© Davidson Loehr
November 11, 2001
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
We love war stories. We always have. We still make WWII movies, 56 years after the war ended. And one of them (Saving Private Ryan) won several Oscars a few years ago, and almost won Best Picture. The Rambo movies tried singlehandedly to rewrite the history of the Vietnam War, letting us win it.
I think there is a select group of war movies that should be required viewing for people in our society who have never been in a war, to get some small feel of the bloody and seductive power war has always had – at least for most men. On that list, I would include Saving Private Ryan, Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter, as well as some powerful anti-war movies like The Americanization of Emily, Gallipoli and All Quiet on the Western Front.
The great combat general George Patton once famously remarked that next to war, all other human achievements shrink to insignificance. I’d hate to see history’s greatest artists, diplomats and geniuses dismissed by this modern incarnation of the god Ares, but for sheer power and excitement, Patton is probably right. Every veteran I have known still defines their war time as the defining experience of their life – as I also do. It isn’t kosher to say it, but I wouldn’t trade anything in the world for my 53 weeks in Vietnam – and almost every veteran of every war will understand.
We love war stories. The oldest story we have preserved in Western Civilization is a war story – Homer’s Iliad, probably written down 2800 years ago: the story of the Trojan war of three millennia ago.
Our notion of the hero goes back to those stories, too. For the Greeks, a “hero” was half way between humans and gods: someone of nearly superhuman personal courage and skill in the service of some higher ideal the Greeks admired.
That’s the key. It isn’t just courage, it’s a selfless courage in the service of a higher ideal. Heroes fight for others. So do the soldiers we admire. When they fight for small or selfish ideals, we never think of them as heroic:
Mafia fights have often been bloody, and required some courage to pull off. But the slaughter was tribal, in the service of one family’s greed, usually involving profits from prostitution, drugs or gambling, nothing nobler. So we may be fascinated by stories of the Godfathers, but we don’t regard them as heroes. We don’t have holidays to celebrate them.
Mercenaries, soldiers for hire, also risk their lives. But we think of them as opportunists with way too much testosterone, not heroes.
And violent atrocities during war are never regarded as heroic. Many of us remember Lt. Calley and the Mai Lai massacres of the Viet Nam War, where his platoon slaughtered an entire Vietnamese village of men, women, children and babies. He was court-martialed, not given a ticker-tape parade.
We have similar reactions to the military violence of the Nazis, the Salvadoran death squads, the horrible acts of “the killing fields” in Cambodia and so many others. Bullying, brutality and barbarism have never been admired, even though they continue to be imitated. We know the difference between barbarism and heroism, and it is a nearly sacred difference for us.
On Veterans’ Day, we try to remember the nobler, more selfless and heroic acts of men and women who put themselves at the service of orders they believed served the best parts of our country’s history and heritage. Few of our veterans were in actual combat. In the Vietnam War, about 90% of our soldiers were support troops, only about 10% saw actual fighting, and I imagine it’s still about the same. But every one of them made themselves available, and was there to do whatever was asked of them, the clerks and cooks just as much as the infantrymen.
There is something here that is striking and heroic. These are ordinary people who will do what they are told because they trust that their country would not ask them to risk their lives if it weren’t necessary. They trust their captains, their generals, their president. They trust us.
There is an unwritten, unspoken covenant that soldiers make with their countries. It’s a deceptively simple covenant. They say, “I’ll risk my life, maybe even lose it, in a cause I can’t fully grasp, in a battle that is part of a larger war I’ll never understand. I’ll do it for you because I am one of you and you have asked me to do it. In return, you must promise me two things. First, you must promise that you will do everything in your power to make sure it is a war that is worth my life. Second, you must promise never to forget. You must promise never to forget me, us, and what we did, because we did it for you. You must promise never to forget.”
Veterans’ Day is one of our annually scheduled times to try not to forget, to keep up our part of this holy, bloody, covenant. But in truth, we mostly do forget, don’t we?
