“To Die For”

Who am I to talk about fallen soldiers to people of diverse opinions and political affiliation who live and work in the shadow of our nation’s capital and at the gates of the United States Naval Academy? I grew up on a college campus. I was a faculty brat, not a child of the military. My family inheritance in these matters is one of doubt and dissention and passive pacifism. I often have occasion to remember my mother in a typical yellow-dog Democratic pose, hunched over in her chair before the TV, arms crossed defiantly and cigarette tip glowing—ooh glaring, glaring at the speech-making President, pelting him with the most unflattering epithets.

My Dad served in the US Navy in World War II. He was Communications Officer aboard a tug called the Owl which hauled Mulberry elements across the English Channel to France in preparation for the D-Day landing. I found his service knife one day in a box in the basement and when I asked him about it, he snatched it from me and refused to speak about it. In my adolescent morbid imagination I pictured a horror story untold. But the only concrete legacy for me of his Navy service is my handwriting, which reflects the careful printing of a person concerned with the accurate transcription of code. The communications officer lives on in my tiny neat linked printed letters and crossed sevens.

Who am I? I am one of you—part of a tradition in which a diversity of opinions can be respectfully shared in community. I am a minister-in-training behind a free pulpit. My calling is to call things as I see them and hope that my words will at least stimulate your thinking and at most inspire creative dialogue and action. I speak only for myself, to each of you, respecting in each moment that you may disagree.

Perhaps it is my imagination, but I am noticing that Memorial Day, contrary to what one might expect after a military victory with casualties, is this year quite a subdued affair. I find that curious. I suspect this might be due to the fact that our understanding of the meaning of patriotism and sacrifice has been shifting. This war on-going has posed in many ways the ultimate challenge to the ease with which we send young people off to “die for their country,” to die for us.

Last weekend I traveled to New England for a regular gathering of a spiritual group of which I am a member. I was the first to arrive on the wooded property and I decided to go for a walk. Just down the hill from the house I saw something bright, a splash of bright blue under a tree. It was so bright I thought it must be a painted toy of some kind, but as I approached I saw that it was a magnificent young male blue jay lying on its belly on the pine needles, wings and tail outstretched as if it were still in flight, its neck broken and not a scratch or bug or scrap of dirt on it. It was dead, still, soft, elegant—simply beautiful. What was he doing in the moment that he died? Enjoying the gift of flight? Listening to the sound of his own harsh cry? Seeking a mate? Celebrating the life of a healthy young male with beautiful wings and dark piercing eyes? I lived a story with this bird that weekend. He was a teacher for me about matters of life and death. What did he die for? He died for nothing. One moment he was full tilt in his life and the next he was dead on the ground. On Saturday afternoon I buried him under that tree and made a little ceremony of thanks and praise. And I found myself thinking about my Dad.

My father died of a ruptured cerebral aneurysm in a car crash with a misbehaving truck on a Georgia highway nearly a decade ago. He and my Mom were traveling to Florida for a Christmas visit with my sister’s family. The car was packed to the brim with gifts in festive wrappers. I got the phone call in Virginia at ten o’clock in the snowy country evening. The ER doctor told me that my Dad was alive but would not survive the injury to his brain. Then I talked with my mother, who was uninjured. “They let me visit him next door here, and honey,” she said in a quiet voice, “he is perfect. There is not a scratch on him.” What was he doing in the moments before he died? Searching into the rainy night for the way? Thinking about his new granddaughter; a poem; cottage cheese? What did he die for, I wondered—this man newly retired and healthy; this man worth, in the lawsuit, only seven hundred grand; this man so loved and giving; this man whose kidneys and liver would within hours find new bodies to serve? He died for nothing, but in his dying for nothing was his living for everything. He was beautiful and more valuable than anyone can calculate just because he was so much who he was. As was the bird. As were all these fallen soldiers. They all loved their lives. I buried the bird and my father both that afternoon with a renewed sense of the preciousness of this gift of life.

Marine Lance Corporal Nicholas Brian Kleiboeker, 19 years old, “killed when the bunker he was working in caught fire and exploded” on May 13^th. Army Private First Class Marlin Rockhold, 23 years old, “killed May 8^th by a sniper attack in Baghdad.” Why were they there? What did they die for? They were there because we sent them to that dangerous place and we told them they would be heroes and that they were fighting for us, for our freedom, for the country they love. They believed us and they believed in us and they entered into the fray and they died there.

