Category Archives: War & Peace

Arguing With God: Quaker House & My 9-11 Story

Back home in Pennsylvania, I struggled through the next days, like everyone else, to make sense of what had happened. Only one thing about the aftermath seemed clear to me: the U.S would soon be at war. Where and when were obscure, but this had seemed to me a bottom-line certainty even before we finally rose and left Arla alone with her smoking television screen that morning.

This certainty was not a sign of any prophetic gift. It came, I think, more from my roots in a military family. Many of the reflexes of that culture were ingrained: You (whoever “you” were, we still weren’t sure) don’t get away with attacking the Pentagon, the nerve center of all the US military. Somebody will soon face some heavy payback from the armed men and women whose center and stronghold is in that building.

And chances were very good that when this war started, there would be many more of the innocent killed in their frenzied, fiery search for the guilty. U.S. revenge would be painted on some part of the world in a very broad brush of death.

And me? What would I do in the face of this impending war? The attacks had shaken me, truly, but had not undermined my basic Quaker pacifist convictions. I had just seen murder, on a huge scale. But more murder was not an answer to murder. That was my conviction on September 10; it remained so on September 12th. And I also sensed that I would have some small part in struggling to frame and lift up some voice for an alternative. Hell, any serious Quaker (or Christian?) would. Right?
But what alternative? And how to raise it?

I didn’t know. But Quakers in circumstances like these are taught to wait for “way to open.” Our spirituality is that if we are properly attentive, we will be given “leadings,” which will point us in the way to go.

Tom Fox And The Last Supper

Tom had grown up in Chattanooga, then did twenty years in the Marine band in Washington DC. He played bass clarinet – and was about as unmilitary a soldier as one could feature. He began attending Friends meetings during this time. My first memories of him was being at meeting in a khaki uniform.
After the Marine band, he became a baker and assistant supervisor at a health food supermarket. He was good at this, and his bosses wanted him to move up in management.

But Tom heard a “different drummer,” especially after September 11, 2001. With a war on, he felt called to “pursue peace” in a concrete way. After much prayer and reflection, he joined the Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT).

CPT sets out to bring the “weapons of the spirit” into the front lines of conflict, places where death and life are often but a hair’s breadth apart. This was dangerous work, in a region where conflicts seem hopelessly intractable.

Is Jesus Just Like A U.S. Soldier??

Let me point out, Sir & Ma’am, that in fact, many other “defining forces” HAVE indeed offered to “die for me,” starting with my mother.
Yes: close to two thousand mothers in the U.S. not only “offer” to die but actually do die either giving birth or shortly afterward, every year.

Then there were numerous first responders: firefighters, police officers (more than a hundred killed per year on duty) and the like, who took many very serious risks on my behalf.

Rather, what soldiers actually offer to do is KILL for “me” — not at my personal request, but on orders from strangers in Washington.

Jesus didn’t do that. In fact, when his followers started to fight to protect him, he told them to stop. (Read Matthew 26 & John 18)

The Photo I Hoped I’d Never See

It remains unclear how over 450 additional troops would overcome the central problem to the training effort in Iraq: a lack of recruits to train. . . . The announcement was greeted with indifference and scepticism in Iraq, where efforts to arm local Sunnis opposed to Isis have foundered and training programmes by the US have made little progress in producing disciplined Sunni fighters capable of challenging the militant group.
“The increase doesn’t have an effect,” said Hisham al-Hashimi, an Iraqi scholar and expert on Isis. “It is a weak step to reduce pressure from the media.”

Two Unforgettable Profiles In Courage: 1969

David McReynolds on why he wrote the “Coming Out” article in 1969: “those of us who were homosexual hid this fact when we spoke of the Gandhian principle of absolute truth. Yes, truth and honesty about everything … except our own lives, which were in violation of the laws, and about which we had to keep silent in order to speak the truth about war and peace, racism, capitalism. Truth about everything… except the one thing that could destroy us.
My article was an effort to be honest at last.”