It’s hard, almost contrived, to celebrate Veterans’ Day in a liberal church like this. I took part in a service with another Vietnam veteran in St. Paul a year and a half ago, and when all veterans were asked to stand, only six stood, including the two of us on the stage. Six out of about three hundred. Here in the South, the percentages are higher: we had 12-15 out of the 300 present at our second service. Still, it isn’t a big percentage. If you want to see a bigger percentage of veterans, you’ll probably have to travel east of I-35 to some of the black churches, or up the road to some of the big Catholic churches where there weren’t as many college deferments. But here, and in Episcopal churches and churches on the west side of Austin, we aren’t the warrior class. We get others to fight our wars for us.
And once the wars are over, the veterans become almost invisible – especially the broken ones, who are embarrassments in peacetime. Occasionally, you see a license plate on which a veteran wants to remind you that he or she served, and in which war. Once in awhile, we may be dimly aware that somewhere in almost every major city there is a Veterans’ Administration Hospital, where wounded, broken, disabled vets languish away out of our sight and out of our thoughts.
Even our good wars leave many veterans with wounds that will never completely heal. Our bad wars are much worse.
My veteran friend in St. Paul wrote a book about his experiences in Vietnam, and during his research he discovered that more Vietnam veterans have died of suicide than were killed in the entire war. That’s sixty thousand or more suicides. The fact that this is probably the first time you’ve heard this is one measure of just how invisible veterans are.
With the wisdom of hindsight, we can look back on Vietnam and realize that we didn’t keep our part of the covenant back then. The soldiers never promised it would be a good war, because that’s not their job. That’s the part we were supposed to guarantee. It is our responsibility to insure that it is the right war to be fought in that place at that time, just as it is our job to ask those questions in our present war. The soldiers only promised to serve, to risk and even lose their lives if necessary. We were also supposed to remember them for it. But after the humiliation of defeat in Vietnam, our society blamed the veterans for losing a war that should never have been fought, and many of them – tens of thousands of Vietnam veterans – were undone by it. The effects on their families, children and friends are incalculable.
People who attend liberal churches like this where over 90% of the members hold college degrees are never likely to be well represented in the warrior class. But Veterans’ Day still has a powerful message for us. In fact, it brings challenges which fall more directly to us than to almost any other sector of our society – especially since we are now getting drawn into a new war, whose effects may be with us for a long time.
Our favorite war stories reconnect us with those rare and powerful times when character is put under pressure and under fire. Remember, that’s how diamonds are made. And at its best, war’s ability to shape and temper character is like the story of coal being converted into diamonds through intense heat and pressure. The potential for that clarity and strength was always there, but it would never have emerged without the terrible pressure. Some, of course, can’t withstand the pressure: sixty thousand suicides from Vietnam veterans are a small measure of this.
In times of war, and observances like Veterans’ Day, we are offered the chance and the challenge of putting our own character under that same pressure and seeing what kind of precious jewel we can produce. It will not be the jewel of combat warriors, for that’s not the stuff of which most of us are made. I’m not made of it either. I was on a lot of combat operations, but as a combat photographer. I carried a camera instead of a gun and shot pictures rather than people. And while I was shot at as much as most of them, I was a watcher, not a warrior.
It left me believing that we owe something to those who have fought for us. I believe that every act of bravery that serves us is a kind of debt that we owe, and that we must repay when the time has come for our kind of courage. This Veterans’ Day is, perversely, the two-month anniversary of the attacks of September 11th, so the one day leads to the other. These times since the attacks of September 11th do offer challenges that fall particularly to us and other cultural liberals.
One of the most important revelations after the attacks came from that amazingly unguarded interview between Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, where they blamed the attacks on liberated women, abortions, gay rights, the ACLU and all liberal organizations that work for individual rights and freedoms. The revelation was that this was the same hate list produced by the fundamentalist Muslims of the Taliban. The lesson is that fundamentalisms of all kinds are among the most dangerous enemies of freedom and democracy in the world.
