The Rocket’s Red Glare Chemical Weapons, Airstrikes, Drones…and Guns Next Door

Here we go again it seems…images of unspeakable horror as innocent civilians in Syria—store owners, trash collectors, computer wizards, farmers, grandparents, newlyweds, moms, dads, teenagers, babies—are poisoned seemingly by their country’s leadership with chemical weapons. 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/21/syria-worst-chemical-weapons-attack_n_3790755.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nearly-1500-killed-in-syrian-chemical-weapons-attack-us-says/2013/08/30/b2864662-1196-11e3-85b6-d27422650fd5_story.html

The people have been resisting a brutal, strong-fisted dictatorship, and they are paying the price for their quest for freedom, while factions of all sorts exploit their resistance and desire for peace.

The world’s witnesses argue about what to do to protect the innocents from further deadly action by their leaders: invade or not invade; strike or not strike w/ strategically targeted missiles; wait for others to join “us,” or don’t wait; talk or the time for talking is over.  “No ‘boots on the ground’” the U.S. President assures his citizenry, so no American lives at stake.  

Of course w/ missile strikes, there will be “casualties”—more innocent lives taken who simply happened to be or live in the wrong place at the wrong time.  No problem, though, the U.S. has had plenty of practice living w/ its “casualites” in its ongoing drone strikes in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Yemen.  We crow about the number of terrorists killed, while the civilian casualties are rendered non-existent in the cable and online news.

http://www.jewishpress.com/news/breaking-news/us-drone-kills-4-al-qaeda-terrorists-in-yemen/2013/08/06/

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/08/the-case-against-drone-strikes-on-people-who-only-act-like-terrorists/278744/

Here in the U.S., I don’t know how many people even know where Yemen is or are even aware that the U.S. is spending taxpayer dollars send-ing multi-million dollar war machines to strike “targets” in small countries with whom we are not at war.  Instead, the concerns of many Americans center on their own, personal weapons of individual-mass destruction.  

On my Facebook page recently, a brief debate arose about guns after I posted the words of President Bill Clinton, “A great democracy shouldn’t make it harder to vote than to buy an assault weapon.”  One gun rights advocate echoed the common argument by gun activists that “guns don’t kill people; people kill people,” insisting that a gun is not "designed to harm someone. It is designed to protect its user.”  This sentiment is one-dimensional at best and historically inaccurate.  But it’s not surprising.

We Americans are so diligent in our defense of our individual and corporate development and use of our deadly devices.  We Americans deny our own personal or national underwriting of or collusion with violence, yet cast quick judgment on the actions of others and then seek to condemn then, placing them in our sights and pulling the trigger without considering less lethal options.

We refine our bio-chemical toxins, our weapons delivery technolo-gies, our guns and ammunition, all for greater killing power.  We glory in our weaponry.  In the 2013 video, A Girl and A Gun, women delighted in their person firearms for their beauty; the technicians building the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki signed messages to the Japanese emperor and named their deadly metal craft “Fat man” and Little Boy.”  

In the Old Testament of The Bible, the leader of the Hebrew nomads, Moses, went off up a mountain to converse with God.  He didn’t return to the people according to their time frame, so they took matters with God into their own hands, collaboratively deciding to build an icon to God in the form of a golden calf, created by pooling their valuables and melting them down.  The God of the Old Testament was an angry sort and He did not take kindly to the “graven image”; in the image of us judgmental and deadly humans, He set out on a celestial first strike of his own against all the people.  Fortunately Moses intervened and the people were spared. 

A few thousand years later, we seem to have new graven images in the various shapes and sizes of our shiny metallic weaponry.  What will be the consequences to us if we continue our worship of our own devices, in our case devices of destruction?  Will there be anyone to intervene on our behalf?

I don’t have a point here.  I certainly don’t have any answers.  I haven’t even been able to post a blog of late because I’ve been without words.  Living in the wake of ongoing gun violence, accidental shooting deaths, “successful” drone strikes, 1,400 innocent civilians poisoned in a chemical attack, divisive and hateful rhetoric…what can I possibly say that will have any meaning? 

 I juxtapose our current deadly exploits as humans against Jesus prohibiting Peter a pre-emptory first sword strike at the ear of the Roman sent to arrest Jesus.  Against Jesus’ response to the question, “who is my neighbor”…turns out the neighbor is the one who steps to the plate and actively serves whomever crosses her path.  Against the message and lives of peace of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, both of whom were assassinated w/ firearms.  Violence has seemed to want to hear nothing from peace.

Surely humanity cannot stand by and watch a brutal dictator gas his own people with deadly toxins.  But who are we in America to judge and act against others when we are ourselves guilty of indefensible atrocities?  Is more violence the solution?  Or is it really true that violence only begets more violence.

http://0.tqn.com/d/politicalhumor/1/0/3/v/3/Answer-to-Gun-Violence.jpg



   

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