People of faith are concerned about human society, not just whatever happens after this life. We have always tried to improve people’s quality of life.
Very often we see news articles about soldiers committing atrocities and gross violations of human rights in the countries where our government is fighting.
And very often we see news articles about soldiers and veterans in our local community who are committing horrible acts of violence against their spouses, children, friends and innocent bystanders. Remember the soldier who “water-boarded” his 4-year-old daughter because she could not recite her ABC’s for him? Active-duty troops and recent veterans are committing suicide at epic rates.
The list goes on and on.
Their surviving friends and family members usually tell the news reporters that these people had been happy and sociable people before they went to war.
Our military has trained them to commit acts of violence. Mentally healthy people do not do such things, so military training includes desensitizing them to disregard other people’s suffering, and dehumanizing their sense of the people who live in the countries where our government is making war.
These are not just random acts of violence. Our government spends billions of dollars training people to kill and oppress, sends them to other countries where they violate other people’s human rights, and then sends them home and assumes that they will automatically return to normal, despite the trauma of their military training and the trauma of their war experiences.
Some politicians want to provide mental health care. That is necessary, but fails to address the root causes. Rather than just a few isolated cases, we are experiencing military violence as a public health epidemic. While treatment can be useful, the only realistic way to address a public health epidemic is prevention!
The U.S. spends many hundreds of billions of our tax dollars training people to kill. It is not realistic to think that spending a few million on treatment will suffice. Imagine if we spent hundreds of billions of dollars encouraging people to smoke tobacco and then thought that a few smoking-cessation classes would solve smoking’s health problems. For such a huge public health epidemic, the only realistic solution is to prevent the problem in the first place.
We must stop training millions of young people to dehumanize other people and desensitize themselves to other people’s suffering (and their own).
We must stop having a foreign policy that uses violence to solve the world’s political and social problems. Violence only makes things worse!
We must stop thinking that the U.S. can dominate the rest of the world and violently punish anyone who opposes U.S. political and economic policies.
People of faith see everything connected. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The bombs we drop in Vietnam explode at home.” We see how U.S. militarism comes home to roost in violence here.
War is suicide.
People of faith care about the real world. A faithful response is to work for peace.
Glen Anderson is a Christian pacifist and conscientious objector from the Vietnam era and has served for decades as a full-time volunteer organizer for peace, social justice and nonviolence, especially through the Fellowship of Reconciliation.
Perspective is coordinated by Interfaith Works in cooperation with The Olympian. The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily endorsed by Interfaith Works or The Olympian.
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