nations will inevitably suffer tragic injustices during this violent century. We need not, however, add to their sum.
People everywhere want to live their lives in liberty, and to pursue their individual and collective dreams uninterrupted by violence. The only path to the very peace we all want for ourselves and our friends and families, is a path we can only walk together, along with everyone else. If we want peace and safety, we must teach it, live it, and offer it to all, just as if we lived in a world of next-door-neighbors. Which we do.
The night before his death, Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “The choice is no longer between violence and nonviolence. It’s nonviolence—or nonexistence.”
The world can learn peaceful ways without facing the devastation of nuclear annihilation. We can open our minds and hearts now to the practical promise of non-violence, before greater tragedies befall our world. Non-violence has come of age; it is an idea whose time has finally come.
The cancer of violence is insidiously attacking, organ by organ, the body of humanity, destroying the nature and quality of human life on our small planet. Only when we learn to apply non-violent solutions to this century’s most urgent problems—energy sufficiency, disease, injustice, hopelessness, hunger, greed, environmental degradation, natural disasters, ignorance, addictions, prejudice, nuclear proliferation, crime, poverty, war, terrorism, and violence itself—can we restore health and safety to the embattled body of mankind and to our mother earth.
Which path to safety will we choose during our next elections? A violent, power-based one? Or the path of non-violence, Jesus’ path, Gandhi’s path, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s path, the gentle path of all those around the world who are now peacefully resisting tyrants? Do we want a path to a police state or a peace state?
In the past, we elected many representatives of the old politics of fear and aggression. During our next election, we can turn away from demagogues who rule our emotions with the fear of fear itself, turning instead to new, moral leadership which shows us peaceful pathways to greater global safety.
Nothing matters more than that our new leaders embrace the universal, timeless, and essential values of faith, hope, and love….
Because:
Only faithful leaders trust in God’s redemptive love for every one of earth’s children, and in international dialogue and peaceful cooperative efforts, disavowing the politics of exclusion, polarization, and dehumanization;
Only hopeful leaders join with like-minded light-bearers of other nations, stand with them, work with them, and lift all nations and peoples up, leaving no one behind;
Only loving leaders forgive, and let the past–and past blame–go, accepting, supporting, and respecting human life everywhere.
Led with faith, hope, and love, Americans can work with the whole global community to make the world a safer, more inclusive place for all. We can swing open, to greater cooperation and mutual support, the closed doors of secretive agencies. We can build new peace initiatives within our dedicated, patriotic Defense Department. We can develop a volunteer force of unarmed citizens to observe violent conflicts at home and abroad. We can establish a U.S. Peace Academy, equivalent in honor, distinction, and service to our proud military academies. We can found a cabinet-level Department of Peace, to influence policy, conflict resolution, and decision-making at the highest levels, as well as in our home towns and school curricula. We can apply cutting-edge peace research to the transformation of our combative diplomatic, justice, welfare, and education systems.
We don’t have to keep on contributing to an ever-more-insane world. We can decide now to work together to build a different one, where acceptance, respect, and support for human life everywhere is the new highest value, an inclusive world where Americans reach out in friendship and forgiveness to former enemies, and where all live together in safety and peace in a shared global home.
Wherever non-violent methods have been applied to political, personal, global, and local conflicts, they have proved to be successful, cost-effective approaches which defuse tensions, resolve conflicts, and heal past grievances. Non-violence, the best approach to a sound national defense program, offers us all the promise of a more effective, values-based, long-term path to a safer future.
Please send comments to epharmon@adelphia.net