Sermons by Rev. Don W. Vaughn-Foerster
The Paradox of Mothers Day
Rev. Don W. Vaughn -Foerster
Unitarian Universalist Church of Sarasota, FL
May 13, 2007
The paradox of Mothers Day is that the first Mothers Day was a demonstration for peace but it was called for by the person who wrote the "Battle Hymn of the Republic", a marching song that was not for God's love but for God's vengeance. Its stirring words and cadence urged over a million young men to their deaths. It is a paradox of how the same woman's breast could be cohabited by both the desire for life and the urge toward death. How can a Madonna have both a child and a weapon in her lap?
I don't intend to answer that question this morning but only to observe that it is often the case. As it was so for Julia Ward Howe, so it is and has been for other women throughout history. What I want to do, however, is talk about war itself and why it has such a powerful tug on the hearts of otherwise peaceful persons, even on the women who bear the sons and daughters that war must kill. That paradox, evidently, exists in most people's hearts.
Let me start by asking why human beings go to war so easily. Given the more benign human capacities to think, analyze, invent creative solutions, and communicate until they understand one another, why do people quit using these intellectual and empathetic powers and try to bludgeon one another into agreement or physical submission? To get to this question let's first deal with how we get into war.
A lot of the answer to this question is in the book, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges. Hedges is a reporter who has covered wars from Central America to the Sudan and Yemen to the Gulf War to Kosovo to Iraq. His book is the most comprehensive and damning report on war I have ever seen and it inspires much of what I have to say today.
My first observation is that those who think of war as inevitable have not yet discovered the power of the mind to understand and to generate actions that build up rather than tear down. If we use our capacity to reason and not clutter our minds with fears for our own demise, or loss of face, or loss of property, then we can acknowledge realities about war that our fears obscure. The first thing we can see is that war -- any war - fundamentally, is based on lies -- lies told by leaders who would have others fight to protect or increase the leaders' property, privileges, and power. People are told that their own lives and well being are at stake and that their loyalty to their nation and their family demands that they fight and die for the honor and survival of their nation. They are not told if there are other ways to resolve differences with the "enemy." They are not told that the "enemy" soldiers are being lied to in the same way by their leaders, as is usually the case.
You know, there are some stark truths about "patriotism." A slanted patriotism can demand unquestioning obedience. This kind of "patriotism" usurps the individual's natural commitment to the welfare of the community. It asserts that the community's welfare is what the leader says it is -- not what one's own good sense and reason or community values say it is. This "patriotism" asserts that the leader's reasons for war can be questioned only at the risk of excommunication or death.
This is totalitarianism and this is why the Declaration of Independence was written. This "patriotism" is rooted in an ideological certitude that, in these days, has become a new kind of fundamentalism. Actually, James Luther Adams, a great UU religious ethicist, has said it best. He pointed out that patriotism easily becomes "a dangerous messianic brand of religion, one where self doubt is minimal." Some fifty to sixty years ago, Adams detected a growing fusion between political leaders on the one hand who wage war and religious leaders on the other hand who believe they are God's own agents on earth. Today we find the same people holding both positions, mixing both their politics and religion in a leadership capacity. We see it when Osama bin Laden calls for a jihad against the West and when President Bush wages a war against an "axis of evil". The result is the present day existence of Christians, Jews, and Moslems who do not believe they are waging wars for economic gain or political power but believe they are doing God's will. The result is a world more and more filled with Christian fascists, Jewish fascists, and Moslem fascists - to apply Adams' own term.
Furthermore, a primary reality is that war is not honorable. War is neither glorious nor an expression of human excellence. It is as Ernie Pyle, the famous war correspondent in World War II, finally described it. Throughout World War II, Pyle had promoted the myth that soldiering is heroic, but, in a rough draft of a column found on his body after he was killed on a south Pacific island in 1945, he had written: "But there are many who have had burned into their brains forever the unnatural sight of cold dead men scattered over the hillsides and in the ditches along the high rows of hedge throughout the world. ... To you at home they are columns of figures, or he is a dear one who went away and just didn't come back. You didn't see him lying so grotesque and pasty beside the gravel road in France. We saw him, saw him by the multiple thousands. That's the difference."
War, simply put, is death -- ignominious death -- death of human beings, death of the things human beings work to build and preserve. It is the death of the spirit if not of the body. War turns ordinary men and women into the kind of killers and insensitive brutes that these same persons would condemn in times of peace. And after the war, these same persons are expected to act as if they had never killed, nor pillaged, nor raped, nor tortured -- all things that, inevitably, both sides of a war end by doing. War demoralizes and demonizes human culture.
War has its own culture. As Chris Hedges puts it in his book, "The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug ... It is peddled by mythmakers -- historians, war correspondents, filmmakers, novelists, and the state -- all of whom endow it with qualities it often does not possess: excitement, exoticism, power, chances to rise above our small station in life, and a bizarre and fantastic universe that has a grotesque and dark beauty. It dominates culture, distorts memory, corrupts language, and infects everything around it, even humor, which becomes preoccupied with the grim perversities of smut and death. Fundamental questions about the meaning, or meaninglessness, of our place on the planet are laid bare when we watch those around us sink to the lowest depths. War exposes the capacity for evil that lurks not far below the surface within all of us. And this is why for many war is so hard to discuss once it is over." (p. 3) At its base, war raises the fundamental suspicion that the real mystery of life is the question, "Why bother?"