We like to think, we Americans, that our system, our way of being is different, but I want to point out ways in which we act like the terrorists we hunt. Tyseer al-Ajrami, a man in his twenties, detonated explosives strapped to his body, killing an Israeli policeman, in November 2002. Saeed Hotary, 22, blew himself up killing twenty Israelis outside a Tel Aviv discotheque in May 2001. Jihad Titi, a young man in his twenties, killed a grandmother and child when he blew himself up in May 2002. The average age of Palestinian “martyrs” is 18-23. Most are well educated and single. Most come from a section of their contested homeland called the Gaza Strip where they live, most of them, in refugee camps. These boys and girls are sought out by radical outfits such as Hamas. In isolated enclaves they accept an indoctrination to which they are extraordinarily vulnerable. They are offered camaraderie and support and reminded of the losses they have suffered, of their duty to Islam and to their beloved homeland. They are taught the benefits of “martyrdom”: forgiveness of sins, the peace of Allah, a place in heaven with Muhammad, the satisfaction of vengeance, instant earthly fame and the pride of their parents and friends. They are given an opportunity to prove their strength, their courage, their loyalty in a society in which they are often otherwise impotent..

76% of the Palestinian people approve of suicide bombing missions. 76%. The parents of these human missiles, these instruments of war, experience severe cultural pressure to hide their incalculable grief and maximize their public rhetoric of pride. The “public mask of stoicism” and approval the relatives of bombers don functions as a recruitment tool. Scott Atran in the journal Science writes: “For the sponsoring organization, suicide bombers are expendable assets whose losses generate more assets by expanding public support and pools of potential recruits.” What do they die for? They die for nothing but the inherent beauty of their choice to live the way they lived and die the way they die. They are beautiful strong perfect children with wills that shine like blue jays’ wings and hearts coiled tight as perfect rose buds. But they are pawns of ruthless powers which do not hesitate to sacrifice youth and heart for a cause.

I see Memorial Day as the final pitch in a long menu of tempting recruitment offers our 1^st world democracy makes to our own beautiful strong perfect children. “Be all that you can be.” Join this family of comrades who will never let you down. Learn to handle these exciting high tech toys. Avenge the deaths of innocents. Secure the future of your endangered homeland. Prepare for a good civilian job. Practice uncritical obedience. Make money for college. Make friends and family proud. Feel powerful, strong, and good about yourself. Offer yourself to the cross like Jesus did for the freedom of those you love. Know that we will remember you at the end of May every year, sound the bugle, fire shots into the air, give all your mothers a flag. And young men and women join up for these reasons and others, some highly laudable and selfless, some driven by the most mundane of circumstances.

We like to make a distinction between our nation and others in this regard, but I fear we deceive ourselves. We are all to similar degrees desperate in our separate kingdoms—desperate for land, for water, for jobs, for oil, for control and power, for security, to be heard or to be helped. And instead of using our brains, our voices, our hearts; instead of immersing, observing, listening; instead of exercising compassion; instead of cultivating a willingness to sacrifice not human lives, but things—portions of our fiercely-held material goods and privileges; instead, we do not hesitate to send our precious children out into the desert and the streets to fight and die. We do not hesitate, then, to declare them heroes and martyrs as we lay the rose of their perfect bodies, of their perfect unlived miraculous lives, under a marble stone and a flag. The desperate are not the ones who die.

I for one do not want a healthy young man, father of two, a devoted husband and son to die for me or for this nation. I want him to get an education, raise his children well, model healthy relationship skills for those around him, excel in work he longs to do, find meaning in his daily life, come to death fulfilled and ready, and leave this earth a little better off than when he arrived upon it. If his heart is set on military service, then I affirm him in his work. But my job, as a member of a faith tradition that claims peaceful world community as a goal, as a member of a powerful democracy, as a rational person with an educated spirit, as a minister with a voice, my job is to do my best to ensure that the missions in which he (or she) is involved reflect the true values of our nation and of humanity. This is what patriotism today must be about.

Barbara Kingsolver has written: “Our iconography as a nation grew out of war—our language of patriotism is inseparable from a battle cry.” Let us acknowledge that times have changed. Our skills in diplomacy and our shared understanding of the ethics and aims of international relations have matured. Our technologies, our information systems are astonishingly advanced and can be turned to the service of peace as easily as they have been to the service of war. And the stakes, my friends, I remind you, the stakes are very high. The edge between survival of this earth and its momentary annihilation is very thin. Patriotism and sacrifice do not have to mean what they have meant since 1776 in this country and for millennia in the rest of the world. American patriotism has morphed into a form of rabid nationalism that is diverting us from the enlightened leadership we the people—our government and even our military—could offer a world in continuous jeopardy.

