Peace Vigil
The stones will cry out.
The stones will cry out.
On the first Tuesday of every month, we have a peace vigil at our church. We pray, we share some thoughts, we read poetry, and we sing a capella. It doesn’t feel like enough, but it is something.
While we pray, bombs drop. The president says, “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran doesn’t give in to his demands. These sound like the words of a villain in a comic book. It is Lex Luthor with bad hair, or an overweight Riddler.
Our problem is that we have no superhero to fly in and cuff him. While the ordinary people of Iran suffer, our Congress does nothing to stop him, and is even considering giving him more money for missiles and drones.
During our prayers, I think about the people in Iran who are dying. Does our unstable leader believe that they are a threat? Do they have as much sway over their government as we do? If so, then we are targeting the innocents, because even with a large majority of the U.S. opposed to this war, we haven’t found a way to stop it. So we pray, and we feel betrayed.
What Trump is doing is criminal. Targeting civilian infrastructure is a violation of the Geneva Conventions. The Conventions get quite specific: article 52 says that civilian objects shall not be the object of attack, and article 54 prohibits attacking objects indispensable to civilian survival like food, water, and agriculture. Yet these are the very targets that Trump threatened.
Years ago our human society decided that it is wrong to say “All is fair in love and war.” People who hold to this proverb are saying that achieving their goals is worth any cost, even the cost of their own integrity. This is what we are witnessing today. Trump may achieve his goal of destroying Iran’s military ability, and his goal of enriching himself, but the cost has been extraordinarily high — the loss of allegiances with countries that have lasted for decades, the loss of credibility in foreign relations, the development of new enemies who may become future threats, and the loss in some quarters for the respect of human life. We are already seeing some of the effects of his erratic behavior, as no one knows whether they can trust the cease fire agreement that was pulled together at the last minute.
In America we feel this as a shift in our pride. While it may not be completely lost, and there may be some who are thrilled by our demonstrations of military power, for many in our country we no longer have the deep sense that we are on the right side of history. There is now an uncertainty, a question about whether we have stepped back from being “a beacon on the hill” to something less — just one more competitor scrabbling for power and control.
Our prayers help us to remember that there is something more that is worth working for, and even sacrificing for — goodness, righteousness, justice, and peace. A certain part of our leadership considers this naive. They believe that only power and might will win in the end. It is sad that we don’t hear about the ambition to be honorable or admirable any more. It is heartbreaking that empathy is no longer valued. We only hear about winning or losing. What people with that perspective don’t realize is that they have already lost.
So we keep praying, and we add the zero-sum gamers to our list. Please join us. Say a prayer today — something like, “Thy will be done.” Or if you don’t believe in prayer, maybe you could write a letter to Congress. That’s a kind of prayer too.
Thank you, Bob. Prayer and letters, as you noted, are meaningful paths to follow.