Two Very Different Anniversaries

Ten years ago today, the Iraq War began.

I was a senior in college, and I remember quite clearly that day as I was watching the opening rounds of the NCAA Men's Basketball tournament with friends. Being college students, there were beverages of various kinds being consumed, and I'd like to blame what happened on the beverages, but I can't. Alcohol only lowers inhibitions, so the reactions I observed and did nothing to challenge were indicative of a sickness already inside many of us.

Knowing that basketball fans would get upset if their games were interrupted by breaking news, CBS chose to insert Dan Rather into the commercial breaks instead. A team would take a timeout, and all of a sudden there would be greenish night-vision footage of bombs falling on Bagdad.

If a blind person were in the room, they would have had no way of knowing if guys were cheering for a clutch free-throw or a bright green explosion that probably meant innocent civilians were, at that very moment, dying because of a disagreement over weapons of mass destruction that didn't actually exist.

I didn't join in the cheering, but I didn't do anything to challenge it, either. The scene was so surreal I didn't know what to say, but I'm certain a part of me didn't want to risk a negative reaction from my friends or get accused of being "unpatriotic". So I sat silently as others cheered on a war that, to them, seemed a mere spectacle playing out on our TV screens, just like the basketball games.

This memory becomes even more tragic when I recall that fifty-five years ago today, Thomas Merton wrote about his famous epiphany of the previous day while on a rare journey outside the monastery walls. Merton records in his journal:

Yesterday, in Louisville, at the corner of 4th and Walnut (today Muhammed Ali Blvd.), suddenly realized that I loved all the people and that none of them were, or could be totally alien to me. As if waking from a dream- the dream of my separateness, of the "special" vocation to be different. My vocation does not really make me different from the rest of men or put me in a special category, juridically. I am still a member of the human race- and what more glorious destiny is there for man, since the Word was made flesh and became, too, a member of the Human Race!

Thank God! Thank God! I am only another member of the human race, like all the rest of them. I have the immense joy of being a man! As if the sorrows of our condition could really matter, once we begin to realize who and what we are- as if we could ever begin to realize it on earth. ~Journals, vol. 3 (A Search for Solitude: Pursuing the Monk's True Life), pp. 181-182

I'm not so naive as to believe that one single thing could solve all the world's problems. But if the President of the United States, a bunch of beer chugging frat guys, and everyone else shared in Merton's simple but profound realization that we are all, indeed, one great human family, perhaps we would be much more reluctant to go to war.

At the very least, we certainly wouldn't cheer as bombs exploded on our TV screens during March Madness commercial breaks.

May the epiphany of fifty-five years ago help prevent us from making tragic mistakes like the one that began ten years ago today.

5 years later

Today is the 5th anniversary of the US's invasion of Iraq. Today President Bush gave a speech defending his decision to start this war and his resolve to keep fighting it. Today many other politicians, including presidential hopefuls McCain, Clinton, and Obama, will give speeches touting their positions, saying why the war was and is a good idea or was/is a terrible idea. Whether it's appropriate or not, today is a day filled with rhetoric.

I've weighed in on this war before, so I won't rehash my position. If you want to know how I feel, just look to the left for the pink button. That will tell you all you need to know. So instead of policy talking points or even a lengthy theological interpretation thereof, I want to share my memories of where I was five years ago when we started this war.

Five years ago, in March of 2003, I was a Senior at Butler University getting ready to graduate and move to Nashville to start at Vanderbilt Divinity School in the Fall. On this particular day I was in the informal room of the fraternity house where I lived, along with about two dozen of my brothers watching the opening rounds of the NCAA basketball tournament. Most of us didn't go to class that day because we didn't want our schedule of beer drinking, pizza eating, and basketball watching/ amateur commentating to be interrupted by something as silly as academics. Like it or not, this is the logic of guys in college.

This yearly basketball viewing ritual was a little different, however. The games continued without interruption (because God forbid viewing of a single free throw be interrupted by breaking news of people dying), but during the commercials Dan Rather would come on the screen and show us live footage of Baghdad being bombed. Since it was nighttime in that part of the world, we saw the bombing in fuzzy green night-vision.

Fueled by a combination of too much alcohol and too many video-games, most of the guys cheered for each explosion the way they did a three point shot. The cheers were accompanied by laughter, very creative racial slurs, and impressions of people with Arabic accents running from falling bombs.

I wish I could say that I spoke up and told my friends that this wasn't OK, that each explosion meant that people died, and that people we knew might be killed in the invasion. I wish I could say that I took a moral stand, but I didn't. The whole experience was so surreal that I sat there transfixed, unable to believe what I was seeing on TV, never mind being able to process the reactions around me.

You can support the war or oppose the war, but people dying is never funny. All wars, no matter how positive the outcome (and I firmly believe that positive things can come out of any situation, no matter how bad), the death of anyone, civilian or soldier, is a tragedy. We can and should debate with one another whether the war was the right thing to do and whether we should stay in Iraq, but as we do, let us remember that lives are being lost every day that are never coming back. People lovingly created in God's image are dying, and God is the first one who cries any time any person meets a violent end.

I hope and pray that we we reflect on, debate, and disagree about what has happened over the last five years, that we can remember all the precious lives that have been lost, and that whatever position we support, we do so sincerely trying to honor those lost lives.