Martha Nussbaum, Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, offers an alternative concept, one which eliminates the belligerence, militancy, rigidity and abstraction of nationalism while offering to the idea of patriotism broader scope and a more inclusive dream. She calls it cosmopolitanism, a world citizenship based in “the very old idea of the cosmopolitan, the person whose primary allegiance is to the community of human beings in the entire world.” “We should give our first allegiance to no mere form of government,” she writes, “but to the moral community made up by the humanity of all human beings.” Quoting a Stoic philosopher, she says “Our task as citizens of the world will be to ‘draw the [concentric] circles [of the various communities to which we each belong] somehow toward the center.” {http://www.phil.uga.edu/faculty/wolf/nussbaum1.htm}

Today in churches and cemeteries, at memorials across this country, our nation gathers to mourn and honor members of the United States Armed Services lost in war. I call them into our memory here this morning not because they were “patriots,” not because they “made the ultimate sacrifice” as the rhetoric goes, not because they are Christ-like in their martyrdom for the good of the many, but because they were beautiful children of our nation—young, full of heart, passion and energy, each with a promising life ahead. Unlike the parents of Palestinian suicide bombers, unlike many of the parents, siblings and friends of these American soldiers, I refuse to bury my grief and my guilt and my horror under our flag. Our consciences as individuals, as mothers and fathers, siblings and friends, as related in the humanity we share on this beautiful, hopeful, war-torn earth, must not be allowed to die, to be silenced. The roses I offer today declare:

My life is dedicated to peace,

to the support of diplomatic wisdom and the United Nations;

to listening and learning about countries and cultures

and governments and religions

that are different from mine;

to witnessing and speaking out and voting;

to being a citizen of one world of diverse cultures;

to nurturing, encouraging, and empowering

youth and young adults;

to noticing and rewarding the cosmopolitanism

of living servicemen and servicewomen;

to remembering well long lives and natural deaths;

and to the offering of roses to the living.

I will give my roses to the living and remember these dead for the lives they were called to live, for their brilliant blue wings and their fearless flying.

In the integrity with which we respond to our own hearts’ call, to our own souls’ duty lies the hope of our nation and our world. I would like to close by reading a few more names of young people killed in the War against Iraq. At the end I will add the name of the cosmopolitan activist Rachel Corrie. In calling these names I call the names of all those who have chosen their causes and come to death with great courage. In the pause that follows, I invite you to mention out loud the names of any fallen soldiers, lost in this war or any other, whom you would like to be remembered today.

Marine Private First Class Jose F. Gonzalez Rodriguez, 19, died May 12^th with another Marine when ordinance they were handling exploded. A Mexican immigrant, he was an honor student and an athlete.

Marine Lance Corporal Matthew R. Smith, 20, died May 10^th in a vehicle accident in Kuwait. The day his son died, his father received the first letter from Matthew since his deployment. His son wrote how proud he was to be fighting for his country’s freedom. His father said, “How many people on this Earth die doing the job they know they were put here to do?”

Army Captain James F. Adamouski, 29, died April 2^nd in a helicopter crash in central Iraq. He had been accepted to Harvard Business School and planned to teach economics at West Point after earning a master’s degree.

Navy Lieutenant Thomas M. Adams, 27, who was killed March 22^nd in a helicopter collision over the Persian Gulf. From the time he was a boy, he wanted to know all he could about ships and planes. “A look in his room at the models and posters was only part of the story,” said his uncle.

Marine Lance Corporal Andrew Julian Aviles, who was killed April 7^th when an enemy artillery round struck his vehicle. “He was a born leader, mature beyond his years, smart and articulate,” said his sister Kristine. “He always had big dreams, big aspirations, and he loved his family and friends deeply.”

Army Sergeant Jacob Butler, 24, who was killed April 1^st by a rocket-propelled grenade. “He was kind, care-giving and loving,” his father said. “He’d give you the shirt off his back. I guess it goes back to the way he was raised. We’re a tight-knit family. We believed in things that were right.”

Army Specialist Narson B. Sullivan, 21, who died April 25^th when his gun accidentally discharged. He studied in the food service program at his vocational-technical high school, aspiring to become a chef, and relatives say he joined the army in 2000 to help pay for college.

Rachel Corrie, American peace activist, 23, crushed to death by a bulldozer on March 17^th as she tried to prevent the Israeli army destruction of Palestinian homes in the Gaza Strip.

* * * *

Sunday, May 25, 2003

Readings

Sermon for May 25, 2003

“To Die For”

This Happens Every Day

[Excerpts from e-mails sent from Rachel Corrie, an American Activist who was fatally crushed by a bulldozer on March 16 as she tried to prevent the Israeli army from destroying a Palestinian home in the Gaza strip (Harper’s Magazine, June 2003).]

February 7, 2003

Hi friends and family, and others, I have been in Palestine for two weeks and one hour now…. [N]o amount of reading, conferences, documentaries, or word of mouth could have prepared me for the reality of the situation here…. I am in Rafah: a city of about 140,000 people, approximately 60% of whom are refugees.

