IIn May, Starr King School for the Ministry held its graduation in my former church in Walnut Creek. The school rotates its commencement between the larger churches in the Bay Area and there have been some memorable ones at Mt. Diablo. But none was more memorable than the one this year when honorary degrees were awarded to Mary Harrington, who gave a stirring sermon at the Service of the Living Tradition at General Assembly about her journey with Lou Gehrig’s disease; Jeremiah Wright, the controversial former pastor of Barack Obama; and Chris Hedges, the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who has written such ground-breaking books as If You Meet the Buddha on the Road Kill Him and War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.
Chris Hedges is a remarkable person. He is a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School who pursued a career as a war correspondent rather than following his father into the ministry, as he had originally intended. Being awarded an honorary degree from Starr King was appropriate for Hedges, given the school’s commitment to educating its students “to counter oppression and create just and sustainable communities.” It was also appropriate because Starr King is unlike Rockford College, where Hedges was booed off the stage when he made some unfavorable comments about our war in Iraq during the address he had been invited to give at that school’s graduation. Hedges was not only booed, he was escorted off the stage and put on a bus that took literally him out of town. It’s amazing to me that, in our time, such things still happen. It’s like being ridden out of town on a rail. But I suppose it shouldn’t be so amazing, given what happened last summer at all the town hall meetings on health care right here in Colorado.
Needless to say, Hedges got a different reception at the Starr King graduation as he talked about how what actually happens in the midst of war is almost completely forgotten in debates like whether we should engage in war as a means of getting what we want. Although he is not a pacifist – it would be hard to be a pacifist and a war correspondent – Hedges came back from Iraq, the last of the many battlefronts from which he’s reported, so traumatized he was been unable to return. And he says his experience wasn’t unique. Most of those who’ve fought in places like the Middle East have been deeply affected by the experience. Many of you who have been in battle know what I mean.
Hedges has won several awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, for his reporting from such places. In the beginning, he says he actually enjoyed the experience. It gave him the high that goes with putting yourself into such a fearful situation – the kind of high multiplied by several magnitudes that goes with entering a haunted house on Halloween. But the high seldom lasted; especially as the fighting dragged on and he began to see the carnage it created with what seemed to him like an almost total disregard of the humanity of the people involved. Finally, his own humanity rose up and he found he couldn’t stand any more of the killing. He had discovered that no matter what the high is that can come from entering into battle, as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, himself, has put it, that what happens in war isn’t heroic. He said: “People get the idea that war is going to be antiseptic,” that it’s going to be like a video game where people don’t really die – killing is just blips on a screen. “Well,” he went on, “it’s not going to be that. People are going to die.” And they are often going to die in the most horrible kinds of ways.
In an article that appeared in The Atlantic earlier this year, Hedges wrote about what he discovered when he and a colleague interviewed troops who had returned from the battlefields of Iraq. Indeed, though they had served their country well, few of them felt heroic. In fact, to one degree or another, all of them had been traumatized by the experience and it seemed to Hedges as though many of them were going to face futures just as painful the Vietnam vets who today live on the streets of our cities.
In a conversation they had soon after he had returned from Iraq, Hedges told Bill Moyers that one of the things that frightened him most about the response of Americans who stayed at home while our troops were sent off to Iraq – and now Afghanistan – is how little they understood about what was actually going. It’s almost the opposite of what happened with Vietnam. In that conflict Americans were confronted day after day with pictures of people dying and soldiers coming home in body bags. Remember the picture of the little girl fleeing down a road in the nude absolutely terrified by the firefight going on behind her? Death counts were given on the news each day just like baseball scores – and most families had to face the risk of one of their members being killed or maimed in battle. These days our cleaned up news shows almost none of this – and I don’t mean just Fox. The Bush Administration wouldn’t even allow flag-draped coffins be shown when our dead were brought home. With all the flag-waving, the adulation of our troops, and the sanitizing of the news, Hedges says, “we’ve lost touch with the notion of what war is.”
This is a shame, says Hedges, because after seeing the reality of what happened in Vietnam, for awhile, at least, it seemed as though: “we became a better nation.” We became a better nation because “we were humbled … in our defeat.” Because of this, we were forced: “to step outside of ourselves and look at ourselves as others might see us. And it wasn’t a pretty sight.” So: “We asked questions about ourselves that we had not asked before.”
But this isn’t the way we’re experiencing what is going on in Afghanistan and Iraq. If we were seeing what was happening more realistically, says Hedges, we’d be telling the President not to listen to the advice of the generals who want to ramp up the killing. We’d be calling on the President to realize that confronting violence with violence has never worked in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq. We’d be calling on the President to realize that war isn’t some kind of strategic game, even though it’s being presented that way by all the former generals and diplomats on PBS. War means people dying – people just as human and lovable as the President’s daughters. We should be calling on the President, and ourselves, about whether or not we’d be willing to send our own loved ones into such battles.
