We Cannot Kill Our Way to Peace

I'm far more interested in forgiveness than justice.

I say this just to calm myself down after a morning of media overkill, so to speak. There are so many murdered mothers and children in the news, some with names and faces, so many just adding anonymously to one death toll or another.

An Iraqi mom, 32 years old, is beaten to death in her house in El Cajon, Calif. A note by her body reads: "Go back to your country, you terrorist." Was it a hate crime? An isolated incident?

The guy who killed Trayvon Martin is still at large, somewhere. But his 2005 mug shot is everywhere, making him the poster child of vigilante justice. Do I have to reduce the killer to that viral scowl to feel compassion for Trayvon?

Dehumanization, the death of the human soul, is now reaching an advanced stage and its consequences are spreading across the country and the planet like global warming. I feel my own immune system breaking down. I can't absorb the news anymore without hearing a deep alarm go off somewhere, insistent, berserk.

It's not just the violence. Violence is a symptom - of social brokenness, alienation, profound disconnection at so many levels, perpetuated by our institutions and popular culture.

So I think about the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Shaima Alawadi and the Afghan civilians allegedly murdered by a lone, drunk American soldier (with the implausibility of the official scenario of yet another lone gunman growing in magnitude) and I feel myself groping for so much more, in all these tragedies, than - at best - the discharge of sterile justice.

The soldier, whisked out of Afghanistan, is sequestered in a holding cell in Kansas: "Sgt. Robert Bales Joins Military's Notorious Criminals at Ft. Leavenworth," ran the ABC News headline. This is like a cartoon show of crude stereotypes.

Please read more here: http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/13412

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We cannot kill our way to peace.

Understanding this, I wish only for a moment of collective calm and a social shift toward forgiveness. Let the moment be fleeting, but let us feel the harm we keep inflicting on ourselves and then both seek and bestow forgiveness for all we have done. And let us drop our weapons, if only for that moment, so we can understand that it's possible.