A war on terrorism is about as effective as a war on drugs...

So, having been inundated like everyone with underwear bomber and shoe bomber news...with people actually comparing Obama's response to the foiled attempt in Detroit with Bush's response to 9-11 (there's a slight difference of scale) and hearing that Yemen is the new front on the war on terror (which Dick Cheney wants to make sure is still called a war) despite this not being a new idea to the entire intelligence industry, I have had a few thoughts.

Very much like a "war on drugs" a "war on terrorism" accomplishes only two things. First, it makes people hate us more because fighting "wars of choice" really means that we are invading countries and going to war without declaring war, often in the "pre-emptive" fashion that has now apparently become the accepted norm.

Second, fighting such a war in a single-minded fashion only addresses a symptom. Just like law enforcement alone will never send drug use, military might can never kill or capture all of the terrorists. Hell, we don't even have good ways to tell them from the population of innocent bystanders in such a war.

The pieces are being put in place to open a new front in this "war" in Yemen. Yemen currently spends 6% of its GDP on its own military, often fighting the same people we would be engaging. They haven't eradicated or even slowed them. In fact, they have created more of them.

This recent article from SLATE does a great job explaining why a country like Yemen in an oil-rich area of the world struggles so much.

Journalist Brian Palmer says this: "More problematic for Yemen's long-term prosperity is the mismatch between the country's needs and means. Agriculture is a good example. While 43 percent of its employed adult men are farmers, the nation imports more than 75 percent of its food. A few decades ago, Yemenis were able to feed themselves; now many farmers have switched over to growing qat, a leaf containing an amphetamine-like drug that is illegal in most Western countries." Perhaps there's more in common with a "war on drugs" and a "war on terror" than is immediately apparent.

Corruption, greed and the merging of corporations and government (things which should be driven by very different goals)has effectively hamstrung Yemen. It is a theme which we should be familiar with and very scared of. Until we begin to understand that power concentrated in the hands of a few at the expense of the many is an equation that leads to dysfunctional social constructions like drug use and terrorism or radicalism we won't make a dent in those problems.

By and large people want the chance to live in peace, be prosperous and take care of themselves and their families. When that opportunity is hindered in some way, people react. They react and they take what opportunity is there. Perhaps it is drug production/sales/use, perhaps it is striking out in whatever way they can against what ever "enemy" they can be convinced is responsible for their plight.

Fighting this in conventional ways accomplishes nothing but feeding that beast. It is time to starve the beast by evoking the most dramatic and radical notion ever - loving our neighbors as ourselves.

Doing the Same Thing & Expecting Different Results...What's That Called Again?

We are sending more troops (30,000 more to be precise) to Afghanistan. President Obama made a powerful argument for the necessity of this action...powerful, but not convincing to me. We have spend the past 8 years engaged in nation-building and the strategy of invasion as foreign policy tool. I don't think it works.

Yes, Al Qaeda has attacked us in the past and perhaps continues to be some threat to our security. Yes, the Taliban is a ruthless organization determined to establish a totalitarian and oppressive regime in Afghanistan. Yes, we have started something and should have some responsibility to see it through. I agree with all of these things.

Here are my issues:
1. We have no idea what we are doing. Our nation-building in Iraq was a long and painful process, not to mention enormously costly in terms of lives and money. We do not understand the Arab mindset, ethos or culture at many levels . How long will it take this time as we make mistake after mistake because we, to paraphrase Tom Friedman in his opinion column in the NYT this morning, "try to make Afghanistan into Norway"?

2. We have some "nation-building" to do right here at home and perhaps we should get our own house in order before we go dictating to the rest of the world how it should be done. Lost in the shuffle of all of this talk of security is the real threat to our security...our economy is consumer-driven instead of production-driven, our debt is staggering and growing daily, and our culture is based on borrowing instead of saving. This is an unsustainable system and the biggest security risk we have...far more dangerous than Al Qaeda. (This is not to even mention the fact that we will not blink at raising the deficit or passing on debt to our grandchildren to fight wars, but will scream "socialism" from the highest tower if we dare to think about the same thing providing health care for millions of Americans. As my dad used to say, if you want to know where a person's heart is look at where they spend their money. For a nice take on "paying for war" see this site.)

