Waging Peace
March 18, 2003
By Bridget Gibson

A curious thing happened on the way to Baghdad. It seems that somehow during the long dark night on the road to war, many brave people stood before the guns unarmed, with only words as weapons, and waged peace.

Peace, as many of us know, is hard to accomplish. We know this from our personal relationships with friends and family. We know this from working in situations every day, doing the most mundane of tasks. Making the feelings and opinions of others about us positive is influenced best by kindness, consideration and courtesy.

We, the people, have needed our political leaders to lead us into peace, not into war. We have heard the drums in the background and felt the disruption in our lives.

We need to know that our world, though flawed and troubled, will survive. Only through reasoned and clear dialogue can this happen.

When thieves and robbers come and take your possessions and kill your family at the end of a loaded gun, when they leave with your things or occupy your home and property, would it occur to any of you to thank them for killing your children and destroying your world?

Somehow that is the scenario that the Bush administration attempts to paint regarding the occupation of Iraq. Excuse me. Can we have some sanity here? Just place yourself in any situation where life and limb and those of your children or husband or mother or father or aunt or uncle - all those that your life has truly revolved around - picture them dead at the butt of a gun - picture your response to your "liberator."

What our world needs is for our politicians to learn the art of diplomacy and to cease to posture. We need to get politics out of government. Our forefathers were quite clear about "serving" our country. It was an honor, it was a duty - it was not a profession.

Yes, we have "poli-sci" degrees in our universities. I apologize to all who are about to be offended, but puleeze get over it. Life is not a "career," it is life. When all you do is to collect things - degrees, wives, children, cars (the list goes on and on) and you never collect the rewards of truly living - using common sense to govern your days, do you know what you get? You get politicians wasting time in Washington, D.C. changing the name of an item on the menu of the congressional cafeteria!

This is how our politicians wage peace. They figure out how to be petty, mean and waste the dollars of the taxpayers who pay their salary.

I am tired of the absolute inanity that spews forth from our elected representatives. I received a letter from my congressman regarding an issue that I had written about in December - the unemployment benefits for more than one million people were expiring at Christmas. In an economy that has lost of 3.45 million jobs in the past two years, we have congresspersons worrying about the name of a menu item in the congressional cafeteria?

Well, my congressman stated that the reason that nothing had happened until recently was that the 107th Congress had "left work undone." To the uninformed, this might seem that the 108th would do better, but my congressman was a part of the 107th also! Does this mean that he's finally accepting responsibility for the work that he is not accomplishing? Heavens no! He was hoping that I would not remember that his failure to act was his burden to explain.

We all need to force our representatives to explain why they will not wage peace. They will do anything and everything to squander our nation's resources: Its time, its money, its children and its future.

Let's wage peace!