If
Only George Bush Had Been Amish
By Doug Soderstrom
14 October, 2006
Countercurrents.org
The
Amish response to the brutal slaying of five of their own offspring
in an old fashioned, one-roomed school house was a blueprint for how
President George Walker Bush should have responded to the slaughter
of nearly 3,000 of our own citizens in the tragedy of September 11,
2001. The merciful decision to forgive a deranged man who, for whatever
reason, chose to project a self-inflicted sense of hate upon a classroom
of nothing but innocent children was exactly as God would have had it,
exactly how he would have responded if it had been one of his own children
who had been slain. Something like that of “the cross” when
his son, Jesus, spoke the immortal words, “Father forgive them
for they know not what they do!” A message for the ages, one for
all of mankind to hear, even to understand. A reminder that hate might
well rule the day, but, in the end, only love has the genuine capacity
to heal a world caught up in the agonizing grip of pain and suffering.
However, such was not to
be the case for our president as he chose not to travel the path of
peace, but rather a way traversed by men determined to mete out justice
according to an eye-for-an-eye, clenched-fist law of lex talionis, one
that led a world of onlookers to condemn what turned out to be a shameful
display of “shock and awe,” a merciless attack (by the greatest
military power the world has ever seen) upon a country of folks preveniently
bombed into a near stone-age existence, proving our country to be that
of a true bully, one motivated by national glory and corporate greed,
all in order to prove to the world who the boss really is, who it is
that shall have “the last say.” However, as it turns out,
having “the last say” depends not so much upon who is able
to throw the final punch, but rather who it is that is most wise, who
is able to impel folks to be a friend of he who happens to be crowned
as victor.
Almost as if the world had
been caught short in some sort of sleeping (counting its peace dividend)
slumber, 9/11 pounced upon the body-politik as if slapped in the face.
Everyone, except for those of Al-Qaeda (and a complement of heedlessly,
inattentive Bush administration officials), was shocked, stricken to
the core of their being, put on notice that the world had been irrevocably
changed, modified to such an extent that nothing would ever be the same,
that a new world order would from this point on be required. If only
the Bush administration had done its homework. If only they had been
prepared. If only George Walker Bush had been, as he had so routinely
claimed to be, that of a true Christian, a resolute, born-again believing
follower of the Lord Jesus Christ, the world may have been spared the
unfathomable travesty of a “nation of believers” driven
insane by an uncontrollable urge to kill in the name of an all-loving
(yet, no doubt, rather ill-tempered) God.
If only George Walker Bush
had taken the time to read the same Bible as that of the Amish, a simple
pastoral community wanting to carry out the merciful requests of a loving
God, a people who took to heart the words of one who so clearly taught
that the wisdom of the world is no more than mere foolishness to God,
that the urge to take revenge upon those who might choose to hurt another
is nothing short of folly, that the decision to strike back is like
pouring kerosene on a lighted fire, a catalyst that transforms enmity
to into a certain desire to kill.
If only our president would
have had the capacity to comprehend that having been attacked, the world,
for the first time since the days of Pearl Harbor, seemed to feel sorry
for us, were more than ready to help us. We had the world in the very
palm of our hand, and all that was required was to simply place the
so-called terrorist problem in that of their own lap, and, out of an
empathic concern for us as a people, they would have immediately come
to our rescue. The United Nations had placed inspectors in Iraq, no
weapons of mass destruction had been found, and, for the cost of merely
one week of war in Iraq, we could have financed the work of a phalanx
of inspectors for decades to come. And with the balance of money having
been spent on a war lasting longer than that of our involvement in World
War II (an amount nearing one half trillion dollars!) we could have
paved “the roads of the world” with the glittering gold
of gracious and benevolent concern for others by constructing medical
clinics for the sick, schools for those without education, water wells
for those living in parched lands, and by feeding the tens of millions
of staving children around the world…… random acts of kindness
that would have generated enough good will to last until the end of
time.
And all of such while having pretended to be a noble, Christ-centered,
nation, aided and abetted by a sanctimonious undercurrent of jack-booted,
xenophobic apologists having marched their way into the bloodstained
jaws of empire, we will one day be taken to task, forced, by all of
humanity, to take responsibility for having allowed ourselves to have
become a venerable “den of thieves,” a nation condemned
for having led the world into an apocalypse of horrors, an astonishingly
brutal abolition of the world..... as we now know it.
Doug Soderstrom Ph
D is a Psychologist. He can be reached at [email protected]
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