3. We have Korea, Vietnam, both Gulf wars and a host of other nations' histories to look at - why do we think that we can accomplish what has never been accomplished with these tactics in a place that no country has ever invaded and successfully built up? And to try to do all of this on a timeline is just political gaming...

I agree with Friedman and others in the belief that a real stance for our security would not involve sending more troops to fight, but would mean the much more difficult and self-effacing move of a retreat from our addiction to fossil fuels and, in doing so, a shift of power, economic support for the totalitarian regimes we resist on one hand and feed on the other.

Our future demands some real courage...some courage beyond even the substantial amount being demonstrated by our armed forces every day. It requires the courage to say that the way we have been doing things isn't working and its time to re-evaluate our priorities and goals. It requires the courage to change. That's what I can believe in.

A Purpose Driven Life?

Rick Warren gives the standard argument against same-sex marriage in these clips - a position he basically reinterates in a more recent "Meet the Press" interview. His claim is that same-sex marriage would change a "5000 year-old" definition of marriage as between one man and one woman. There's only one issue with that - it isn't true. He goes on to claim that he doesn't want a brother and sister marrying (OK, that one is covered),an older man marrying a young girl (sorry, Rick, that was not only a Biblical custom but still goes on today in many cultures), or a man with multiple wives (You mean like David or Solomon or the many cultures which still practice that today? Read Leviticus 18:18 or Deuteronomy 21:15 if you need some insight into multiple wives in the Biblical law). The idea that monogomy is the norm that has existed through all cultures and times is just false.

I have yet to hear any commentator against same-sex marriage tell me how two loving gay partners marrying threatens my 10 year-old monogamous, "traditional", one man and one woman marriage. How does it change anything? What does threaten my marriage and the so-called "sanctity" of the "institution" of marriage is the disrespect we give to it in general. Britney Spears Vegas weddings or the moral proselytizers on their soap-boxes and their 4th marriages do more damage than a gay or lesbian couple could ever do.

The slippery slope argument doesn't work for me either. As a minister of the Gospel, I call people (same or different sex) to be monogamous couples because that is the truest form of relationship and the most responsible with the mighty power that is love. I want same-sex marriage not because I want to damage marriage, but because I want to strengthen it - and because I wish to call my brothers and sisters who are LGBTQ to the same discipleship I call everyone else to - and that includes marriage for those who wish to do the hard work of relationships.

Rick - you're missing the boat. The bibical model of marriage is not the same as our mdoel of marriage, just as the biblical model of slavery is not one that we ascribe to. The cultures and times are different. We understand (some of us) that homosexuality is not a sin or curse, but the manner in which God creates some people. It is not a choice, I did not choose my heterosexuality. It is how God created me.

I appreciate the hard pastoral position that this puts ministers in...I really do. But that doesn't mean that we can walk the line so intently that we lose our prophetic responsibility to the Gospel. Jesus was comforting and also challenging. We must be the same, even when it means that those in our own congregations are afflicted. I do not believe that Rick Warren can do the good work he has done with AIDS patients and not be changed by that. I think he addresses that in the "Meet the Press" interview. But you still have to do something, Rick. If you spend time with people dying of this horrible disease and know that they did not "choose" to have this "lifestyle" but instead are victims of a sub-culture that has sprung up from people trying to be true to themselves in a world which will not accept that and therefore forces all kinds of false living, then that new awareness asks for some sort of new response from you. No one said the Gospel was easy.

And one last thing, Rick. You can't support "equal rights for everyone" but then call those rights different things. That's called "separate but equal" and it's been tried. It doesn't work. You're going to have to bite the bullet and do some soul-searching. Either a human right is just that, or it isn't.

Health Care Reform in Oklahoma

If you are wondering what the health care reform package that will be debated in Congress soon will mean to you as a citizen in Oklahoma, read this.

There are a lot of reasons to support reform, even if it isn't perfect.

We cannot afford to do nothing.

Dissention in the ranks...

As I said my prayers last night (yes, I actually do this), I said some special words for Kileen, Texas and the Ft. Hood community. I think that the President said it well when he remarked that a soldier's death in combat is tragic enough. It is awful beyond words when they come under fire on their own soil, at their own base, fired upon by their fellow soldier.

