“We live in a decade of war,” Mirjana Spoljaric, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross, told a New York Times reporter. She cautions that we are on the brink of a third world war. “We now count twice as many conflicts as 15 years ago. We are at 130 international and noninternational armed conflicts that we classify in our system. That’s the highest number since the Second World War. So I think it’s time we stop admiring the problem and start acting against this.”
Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac, director of the Bethlehem Institute for Peace and Justice, observes, “It has been three years since the genocide in Gaza began. … A genocide about which no one can claim they did not know. A genocide that the world has failed to stop. The images of people pulled from beneath the rubble did not stop. The images of people starving in tents did not stop. The images of dismembered bodies, of people wrapped in white shrouds or flags, of mass funerals did not stop. The images of grieving parents, of people weeping, of children left without their parents did not stop.”
These eye witness accounts of war have left me with the question: How long?
How long will the debates, the negotiations, the excuses go on while each additional day of war is yet one more day of death and injury and destruction? The leaders of our nations act as if they have all the time in the world to call a halt to war. Even the conventions and treaties and rules of war are being ignored. Yet, there is no time left for the women and children who will die today in wars across the continents. There is little urgency to call a halt to the sending of young men and women into harm’s way. The nations of the world and the leaders of those nations have lost their ethical and moral compass. And here I am, also biding my time by shouting down a rain barrel a protest that splashes back into my face.
It is time for our U.S. senators and representatives to remain in session, seven days a week, until they pave the path to the end of war and a just peace. They must take the money and profit out of the war machine and put it into aid for the disadvantaged and into the cultivating of good neighbors. It is time for citizens to refrain from glorifying the acts of war. It is time to stop sending our military people into the dehumanizing theater of war. It is time to tell our young people that the real heroes are those who refuse to take up arms but instead seek to serve their fellow human beings. It is time to expose those who profit from war — manufacturing the war machines and banking on the wealth earned to rebuild after the bombs have left their craters and crashed buildings. It is time to abjure those who hold the meaning of life to be wealth and coercive power.
Spoljaric has affirmed, “We are good people, we want to live with people we love, we want to have children that thrive, we want to be able to build a house and know that our grandchildren will be better off than us. This is a very normal human motivation. Our motivation is not to live in rubble. How could it be?”
The alternative to a world of rubble is a world without 130 armed conflicts. Many of these conflicts will lose their meaning when arms are put down and a hand up is offered. It’s not like we must start without any precedent. We have treaties, international conventions and we have identified basic human rights. We have the injunctions of many religious faiths and the ethical pronouncements that scorn violence and praise love of neighbor.
Humanity has tried war for centuries. Perhaps it is time to act on our moral and ethical belief systems. People who are in the midst of war plead for it to stop. Perhaps it’s time to listen to them.
John Buttrick writes from his Vermont Folk Rocker in his Concord home, Minds Crossing.