Rant scratchy: Truth or War

My number two rant about certain conservative politics:
Jesus loves you. God Bless America.

Let’s go to war.

The Simpsons sometimes makes more sense than the news...

I see a lot of people these days talking about how we shouldn’t have gone to war in Iraq, and strangely, some of them are the same people who accused me of disloyalty and being unpatriotic to my country when I thought we shouldn’t go to war in Iraq — back in 2003. In fact, on March 20, 2003, I drove in search of a church, any church, where I could pray that we would not go to (another) war, and when I heard the announcement on the radio that we had invaded Iraq I still hadn’t found an open church and I pulled over to the side of the road and cried like a baby. One of the strangest disconnects about the conservative movement, particularly the conservative Christian movement, is this need to celebrate war and the military. I understand this comes out of a cultural battle that started in the 1960s with the hippie, anti-war movement, but what I don’t understand is how we can still be fighting about it now, forty, almost fifty years later.

The antiwar movement of the 60s still invokes powerful emotions today.

One of the things I thought when I was in labor with Ben (22 hours with no pain meds people!) was, how could anyone send their child off to war? After this much pain and this much hardship just getting a single child out into the world? I cannot imagine anything dearer to me than my children, and at that point, when I gave birth to Ben, I realized that I would always be an advocate for peace.

Many people justify war, giving Hitler as an illustration, but although Hitler caused the death of 5 million Jewish people, as well as a few million more of gypsies, homosexuals and others who didn’t fit into his idea of a pure society, 60 million people died because of the war itself. So Hitler was directly responsible for 7 million deaths, while the war itself — including multiple countries — claimed 53 million more. It is possible that Europe would have been occupied by Germany and more terrible atrocities committed by Hitler if we had not gone to war (although 60 million is a big number), and I understand this argument, but look at that other “what-if” possibility — the assassination of Hitler and a quick removal of his regime could have saved tens of millions of people. War is not a good solution, nor is it Godly, and I wish that our country would not so easily send our youth out to be killed in the name of patriotism. This idea that “not going to war” is somehow unpatriotic is still absurd to me — there’s a difference between throwing dirt at a wounded soldier, and saying “Hey, let’s not send this guy to get wounded” in the first place. I definitely prefer the latter.