Pat Robertson has been very clear about this. He has said that democracy is not a fit form of government unless it is run by fundamentalist Christians under their (and his) rules.
Religious and cultural liberals must be awakened by the fact that any religious or political effort to tie one religion to the political and military machinery of our country will be America’s version of the Taliban, and has the potential to do far more harm than the attacks of September 11th. When God is ordered to bless America, that God has been reduced to a puppet of the government and the media. It isn’t allowed to challenge or question America, only to bless its wars. When that happens, it is no longer a God worth serving. It’s bad theology, and worse public policy. It calls for resistance from the people with the gifts of intellect and articulation that characterize us here this morning. This is our combat zone, our war front.
And the reason it is ours is also because the only antidote to the deadly narrowness of fundamentalisms — again, regardless of which kind of fundamentalisms — is the openness and inclusion that are the very soul of liberal religion. In this church and other liberal churches in Austin and elsewhere is the spirit that this community and this country need desperately as we are being dragged into this new war. It is our job to proclaim the religious alternative of openness and trust over religions that preach fear and obedience.
No, we don’t have the single answer to the world’s problems in a simple set of mandated beliefs, because there isn’t one. What we do have is the deep conviction that the world’s problems can only be addressed through opening the dialogue to a whole range of religious and political answers, learning how to listen to those whose beliefs differ, and asking how those beliefs can be a healthy gift to a world not made in their image. And that, I think, is the answer to the world’s problems.
Friends, nobody in the world can do this better than we can. It is our calling and our mission, and if we don’t engage in this battle for the hearts and minds of our own people we will have failed to answer the call of our times.
What I am suggesting is that you need to spread the good news that there are churches where all sincere beliefs are invited, where a variety of paths toward compassion and inclusion are sought, where the only heresy lies in pretending that there is only one way. That is the Good News I’m trying to spread through my involvement with the Austin Area Interreligious Ministries. I accept every writing assignment or newspaper interview they ask me to accept, because I think it’s my job to accept them. And always, I’m trying to spread the Good News that there is a religious alternative in this community that teaches expansive rather than constrictive visions. It is also the message I will be trying to communicate through my occasional columns in the Austin American Statesman. I’ve already written my first column, to explain this Queen-of-the-chessboard nature of healthy liberal religion, and have been told my first column will be printed on December 8th. We don’t offer a religion here; we offer the possibility of becoming human religiously, along a greater variety of paths than any single religion can offer. That’s Good News. Spread the word.
Churches like this have a terribly important role to play against the background of war. We must ask whether this is a just war, or whether it is being used primarily as a cover, as a tactic of misdirection, while Congress continues to pass bills taking money from the lower and middle classes and transferring it to the top couple percent, as they have been doing in Washington almost since the attacks of September 11th.
Behind the flag-waving, in stories that seldom make the front twenty pages of our newspapers, the real agenda of the people who control our country has been gaining such speed that the restructuring of our economy and our society’s possibilities may be just about over.
The Heritage Foundation and other think-mobs that see 98% of our people as disposable workers for the enrichment of the few who control the capital have been clear that they want “government” shrunk to a size where they can drown it in a bathtub, as Grover Norquist has put it. “Government” here means “all binding restraints on the power and greed of those who control the capital.”
This agenda isn’t subtle; only our willful denial can keep us blinded to it. This president’s cabinet is stocked with a far higher percentage of corporate sponsors and interests than any in our history. Their agenda can’t be a mystery. Under the cover of this new and contrived “war” they are finally able to rush through new bills and laws, unseen, that can change the form of government here into a pure plutocracy — or, as others have suggested, a corpocracy, the rule of the people by the economic ambitions of our major corporations.
