I have never considered myself an activist on any topic. But I think I must now change my stance. With all of this craziness going on in the world and the US involvement continuing and perhaps ramping up in the Middle East it is time that I become an activist for peace. The past week we have seen stories in the Washington Post and other papers about the situation at the Veteran’s Administration. Each time we send one of our men and women into harms way we have to be concerned about how we will care for them on the other side. We have dropped the ball on that end.
When I begin the Liturgy on Sunday, or frankly anytime we begin a liturgy in the Orthodox Church we begin by saying “In Peace let us pray to the Lord.” We understand this as the need for peace in our own soul and heart, but I take it one step more and we need to have peace! In another place we pray for the peace of the whole world! Again, prayer is good, prayer is important, but now is time for action.
This lent I am reading Selected Writings from Dorothy Day. I have just begun this work and I am still in the Introduction. I hope to include some of the thoughts from this book as lent continues. I have also pledged to be on of the million blogs for peace. Our goal should be the timely withdrawal of our troops from Iraq. We need to bring our men and women home and care for them. We need to support them while they are there, and pray for them, and bring them home.
Peace
Oh can I ever attest to the ball being dropped. When you return from “over there”, big sandy, The Rack (as in a device used for torture), and as I liked to call it: not home, you will have trouble sleeping. Trouble thinking about things you should, and trouble because you continue to think about things you do not want to. On the way out the door they (the military doctors) will prescribed SSRI like Paxil, or Zoloft when you begin to muster out of the service. The military is quite capable of fighting a war, but the support teams of doctors and clergy were not prepared for the psychological issues involved. The federal government decided the best way to deal with this “ball” is to do what they did when my dad fought in Vietnam. Ignore it. He still has nightmares. Now we have even more in common, only mine are about Malijaw and Fallujah while his focus on Hue and the jungle.