If we have our wits about us, why do we so easily agree to go to war? Why do mothers permit their babies to grow up with such things as AK-47s within easy reach? If war is something good sense would not have us do, it must be that we are seduced into participation. Perhaps the main impulse that leads us to agree to war is fear -- our natural fear of those we do not know or understand, the artificially generated fear and intensified by those who want war thrust onto the rest of society. Fear for oneself, fear for one's family and friends, fear of the loss of freedom and "our way of life" -- when these fears are focused on and promoted by those in the state who want war, the ordinary citizen is easily pressed into panic, into a mob reaction of following a course of action that in the long term is against his or her own self interest. Besides, fear arouses anger and righteous indignation -- and who doesn't enjoy expressing their righteous indignation and unleashing their anger? Despots and demagogues know how to use fear to promote war. They know that fear can be used to create a strong negative and anxious identity among the citizenry that binds them together in such a way that the state is seen as their protector, no matter how whimsical and unfair the state may be. George Orwell, in his book, 1984, recognized this and observed that a constant war is necessary to forge a false unity among the people that keeps them dependent on the state. A problem posed by this false unity is exposed by the question "If one synchronized swimmer drowns, do the rest drown, too," or can they agree to get out of the water at some point?
Another enduring but surprising attraction of war is that its offer of death seems to give us a reason for living by giving us the illusion of purpose and meaning. When we are in the midst of conflict, the thinness and insipidness of much of our peacetime lives jumps out at us. War is a seductive antidote. War gives us a cause. It gives us a noble crusade, a holy jihad. It gives us stirring battle hymns! Once we have imbibed the noxious narcotic of war, we are like the moth that is so attracted to fire that being immolated seems a small price to pay for the excitement of the attraction. War is the ultimate seducer of morals, the ultimate crowd controller. How many people ever recover enough from the seduction of war to call for a Mothers Day for Peace? So far, not enough, although I like to think their number is growing. It certainly is on the move here in Florida and in this congregation, as today's Standing for Peace demonstration shows.
Because of its power to divert people from the lives they truly want to live, war is a primary means of changing society. Orwell understood this and I think the present leadership of our country does, too. My greatest fear is that war may have become a standing policy of our nation -- a warfare policy that requires a citizenry dependent on the state for its thought and values; a policy that makes our society more totalitarian than free and democratic. Congress seems to be aware of this dynamic. I hope they truly understand the stakes but they may only be countering politics with politics.
Well, what kind of positive attitude can we take that will help minimize war's presence, if not rid us of it entirely? There are times I wish my pragmatism could allow me to be a pacifist; but I suppose the place to start is by acknowledging that, regarding war, the moral choice is not between the moral and the immoral. The choice, actually, is between the immoral and the less immoral, as Reinhold Niebuhr, the Christian ethicist, once put it. The reality is that we will never dispense with war if others would inflict war on us. The ethical point is that it is immoral to start a war but less immoral to fight in self defense. The immorality of both is in the fact that both sides will sacrifice their humanity by doing similar things to each other. Even so, not having started the war is the firmer moral base on which to rebuild society after hostilities cease. We do not have that moral base in Iraq and the citizens of that country, as well as the citizens of ours, realize it. Furthermore, the moral basis for our intervention in Iraq is made even less by recent news reports that this Administration and both Houses of Congress seem to agree that a most important benchmark that would lead to the withdrawing of U. S. forces from Iraq is the Iraqi government's signing of an agreement that, basically, would turn oil profits over to the large western oil companies. The thought that Iraqi oil is the property of the Iraqi people seems lost somewhere in geo-political and economic jockeying for Western dominance.
Perhaps we can reduce the incidence of war if we will learn to pay attention to the effects our nation's foreign policy and our socio/economic system have on other peoples of the world. As a nation, as long as we do not acknowledge that our economic, political, and cultural behavior diminishes other people's prospects and disrupts their lives, we will not understand why their leaders can get them to commit terrorist acts against us. We have to know that our hurting them economically and politically gives them motive to hurt us physically. Without hurting and fearful people out there, war (including wars of terrorism) would be less likely. Therefore, we should never let the plight of people who hate us be underrated and go unexamined.
Speaking out on such things, of course, exposes whoever does so to accusations of unpatriotism and threats of suppression, even though the most patriotic act is always to call the nation to acknowledge truth and to pursue ethical behavior. But, as long as we so easily find our fulfillment in narrow, self serving patriotism and in the exuberance of war, we will never understand those who hate us nor how they perceive us. We won't even understand ourselves and why war excites us more than it sobers us. And we will have to live in a warring world caused largely because we ignore real injustices and have no understanding of the rage and despair caused by what we have inflicted on others. In essence, to prevent war, it is necessary for us to know more than we want to know. Not to know what we need to know blinds our conscience, makes us irresponsibly ignorant, and makes us uncaring of human consequences.
I would sum all this up in this way. By demanding total commitment, war gives us an immediate, short-term but compelling reason to be. But war leads people away from their highest values and can sweep the very foundation of their society from under their feet and they not recognize it until too late. In light of this, going to war can only be seen as a failure of human intelligence and good will -- a failure that, until human beings come to their senses, we must endure. Whether we acknowledge it or not, this country has the Battle Hymn of the Republic-Mothers Day paradox deeply embedded in its psyche. It's time we acknowledge it and begin to seek a higher synthesis of human concern.