LAST EDITED ON Feb-02-03 AT 11:14 AM (ET)A friend of mine who is a Presbyterian minister sent a hard copy of this article to me via mail the other day. I found it on the internet and thought DUers would enjoy this piece by Stanley Hauerwas, a theological ethics professor at Duke Divinity School.
It is a long article, so I give you a long snip.
After the first page, you must scroll to page 8 on Adobe Acrobat to continue the article.
http://www.opendoorcommunity.org/HospOct02.pdf
I want to write honestly about September 11, 2001. But it is not easy. Even now, some months after that horrible event, I find it hard to know what can be said or, perhaps more difficult, what should be said. Even more difficult, I am not sure for what or how I should pray. I am a Christian. I am a Christian pacifist. Being Christian and being a pacifist are not two things for me. I would not be a pacifist if I were not a Christian, and I find it hard to understand how one can be a Christian without being a pacifist. But what does a pacifist have to say in the face of terror? Pray for peace? I have no use for sentimentality.
<snip>
Yet I do know that much that has been said after September 11, 2001, has been false. In the first hours and days following the fall of the towers, there was a stunned silence. President Bush flew from one safe-haven to another, unsure what had or was still to happen. He was quite literally in the air, not quite sure where safety might be found on the ground. I wish he might have been able to maintain that posture, but he is the leader of the "free world". Something must be done. Something must be said. We must be in control. The silence must be shattered. He knew the American people must be comforted. Life must return to normal.
So he said, "We are at war." Magic words necessary to reclaim the everyday. War is such normalizing discourse. Americans know war. This is our Pearl Harbor. Life can return to normal. We are frightened, and ironically war makes us feel safe. The way to go on in the face of September 11, 2001, is to find someone to kill. Americans are, moreover, good at killing. We often fail to acknowledge how accomplished we are in the art of killing. Indeed we, the American people, have become masters of killing....
"During the election campaign Bush was delighted to be presented with a 'Billy Bass'...Jacques Chirac would open a vein rather than been seen with a singing plastic fish." - Ben MacIntyre, UK Times
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