The scale and boldness of the greed has even pushed observers like the normally calm Bill Moyers into anger, as he has written in his October 16th speech to the Environmental Grantmakers Association in Brainard, Minnesota:
“While in New York we are still attending memorial services for firemen and police, while everywhere Americans’ cheeks are still stained with tears, while the President calls for patriotism, prayers and piety, the predators of Washington are up to their old tricks in the pursuit of private plunder at public expense. In the wake of this awful tragedy wrought by terrorism, they are cashing in.”
What else can be accomplished under the cover of the patriotic fervor designed to distract the ignorant masses? “Why, restore the three-martini lunch — that will surely strike fear in the heart of Osama bin Laden. You think I’m kidding, but bringing back the deductible lunch is one of the proposals on the table in Washington sacrifice in this time of crisis – by paying for lobbyists’ long lunches.
“And cut capital gains for the wealthy, naturally — that’s America’s patriotic duty, too. And while we’re at it don’t forget to eliminate the Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax, enacted fifteen years ago to prevent corporations from taking so many credits and deductions that they owed little if any taxes. But don’t just repeal their minimum tax; give those corporations a refund for all the minimum tax they have ever been assessed. You look incredulous. But that’s taking place in Washington even as we meet here in Brainerd this morning.
“What else can America do to strike at the terrorists? Why, slip in a special tax break for poor General Electric, and slip inside the Environmental Protection Agency while everyone’s distracted and torpedo the recent order to clean the Hudson river of PCBs. Don’t worry about NBC, CNBC, or MSNBC reporting it; they’re all in the GE family.
“It’s time for Churchillian courage, we’re told. So how would this crowd assure that future generations will look back and say ‘This was their finest hour’? That’s easy. Give those coal producers freedom to pollute. And shovel generous tax breaks to those giant energy companies; and open the Alaskan wilderness to drilling — that’s something to remember the 11th of September for. And while the red, white and blue wave at half-mast over the land of the free and the home of the brave — why, give the President the power to discard democratic debate and the rule-of-law concerning controversial trade agreements, and set up secret tribunals to run roughshod over local communities trying to protect their environment and their health. It’s happening as we meet. It’s happening right now.”
Moyers’ anger is uncharacteristic, but he’s hardly alone. Consider some of the comments by Paul Krugman in the Sunday 11 November New York Times (Reckonings: “Another Useful Crisis“).
He reminded us of the California energy crisis and how “… it illustrated, in particularly stark form, the political strategy of the Bush administration before September 11th. The basic principle of this strategy – which was also used to sell that $2 trillion tax cut – was that crises weren’t problems to be solved. Instead, they were opportunities to advance an agenda that had nothing to do with the crisis at hand.
“It is now clear that, at least as far as domestic policy is concerned, the administration views terrorism as another useful crisis.”
Now the administrations “economic stimulus” proposals have nothing to do with helping the economy, but everything to do with its usual tax-cutting agenda. The administration is now favoring a program with huge retroactive tax cuts for big corporations, and a total cost of $220 billion over three years – less than $20 billion of that total having anything to do with economic stimulus. The rest consists of “tax cuts for corporations and high-income individuals, structured in such a way that they will do little to increase spending during the current recession.”
“Why does the administration’s favored bill offer so little stimulus? Because that’s not its purpose; it’s really designed to lock in permanent tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, using the Sept. 11 attacks as an excuse. … Politics, while never completely clean, didn’t used to be this cynical…. It’s something new to see crises – especially a crisis as shocking as the terrorist attack – consistently addressed with legislation that does almost nothing to address the actual problem, and is almost entirely aimed at advancing a pre-existing agenda.
“Oh, by the way; the administration is once again pushing for drilling in the Arctic. You see, it’s essential to the fight against terrorism.”
These certainly aren’t the only voices trying to wake the slumbering people of our country – people being kept drugged and drowsy through the collaboration of a cynically manipulative administration and spinelessly compliant media. The list of greedy activities slithering around under cover of all the flags is a long and growing list. Some feel we may be losing the last remnants of democracy and the hopes of the vast majority of Americans right now, while we are being so brilliantly distracted by the super-hyped war (with complete and shameful collaboration by the media).