In his conversation with Hedges, Bill Moyers asked him what a soldier being sent into battle has to face. He said that whatever the high they might initially feel they were going to have to deal with a deflation of the myth of war: “the myth of heroism, the myth of patriotism, the myth of glory: all the myths that have the ability to arouse us when we’re not in mortal danger. They were going to have to confront their own mortality – and that’s going to be scary.”
Hedges said: When they actually get into battle, some will cry, some will throw up. They won’t speak much. Everyone will realize that from here on out, at least until the fighting ends, it will be a constant minute-by-minute battle with fear. And that sometimes fear wins. And anybody who tells you differently has never been to war.
So, Moyers asked, why doesn’t the media show us this? The answer is because it’s got a stake in not doing it. Not only does the public respond better when war as entertainment, the media is a part of a corporate structure that profits from war. And even though we’re not shown their reaction, this upsets our troops. Hedges says that when he was embedded with the Marine Corps in Iraq he discovered just how much the Marines hated the media, with all of its “flag-waving” and “jingoism.” They way the media sanitized their experience felt as obscene to our troops as did what they were being told to do. That’s why, says Hedges, rather than they’re feeling heroic: “It’s not uncommon that when soldiers are dying they call out for their mother.”
War has a horrible cost - and I don’t mean just because it leaves soldiers crying. But, says Hedges, it’s a cost that seems to gives a lot of those who don’t have to pay it a sense of meaning – like the folks driving around with American flags flapping on their cars and bumper stickers with slogans like the ones we used to see: “America, love It or Leave It.” These things are symptoms, says Hedges, that war is “one of the most powerful narcotics ever invented by humankind.” And of all the things concerning war about which we should be afraid this is one of the most important because top overcome their fear soldiers become pumped up to see the enemy as an “other” which they have an obligation to destroy. But once they’ve taken on this “divine-like power to revoke another human being’s place on this planet,” as Hedges puts it, they forget about what will happen to them after they’ve done it?
Chris Hedges isn’t a pacifist. Unlike William Ellery Channing, the early Unitarian from whom we took this morning’s reading [*see reading at the end of these remarks], Hedges doesn’t condemn those who have responded to their country’s call to go to enter into battle. He admires “the courage and integrity” of most of those who’ve done it. But what he discovered was that, as time went by it becames harder and harder for them to maintain a sense of respect for themselves when they’ve so disrespected others so much they were willing to cause their deaths.
If Hedges is correct, one of the things we should be asking our President to do as he’s being called on to send more troops to Afghanistan is to think about the human equation involved in doing so, for the living and dying of human beings is what war is all about. And, we should be asking the media to show us this reality. I became an activist against the War in Vietnam because I saw pictures of battle-scared victims brought back from Vietnamese hospitals by a group called Physicians for Social Responsibility. I remember putting them up in the entryway of the church I then served and how that shocked people. I did it because I wanted them to see the carnage their tax dollars were creating. It’s what happened to me when I saw, in person on trips to Nicaragua and El Salvador, what our tax dollars were doing to the people of Central America. I actually went to Nicaragua and El Salvador to bear witness to it.
I believe we should also stop feeling so righteous about our country we think it can never be wrong about sending troops into battle – or that if it has been a mistake we can’t end the killing and bring them home. We finally did that in Vietnam and not only are the Vietnamese better off because we brought our troops home, we’re better for it, too. As an example of what I mean, there was a segment on Frontline a couple of months ago about a Unitarian Universalist from Oakland who helped a craftsman in Hanoi set up a shop to build low-cost wheel chairs for victims of the land-mines left over from the war we fought. What he’s doing is winning friends for us in a country whose people had little love for us when we were trying to kill them – and this is because of what happened when we ended a war, rather than prolonging it.
Hedges also says that if we going to be able to cure the “narcotic” of war we’re going to have to respond to its allure as would any recovering addict. We’re going to have to admit that countries can be making a mistake when they choose to engage in it. Sure, we may need to hunt down people like Osama bin Laden, just as we would the criminals who threaten us, but we must also remember that even if we find bin Laden we’re not going to win the hearts of his followers, any more than we’d win the hearts of anyone else who threatens us, unless we begin to address the roots of whatever it is that makes they want to harm us – and trying to kill them isn’t going to do this.
