This Sunday's Topic: Nonviolence as a Reality

When I was a child the flag salute didn't include the words "under God." At some point since then, when I wasn't looking, those words were slipped in. I wonder why, especially at times such as this, when Christian precepts have been quietly set aside.

Following the strikes on the Pentagon and the former World Trade Center, to this day I haven't heard anyone in high places use words like ...gulp! ..."turning the other cheek," and I wonder about that, too. For me that was one of the main precepts of the guy that gave that totally cool Sermon on the Mount, for me the high point of the New Testament.

(The story of Job is the high point of the Old Testament, though elsewhere King Solomon had quite a few good things to say, too. A considerable amount of the rest of the Old Testament, however, is the kind of thing that I suspect Solomon had in mind when, toward the end of Ecclesiastes he lamented that "Of the writing of many books there is no end." It's interesting that he would've thought that, so early in the enterprise. Or did the good scribes of James 1 stick that in, centuries later, in 1703?)

Instead of constantly screaming and raging, I think that after the collapse of the WTC towers the country should have calmly bound up its wounds and waited while the President sent envoys to Kandahar and called the Taliban's bluff by presenting the evidence of the guilt of Bin Laden and his associates. I think the results would have been surprising. There's at least a 50 percent chance that it would have worked, especially if this could have been done within the Pashtun codes.

If that had failed, then, as so often when we've set into motion a worthy plan that still falls short, it would have revealed to us the outlines of Plan B, and Plan B would have been a winner, a bold and imaginative stroke that would have brought the country all sorts of salutary benefits.

Instead, look where we are. Looks like not one but two cesspools to me!

The gospel in almost all quarters, progressive or not, seems to be that Bush's assault on Afghanistan was fully justified, and in one of his posts in "inanis et vacua" a couple of months ago, James said that even Mahatma Ghandi would also have sent in the troops. I buy quite a number of his views, but there I differ.

I think that Ghandi, and Martin Luther King, too, took their principles of non-violence far too seriously to have succumbed to the hysteria and the urge to "do something" that infected so many in the country immediately after 9/11 and still does. Instead I'm certain that they would have counseled something like the following:

"Now before we start launching ten-fold reprisals, let's think about this. After all, this may be the worst loss of life in an American city ever from a terrorist attack ...but it was only that. It wasn't a calculated attack by a foreign government, as Pearl Harbor was, and it wasn't even carried out by Afghani citizens, as not one was aboard those planes and very likely not one of their dollars went for a plane ticket or a box cutter. And it is far from the worse devastation that has ever been wrought from the air. The U.S. itself is in fact, history's world leader by far in inflicting enormous amounts of death and destruction on many cities in several countries by means of airpower. So, after all that, is the country really so righteous that it really expected its own cities to go untouched forever by the same sort of calamity, at the hands of some hostile government or by free-lancers such as these were?"

I have no guesses, however, about what they would have advised doing as a course of action. And meanwhile Iraq waited....