Could it happen? Of course it could happen. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, and we the masses are being successfully lulled into a sleep from which we may not awaken as the same nation. Of course it could happen. And then how would our current “war” be seen in retrospect? What could we then tell the families of these new young dead soldiers when they ask us to remind them, again, just what we thought was worth having their loved ones die for?
In retrospect, we now see that the Vietnam War was almost certainly not justified, and that all those people died for no reason we can be clear about. We failed in our most fundamental covenant with those soldiers, and we simply must not fail in that way again now.
We also need to insist that religious dialogues be kept open, and that our Muslim brothers and sisters are not harrassed or harmed out of an ignorant fear of those who look and believe differently. We’re the ones who believe that sincere differences beautify the pattern, and that the whole human sound goes up only from the full orchestra. We need to say so, out loud, to our friends, neighbors, to people in the grocery store, anywhere and everywhere the subject arises. And if they don’t believe there is a church where such things are taught, invite them here. We are certainly not the only open and healthy church in Austin, but we are one of them, and an important one.
This is Veterans’ Day. And the way we serve the sacrifices made by those veterans who have fought for us is by rising to meet the same level of moral challenge. Our mission is not one where we will carry rifles or shoot bullets to kill people. Our mission is to offer an educated vision, articulated in ways that can make a positive difference in the lives of our members, our children, and the larger community and nation. We are called to respond to these challenges just as surely as soldiers are called to respond to challenges on their own battlefield.
I’ll try to wrap my message in a story. This is a parable I wrote a dozen years ago for a different topic, but parables offer many applications. It is called “The ABC of Music.”
The ABC of Music
A. A girl walked by a building she had not seen before. Looking in the window, she was stopped by an odd sight. There was another girl, about her age, standing in a far room of the building, doing what looked like a kind of dance, or at least a dance done from the waist up, for her feet hardly moved at all. She seemed to be biting the end of a metal rod. She was holding the rod in her hands, out to her right side, and she seemed to have the other end of the rod in her mouth, biting it, or at least chewing on it. As she bit it, she moved a little, a kind of gentle swaying motion.
The girl could not see clearly, for the window was dirty, or cloudy. Still, it was the strangest sight! She began stopping by this building each day to watch the strange dance, always about the same, and soon found herself wondering whether perhaps she wasn’t looking into the window of some kind of a hospital-a hospital where they put people who did these slow little dances while biting metal rods.
B. One day when she walked by, the window was open. And now, when the girl looked in, she heard the sound of a flute playing. It was a flute player, not a dancer, and the point of it all had not been the movement, but the music, which the girl had never heard before. “Aha,” said the girl, “now I understand!” Then, no longer interested by the spectacle, she turned to leave.
C. But the flute player saw her, and called out to her. Surprised, the girl stayed by the open window as the other girl approached. “Here,” said the flute player when she reached the open window, “wouldn’t you like to play? This is yours, after all, and it is your turn now.” With that, she handed the flute through the open window to the girl who had, until then, been only a spectator.
And then the flute player disappeared, the whole building disappeared, and the little girl found herself standing there with her whole life still ahead of her, holding a flute-and trying to remember the movements, and the music.
Courage is like this kind of music:
A. From a distance, it can look like strange, foolhardy or Hollywood-style actions of cartoon characters like Rambo or GI Joe.
B. When we understand it more deeply, it isn’t about the dramatic actions as much as it is about character. Courage is what character becomes under pressure, much as diamonds are what coal becomes under pressure.
C. But finally, we have to realize the one thing we hadn’t wanted to realize: that this is always about us, too. When the times call for courage, they call for courage from everyone, each in our own way.
That pressure that turns coal to diamonds asks us where and how we must act now.
The people who fought for us have let us hear the music of courage. But they have offered us that flute too, and told us that the flute is also in our hands. Whether we like it or not, it is also our turn to make our own variety of courageous music.
What can we do? What must we do? What will we do?
