Those who have read this blog know that I do not like war. Apparently, I am in the minority when it comes to this view. When I posted “Study War No More”, it generated several comments and a follow-up, “Maybe We Should Study War No More”. This generated even more comments. The majority of the comments were surprisingly pro-war. I say that they were surprisingly pro-war because the commentators have identified themselves as ministers or ministerial candidates.

I should have not been surprised that I received such comments. When I posted my thoughts about the shooting at Virginia Tech in the spring of 2007 (“It Happened Again” and “It Happened Again – Part 2”.), the most striking comment was made by a minister who suggested that if one of the victims had carried a gun then the shootings or the multiple killings would never had occurred.

If ministers are for violence, then why shouldn’t we expect more violence to occur? Perhaps there is a justification or a rationale for war; perhaps there is a justification or a rationale for armed retaliation when violence strikes our loved ones. I am also reminded that the Amish community of Pennsylvania did not strike back when a gunman killed a number of innocent children in a community where violence is seldom present (see my thoughts at “What Do We Say?”).

When my wife was growing up at the beginning of the Cold War, the priests and ministers preached against war. People were terrified of “the bomb.” Peace was preached from the pulpit because no one wanted to see nuclear war. There was an understanding then that war has no winners, only survivors. Now, we don’t care. Those who grew up in the days of World War II remember the death and carnage. It has been said that the War Department in 1943 was very tempted to censor the photographs of the dead Marines on the beaches of Tarawa because the scene was gruesome and the number of dead was way beyond expectations.

My wife was 8 years old when she heard those words of ministers and priests; those words have stuck with her all these years. Others heard the words but it seems that they have forgotten them.

It isn’t that our culture is pro-violence or pro-war; it is that our society doesn’t realize what the price of violence or the cost of war really is. It is one thing to hear about a drive-by shooting in some inner city; it is another to know the victim or the relatives of such a shooting. It is quite easy to say that drive-by shootings are the product of a decaying society; it makes it quite easy for us to ignore the shootings. We can escape the inner city and forget those who live there. We don’t have to go into such places so we can ignore the shootings. If we ignore the shootings, we don’t have to seek solutions.

And if we make war into an advanced video game, then war becomes fun. We can easily send young men and women off to die because we don’t have to watch them die. And we don’t see the coffins come home because our Defense Department won’t allow them to be filmed. The dead come home without fanfare and no one, other than the family, knows. Only the family grieves. We can support a war because someone else dies and we don’t have to know.

And our ignorance of war extends to the wounded. The three posts that I posted during the spring and summer of 2007 (“Supporting Our Troops – The Tragedy of Building 18”, “The Tragedy of Building 18 continued”, and “The Tragedy Continues”) pointed out the lack of care received by veterans wounded in Iraq. We care little about those who have died and we apparently don’t care much about the ones who are wounded.

Now, it appears that we do not care about those who were killed in attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. In the February, 2008, issue of Sojourners (see “At the Hour of Our Death”) Rose Marie Berger writes about the lack of respect given to the dead buried in the rubble of the towers. The goal of the rescue effort, it seems, was not to recover the victims or find the bodies of civilians, firemen, or policemen but rather to recover the millions of dollars in gold and other metals stored in the vaults. Once the recovery of the metals was accomplished, then the rest of the material was simply trucked over to the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island.

It seems that very little attempt was made to actually recover any human remains or artifacts. There are body parts and bodies being discovered even today, despite every assurance from various Federal, State, and Local government agencies everything was done to recover the remains.

What does this tell me? Among other things, we don’t care if someone other than our own family dies. We are quite willing to sacrifice civilians and soldiers alike if it will advance the goals of our greed and our self-interests. We apparently don’t care how the families of those who died for that advance feel.

This is not an argument for some sort of memorial for the dead and wounded of 9/11. Others are doing that.

Rather, this is a statement that says we as a society had better look at what we are doing. We shunt the wounded off to the side and hope that no one sees them. We hide the dead when their bodies come back from war. At home, we ignore the homeless and sick. And now, innocent victims are cast aside because we don’t care.

There is a common conception of Neanderthal man being some sort of brutish “sub-human”. But we have found archeological evidence that they mourned their dead. See http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2002/1015doser3.shtml and http://www.britarch.ac.uk/BA/ba66/feat1.shtml for a discussion of the meaning of burials in early pre-historic society.

The 15^th century poet and philosopher Giambattista Vico identified the burial of the dead along with marriage and religion as the three characteristics of a civilized society. He said that these three institutions are the origin of all civilizations and therefore must be the most devoutly guarded (adapted from “At the Hour of Our Death” by Rose Marie Berger, Sojourners – February, 2008).

If you want to call these the end times, today I won’t argue with you.