So we are to now send a fleet of drones to enemy territory, this time not only armed with cameras to scout positions and features, but armed with missles. A technological breakthrough, this: with no risk to our own troops we can kill by remote. The operators of the drones will be on another continent, guiding the prop jet planes by joystick. For a generation that grew up on computer games of shooting up the bad guy it only seems natural. They're practiced, and now they're specially trained. And commanded.
The only difference, perhaps, is that real people will die. As much as Donald Rumsfeld tried to convince us that 'smart' bombs are humane, the record shows that more than two thirds of the victims are innocent.
Wasn't there once a code of honor that said you had to face your enemy? Under such a code it was cowardly to send someone or something to do your killing for you. But then, I suppose that was a time of kings and kingdoms, and kings were willing to die for the causes they decided to fight for. Under what newer code has it been decided that rulers are now too important to so risk? For they, like every ruler in history -- even the greatest and most enduring -- are expendable. Their legacies are limited. They are more important in their own minds than history will give them a sentence in a book.
Military dominance will bring peace. That's the idea we're given. We'll force the bastards into peace.
Only, what is peace?
My friends, peace is not the absence of conflict. Worse, it can't be something that we make people do by threat. Such is merely enforcement, and underneath boils fear and resentment. Hardly peaceful. No, peace is instead a cultivated condition where the least violence is used to ensure social order. Cultivation takes a long time to accomplish. Since violence isn't used to enforce compliance, peace must be based on something else. And that, much as we hate to admit it, can only be love.
Reading the greatest minds in history, and most all religious texts, we find that love is the greatest power, the greatest goal, the most worthy effort of all in the universe. It is the most highly-developed skill to be able to move everything in a forward direction, in a direction of growth and creativity and beauty, in the better interest of all peoples, all life, the entire planet we are granted stewardship of. Love is no fuzzy, drug-soaked hippie ideal: it is the most serious responsibility given us by our Creator.
If love is constructive, my friends, then what is destructive must be its opposite. Armed drones are not what we were intended to rely on. Chaos was not our charge. Those who insist on the need for, the development of , and the use of destruction as a solution are no followers of God, no matter how much they might invoke His name as substantiation.
