Kent Nerburn has a piece on his website that’s adapted from a chapter on war in his book, Letters To My Son. He’s requesting that people pass it around the net and send it to newspaper’s op-ed pages. Count me among those “…in the middle, unable to embrace either pure pacifism or unquestioned patriotism.”
Our country may very soon be going to war. When it does, it may call upon you to fight, and you will be faced with one of the most difficult moral decisions of your life.
Your choices will not be great, because governments do not grant you the right to determine what you feel is a “just” war. They allow you only two positions: that of pacifism and that of acquiescence to governmental policy.
Pacifism is morally appealing. It is easy to say that we must beat our swords into plowshares and establish a new world order built on peace. But before you embrace a position of pure pacifism, ask yourself: Will I stand by and see my family killed by wanton violence if it comes to that? Do my principles run so deep that I would not raise my hand against an intruder at my door? If you can say this, you may honorably claim the mantle of pacifist. Some of the greatest people in recent history — Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Aung San Suu Kyi — have taken this stand.
If, on the other hand, you believe that ours is a good, well intentioned country, and that we must support the decisions of those to whom we have entrusted its care, then you can assert the higher order of patriotism and fight whenever the country asks. Great men and women, too, have done this, even to the sacrifice of their own lives on lonely battlefields in far off lands.
But before you take this position, ask yourself, am I willing to die and leave my children without a parent so that my country can have cheap resources and a privileged lifestyle? Am I willing to kill the child of another mother or father so that my politicians can achieve their own electoral ends? On such seamy motivations are many war decisions made, though the truth of those motivations is seldom spoken.
Most likely, however, you are like the great mass of Americans. You find yourself somewhere in the middle, unable to embrace either pure pacifism or unquestioned patriotism.
How, then, are you to decide where to stand?
Let me give you a possible guideline.
When a society or government is killing children, a sickness is abroad in the land. If it is our government killing children to secure some abstract gain, then our government is wrong and ought to be opposed. If another government is killing children and our government sees fit to stop them by warfare, then you can feel that the war is necessary and just.
This may seem simplistic. But war, at heart, is about taking the lives of others, and you must look the most innocent of those victims in the face before deciding whether or not to take up arms against their government.
Hold that child’s life in your hands as if he or she were your own. Will you sacrifice that life to achieve the goal or policy our country is pursuing?
If the goal is to eliminate a madman who may kill hundreds or thousands of others, perhaps you will say yes. Perhaps, in such cases, you will decide that the saving of the many is worth the death of the few.
But always, look carefully. Your government will try hard to justify its position. It will withhold and it will obfuscate. It will present you with stories and images that have the sole purpose of convincing you to follow its chosen path. Truth will become a victim long before there are bodies lying on the ground.
“Believe,” as the song says, “half of what you see and none of what you hear.” Instead, seek out the most considered arguments from all points of view. Search your heart, inform your mind, and then choose.
If you choose to fight, do so honorably. If you choose to resist, do so with courage. But do not turn against those who choose a different path. For when the fighting is over — and it will be over — you will all be brothers and sisters in time. How you come together to heal the wounds inflicted on you and on the people in the lands where the bombs fell and the blood was shed, will be your legacy to the generations yet to come.
It is the only gift you will be able to give to the innocent children who died, uncomprehending, in a war they did not understand, and the only honorable healing for those of you who were swept up in a madness you neither chose nor were able to escape.