When it happened, I immediately began to wonder what the motive was and was very nervous that we would find another Timothy McVeigh at work or, worse yet, that the shooter would be Muslim. Of course those worst fears came true. It would seem that Major Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army psychologist in an ironic twist, opened fire on his fellow soldiers on the grounds of Ft.Hood. Nothing is really known about motive, though what concerns me is that the religious tradition of the "alleged" shooter instantly produces much speculation.

Why is that? As soon as the man's name is released, clearly of Arabic origin, and the nature of his religious practices are revealed the landslide of implied or bold declarations of "domestic terrorism" are released. First of all I think it odd that he is identified so quickly by his religion.

Robert Stewart, Devan Kalathat, Michael McLendon, Steven Kazmierczak, Robert A. Hawkins, Seung-Hui Cho, Charles Carl Roberts IV, Student Jeffrey Weise, Terry Ratzmann. These are all names of the shooters from the mass murders of the past 4 years. Do you know the religious practices of any of them? Was religion part of even the speculative motives for any of these people? If the answer is no (and I think it is) then is that a double-standard?

While I don't deny that religion often plays a vital role in the motivation of unstable people, such motivation is clearly not monopolized by a single religion. Islam has no special claim on motivating people to kill others. Christianity certainly has its own history with that.

So, as I pray for Ft. Hood, for the survivors and the wounded, for the families impacted in so many ways- including the family of Major Hasan, for the community wounded by this evil, I pray also for a nation which likes to pigeonhole these awful events and turn them into overly simplistic "us versus them" scenarios. The hard truth is that this may be a whole lot more of us...

Jesus once told his followers not to judge so they won't be judged. He said that the judgements we give will be the ones we get. So we'd best be aware that the standard we are establishing now is the one that will be used for us. What kind of world are we creating?

A candle against the gale...

As we gathered in the dusk of a windy evening, we knew we were in trouble. My friend, a fellow minister in the Methodist tradition, looked at me as she tried to light one of the candles we had brought for our candlelight vigil. There was no way that thing was going to either light or stay lit in the strong south wind. Here in Oklahoma, holding an outdoor candlelight vigil is a roll of the dice against big odds.

We had gathered at an outdoor park to hold a vigil for health care reform in conjunction with many others across the country. We had our sound system, our candles, our lighters, our notes...we were ready. As it reached time to start and there were just a few seats filled in an amphitheater made to hold a couple of hundred we delayed for a few minutes. But that was the crowd...

So we looked at the flickering flame, barely able to last a second in the unrelenting wind, and we counted the number of people who could make it to the hastily assembled vigil and for a moment we might have both had some reservations. What are we doing? We did throw this together at the last minute and weren't able to advertise or get much participation because people were already scheduled. What were we expecting?

The cool darkness of the evening, the small number of participants and the complete lack of any candles - a pretty crucial part of a candlelight vigil - might have been enough to completely deflate us. Yet there we stood. We had a single newspaper reporter to cover our story and no hint of a TV camera. There was just a few of us in the driving wind with no candles at all to stand against the approaching darkness.

Yet there we stood. We stood together. We stood even though we knew it was a small gesture against the torrent of opposition. We stood knowing that we were holding a rally in support of reform that none of us expect a single one of our representatives in the House or Senate to support. Yet we stood at least knowing that we weren't alone. Maybe that was why we were there. Not to be a grand showing of half of the city, or to raise a thundering cry of outrage, or to be the lead story on the evening news. Maybe we were there, in the way that we were there, just to be our small group. Maybe we were there, just like those candles were going to be symbols, to represent all of the people who think that health care is a human right. Maybe we were there for all of those people who just couldn't make it for a million different reasons, or who didn't think it would matter, or who can't speak out because of what it might cost them.

What I think is that it did matter, though maybe not for the reasons we had intended. God often works this way, foregoing our intentions and the lure of numbers we so often are beholden to in order to teach us something else. Maybe God was trying to tell us that while we may never feel like a majority, we are not alone. But it isn't the numbers that make an impact...after all, even Jesus never had more than 12 disciples.

