somewhere, in the middle of this week, between researching hezbollah and watching two ROTC guys walk across the street with Jimmy John's sandwiches, it hit me that everyday we are fighting a war. we are a country, fighting a war we initiated - and we have been and will be fighting for a long time.
we are fighting a war, everyday, but usually, when i read the front page of the times, i glaze over the headlines of x number dead in iraq; background. it's just there. expected. inevitable.
one of my wise professors once mentioned in a conversation a year or so ago that we, as a people, as a civilization, as a species, should have evolved, should have advanced beyond war by now.
duh, right?
there is a bumper sticker pasted on the back of a green honda civic that i see most everyday when i walk back to my apartment in the university commons: it has a picture of a broken heart colored as an American flag and reads: "my other half is in Iraq." i assume this is the car of one of the female employees.
for so long it just registered in my head as, well, bumper-sticker patriotism.
but recently, i have felt my heart tear a little bit more as i walk past, and i think of whoever is missing half of her (or his) heart in there a little bit more often.
as a community, as a nation, i think our hearts our broken over the iraq conflict.
but we still have another half. what are we going to do with it?
about a half and hour ago, i looked up peace in the back of my NIV. there are tons of entries for peace (peaceable peaceful peacemakers), peacable (peace), peace-loving, etc.
so i'll end with some bumper-sticker peacemaking:
Peacemakers who sow in peace raise a harvest of righteousness.
- James 3:18
3 comments:
This is a very poignant posting. I have done quite a bit of writing on this topic at my own blog HERE
Check it out. My heart is broken over the whole thing too.
Keep the faith.
thanks, scott. i checked out your blog...great stuff. excited to read more.
Hey Rachel - I was struck by this truth that we are indeed at war over Spring Break. It was on the date of the Four Year Anniversary of the beginning of the war, and I was watching the news special, some Good Morning America deal, on an airplane about to embark for a vacation of leisure and pleasure. I was shocked as I realized four years of war means our entire undergraduate careers have taken place with the backdrop of war - but in such a distant and hidden way for most of us. It is interesting to what degree we don't notice that there really are negative and scary overtones of death and sadness behind everything we've studied; it is interesting how much we don't notice. At the same time, I wish it was more glaringly apparent, more pervasive. If we really felt this war, could we have used these four years as students in a university to effectuate more positive change?
The truth is, it is not over, as you've said, and we will be there a long time (there as in anywhere in a state of war). I think it is important to bring it closer to the forefront of our minds at times.
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