Hedges is the graduate of a seminary who is serious about his faith even though he decided to address his concerns to a wider audience than just the audience of a church. But his faith isn’t of the flowery kind that seems so popular these days, the sort that assumes that something good will always happen if just we have an attitude that’s positive. His is a faith that acknowledges that we all have a dark side – that we’re all as capable of doing bad things as doing things that are good, especially if we’re put in harm’s way, as are troops being into battle. Hedges believes that when people are forced into extreme situations, like being sent into battle, it’s not only easy their darker sides to take control, it’s soldiers are encouraged to let happen. They are encouraged to think of those with whom they will be fighting as no more than “others” – as less-than-beings whose lives have no mean.
Our Universalist forbears told us that everyone on this earth deserve our love because Whatever It Is That’s Most Sacred and Holy loves them just as much as us. Our Unitarian forbears told us that since Whatever It Is That’s Most Sacred and Holy gave us brains we should be able to understand, as Channing and Hedges put it: “Our whole civil society, not just those we send off to fight,” is in danger of “being torn apart” when we “engage that ecstatic, exciting, narcotic that is war.” And “if we don’t get a grasp on the poison that war is, then that poison can ultimately kill us just as surely as any disease.”
Like Hedges, I believe there are times when war is just – when it’s something in which we’re forced to engage. But even then we must understand that’s an enormous price to pay. That’s why, as Channing believed, even though some might think such a topic unfit for the pulpit, in fact it’s an “eminently moral and religious subject” Believing this Channing hoped, as do I: “to excite in you the purpose of making some new and persevering efforts for the abolition of this vestige of barbarism” called war. Said Channing: “I speak of it strongly because humanity and religion demand from us all a new a sterner tone on this matter of evil” because all “other evils fade before it.”
So, when we leave this peaceful place this morning, let us think about how we can spread our feelings of peacefulness in a world in which there remains so much violence and warring, honoring the human dignity and worth we have covenanted as Unitarian Universalists to promote. Let us do this so the Chris Hedges in our midst will never again be booed in Rockford.
Reading from Channing on War
Edited by Clarke Wells
In writing about his opposition to the War of 1812, America’s first war of aggression, a war, by the way, in which we, at best, won only a standoff with our British opponent, William Ellery Channing, often thought of as one of the founders of our faith, said:
In speaking of the evils of war, I have no thought of denying that war has sometimes done good. There is no unmixed evil in the universe. Providence brings good from everything, from fearful sufferings, from atrocious crimes. But sufferings and crimes are not therefore to be set down among our blessings. Murder sometimes cuts short the life and triumphs of a monster of guilt. Robbery may throw into circulation the useless hordes of a miser. Despotism may subdue an all-wasting anarchy. But we do not, therefore, canonize despotism, robbery and murder.
There are times, says Channing, when:
War may call forth in those whom it assails and indignant patriotism, a fervent public spirit, a generous daring and heroic sacrifices, which testify to the inborn greatness of human nature.
These, however, are the incidental influences of war. Its necessary fruits are crime and woe. To enthrone force above right is it essential character; and order, freedom, civilization are its natural prey….
A single murder in peace thrills our frames…. But benevolence has hardly made an effort to snatch from sudden and untimely death the innumerable victims immolated on the alter of war. This insensibility demands that the miseries and crimes of war should be placed before us with minuteness, with energy, with strong and indignant feeling.
For:
The field of battle is a theatre, got up at immense cost, for the exhibition of crime on a grand scale. A more fearful hell in any region of the universe cannot well be conceived.
Second Reading
MOYERS: Does the inevitability of civilian casualties make this war illegitimate?
HEDGES: Well, I think the war is illegitimate not because civilians will die. Civilians die in every conflict. It's illegitimate because the administration has not, to my mind, provided any evidence of any credible threat. And we can't go to war just because we think somebody might do something eventually.
There has to be hard intelligence. There has to be a real threat if we're going to ask our young men and women to die.
Because once you unleash the "dogs of war" and I know this from every war I've ever covered, war has a force of its own. It's not surgical. We talk about taking out Saddam Hussein. Once you use the blunt instrument of war, it has all sorts of consequences when you use violence on that scale that you can't anticipate. I'm not opposed to the use of force. But force is always has to be a last resort because those who wield force become tainted or contaminated by it. And one of the things that most frightens me about the moment our nation is in now, is that we've lost touch with the notion of what war is.
At the end of the Vietnam War, we became a better country in our defeat. We asked questions about ourselves that we had not asked before. We were humbled, maybe even humiliated. We were forced to step outside of ourselves and look at us as others saw us. And it wasn't a pretty sight.
But we became a better country for it. A much better country. Gradually war's good name if we can, between quotes, can say was resurrected. Certainly during the Reagan Era. Granada, Panama. Culminating with the Persian Gulf War, where a war — the very essence of war was hidden from us. And the essence of war is death. War is necrophilia. That's what it is.