It can be a lonely thing to be a progressive faithful person in Oklahoma. I often feel very alone as a person who wants a world oriented more towards justice than judgment, love over righteousness and grace over greed. It was nice that cool evening to feel a different kind of warmth...not the heat of a candle burning next to me, but the warmth of hope from deep inside, stirred by the presence of my fellow travelers.

And thank God for that.

Hoping for Peace

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” – Oscar Wilde

President Obama is announced as the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and audible gasps are heard in the room. Then, just like clockwork, the disparaging comments start rolling in. I have to say that I’m not sure how I feel about him winning. There is a part of me that thinks it is a great statement, and another that says awards like this should be given for accomplishment, not intent.

It is amazing to me how often this happens, but there is a great synchronicity between the gospel lectionary passage for this week and this topic. Jesus encounters a rich young man who claims to be blameless before the law and seeks the final step to inheritance of “eternal life”. Jesus calls him with love to let go of one more thing – his money. We can make this just about money, and that might be a good message in our greed driven society, but the real kicker is this – you can’t halfway hope. You have to give in completely or it will never work. You have to be willing to go as far as changing what you believe in…even when what you believe in seems a long way off.

I agree with a friend of mine who said that it wasn’t so much that President Obama won the award as it was the ideals that he represents. President Obama may not have accomplished much in the scheme of things yet, but he has brought a cool drink to a very thirsty people. The reason that he was voted in and that people all around the world are responding to him, despite his lack of measurable outcomes, is that people are hungry for hope.

We’re hungry for hope instead of power, for cooperation instead of competition, for “we’re all in this together” instead of “every man for himself” and the vast yet largely quiet majority wants to see peace…real meaningful peace as something beyond just the absence of war. None of these ideals are currently measurable. In fact, if one watches nothing but Glenn Beck and listens only to Rush Limbaugh you would think quite the opposite. You would think that the world is going to hell and that President Obama is the ringleader marching us straight into the fiery pit.

This is the funny thing about hope. Look at the gospel stories. People weren’t exactly beating down the doors to get into Jesus’ group. They liked the healing and welcomed his stance against the occupying forces of Rome, but when the rubber met the road everyone but the women (in most accounts) fled his side like a fire alarm had gone off. The hope that lots of us see in President Obama is met quite often with skepticism, doubt and even derision. A lot of that is just partisan politics, but there is something else at work…something deeper and more sinister. It is a questioning of what hope really is.

I believe that a sense of hope is crucial to survival and that, ironically, the more comfortable you become materially the easier it is to convince yourself that you have no space for hope. Hope is a more necessary and hungered for commodity the lower on the ladder you get. But I want to cut my angry brothers and sisters a break, because I understand that hope can be a scary thing…especially when it asks you to give up the things you have already done…to change the way that you live…to believe something entirely new and even invisible. It asks people with power to give some of it up for at least a couple of reasons. First, it isn’t real anyway. The possessions age and crumble or break, the money goes away and power or fame is a wicked slave master. Second, this is the way that hope works...at least the way that I have learned from an itinerant carpenter from Nazareth who tells us that the first shall be last and the last first and that in the Reign of God, power doesn't look like we're used to. In order for power to be real, just like love, we have to give it away.

So, Jesus meets this young man with a serious answer for a serious question. He loves him because he deserves nothing less. He just doesn’t sugar-coat anything or deny him the truth. There is a struggle for our souls going on – one side tells us that might makes right and that we cannot let go of “the way things are” or abandon the “America we grew up in”. Another side says that we have to change things…seriously and completely change things in order to see a world that we want to see. We have hope set before us. We‘re all in the same boat, but some of us are looking beyond at what might be shoreline in the distance. Others are afraid to abandon ship…even as it cracks and splinters and takes on water.

Maybe this award is the best thing…maybe it has just raised expectations so high on President Obama that it will be a detriment. At least it seems like an endorsement of the ideals he represents - the ideals of dialogue, humility and justice...the ideals that focus on the far shoreline of hope...though I don't count him (or any human being) as having a perfect score on those accounts. Perhaps it could encourage him to seek a different path in Afghanistan, or to pursue peace between Israel and Palestine with more vigor, I don’t know. In fact, I really have no idea how anything is going to work out. I just know that from my vantage point in the boat, the stars are very bright.