February 27, 2003

[To her mother]

…I thought a lot about what you said on the phone about Palestinian violence not helping the situation. Sixty thousand workers from Rafah worked in Israel two years ago. Now only 600 can go to Israel for jobs. Of these 600, many have moved, because the three checkpoints between here and Ashkelon (the closest city in Israel) make what used to be a forty-minute drive a twelve-hour or impassable journey. In addition, what Rafah identified in 1999 as sources of economic growth are all completely destroyed—the Gaza international airport…; the border for trade with Egypt…; access to the ocean. The count of homes destroyed in Rafah since the beginning of this intifada is up around 600, by and large homes of people with no connection to the resistance but who happen to live along the border. I think it may be official now that Rafah is the poorest place in the world. There used to be a middle class here—recently. And then the bulldozers come and take out people’s vegetable farms and gardens. What is left for people? Tell me if you can think of anything. I can’t.

If any of us had our lives and welfare completely strangled, lived with children in a shrinking place where we knew, because of previous experience, that soldiers and tanks and bulldozers could come for us at any moment and destroy all the greenhouses that we had been cultivating for however long, and did this while some of us were beaten and held captive…—do you think we might try to use somewhat violent means to protect whatever fragments remained? I think about this especially when I see orchards and greenhouses and fruit trees destroyed—just years of care and cultivation. I think about you and how long it takes to make things grow and what a labor of love it is. I really think, in a similar situation, most people would defend themselves as best they could. I think Uncle Craig would. I think probably Grandma would. I think I would….

I’m having a hard time right now. I just feel sick to my stomach from being doted on all the time, very sweetly, by people who are facing doom. I know that from the United States, it all sounds like hyperbole. Honestly, a lot of the time the sheer kindness of the people here, coupled with the overwhelming evidence of the willful destruction of their lives, makes it seem unreal to me. I really can’t believe that something like this can happen in the world without a bigger outcry about it. It really hurts me to witness how awful we can allow the world to be….

Anyway, I’m rambling. I just want to write my Mom and tell her that I am witnessing this chronic, insidious genocide and I’m really scared, and questioning my fundamental belief in the goodness of human nature. This has to stop. I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop. I don’t think it’s an extremist thing to do anymore. I still really want to dance around to Pat Benatar and have boyfriends and make comics for my co-workers. But I also want this to stop….

Coming here is one of the better things I have ever done. So when I sound crazy, or if the Israeli military should break with their racist tendency not to injure white people, please pin the reason squarely on the fact that I am in the midst of a genocide which I am also indirectly supporting, and for which my government is largely responsible.

The Daughter I Can’t Hear From

[Excerpts from remarks by Rachel Corrie’s mother, Carrie, at a Mother’s Day gathering in Olympia, Washington.]

The possibility of Mother’s Day 2003 having more than the usual significance was sparked for me before Rachel died—a week before, when I was in Washington DC with other women gathered to challenge the pending war with Iraq. I spent a day in workshops and came across mothers planning to take Mother’s Day back to its roots in this country, to Julia Ward Howe and her Declaration calling for a Mother’s Day of Peace, her model for challenging injustice and violence wherever it might be.

My attention, of course, has been drawn to the injustices in the U.S./Israeli/Palestinian conflict…. The International Solidarity Movement, the group with which Rachel worked, “was founded to provide the Palestinian people with a resource, international protection and a voice with which to resist nonviolently, an overwhelming military occupation force.” In the last couple of days the Israeli military has increased pressure on foreigners in the West Bank and particularly in the Gaza Strip and appears to be specifically targeting the ISM. Two British members, Nick and Alice, were held at checkpoint for twenty-eight hours, with no arrest and no charges and are now being held at a settlement apparently for deportation. I believe Alice is the one who comforted Rachel as she was dying. Alice is Jewish and has cousins in Israel whom she fears for when she hears of a suicide bombing….

We in America see the horror of [such] bombings. We seem to see much less of the ongoing violence against the Palestinian people. Our blindness is an enormous contributing factor to this problem. We need to remember that as we have watched the deaths of some of the 773 Israelis who have died since September 2000, that there have also been 2,298 Palestinian deaths. In this booklet now dedicated to Rachel—are the names and some of the faces of the children who have died [in that interval]—Israeli, Palestinian. We need to remember them all….

There have been times when I have been quiet because I felt there were others who knew more. There are some who would like to quiet me now and who would like to quiet the power of Rachel’s message too. I am no longer intimidated by experts or critics and certainly not by the name-callers. After all, my daughter stood in front of a bulldozer in order to protect the Palestinian home of a family with three young children. I believe that I…have the responsibility as a mother to speak out and to demand that the experts, the policymakers, Congress, and the White House reflect our values, our belief in the sanctity of each life, in the equality of each human being, and in justice and the rule of law.

Responsive Reading