Subject: Re: [RC] [RC]
WARNING - POLITICAL delete at will!
Well put, Shelley. For me, war isn't about personal safety,
either--but it is about a lot of the other things that Scott quoted in his
John Stuart Mill quote, and that you have also articulated here. War
is not something to undertake lightly, but beyond even the context of our
current world situation, I always wonder about folks who claim they have
no principles or philosophies that are worth defending. I'd hate to
war over something petty, but I'd hate even worse to not have anything for
which I'd stand up and fight.
My dad is one of the ones who faced being drafted in WWII, and he had
an older brother in the military and a younger brother that claimed to be
a CO. Dad also had a wife and daughter at the time (no, not me--I
came later), and was nearly graduated from theological seminary--and the
military felt that they would rather have the new graduates take the
local churches and have more mature men go as military chaplains, so
he ended up not being asked to serve. But he says that he wrestled
with this question, and it came down to this--if he witnessed a friend or
family member lying in the road, and a tank about to run over that friend
or family member, and he had a bazooka, what would he do with it?
And he said that he realized that he would shoot the tank with the
bazooka. And given that, he surmised that yes, there was reason to
go to war against somebody like Hitler, who was running over entire
populations with his military machine.
Saddam is not unlike Hitler, and given the more sophisticated
military weapons of today and the speed with which war can be made, I
sincerely hope that we don't let Saddam get into the position of strength
that we allowed Hitler to attain by our unwillingness to join in the
fight. I am not keen to live in a world where I have to kowtow to a
dictator, nor where I would have to grow a garden and eat my horses to
survive.
Heidi
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