Pages tagged "War"

Friends: It is that time of year again when we are asked to pay our federal taxes, half of which goes for war and preparations for more wars. In the last century over 180 million people died in wars. Our country continues to spend about one trillion dollars a year of our tax dollars on wars and other military expenditures – for nuclear weapons, bomber planes, drones, over one thousand military bases around the world, and for the soldiers who do the killing for us.

Dear Editor: July 8, 2015, is the one-year anniversary of “Operation Protective Edge,” the most recent devastation of Gaza by Israel. According to the United Nations, about 2,200 Gazan people were killed during the onslaught, 65% of them civilians. I think it is high time that Friends discuss more vigorously and publicly the issues surrounding Israel and the Palestinians.

 

Choose life: It’s a good rule of thumb. But the life I have inherited is one that’s built on killing. While I’m safely minding my own business (in a wealthy suburb in the richest nation that’s ever existed), killing and the threat of killing are adding to the wealth of the nation I live in. Killing and the threat of killing are holding the line between who has access to resources and who does not. Who ends up on which side of that line is based on no good reason. Rather, it is rote tradition that allows arbitrary distinctions between groups of people to be used to enhance the resources of some and limit the resources of others. No matter how convincingly such traditions are sanctified and rationalized, they remain fundamentally arbitrary and morally dead.

Dear Friends: Our First Amendment right to free expression is sometimes called the “crown jewel” of the Bill of Rights. That somewhat oxymoronic metaphor – a fundamental democratic principle sparkling like a diamond in the coffers of a monarch – reveals an uneasy tension between our democratic freedoms and the worldly powers that guard them. Yet even though any government must place some limits on individual freedom, the expectation is that those limits will benefit the common good. In the document that established Pennsylvania’s first legislature in 1682, William Penn wrote, “The glory of Almighty God and the good of mankind is the reason and end of government, and therefore government in itself is a venerable ordinance of God.”

Dear Friends,

Dad was tight-lipped about the war years and only occasionally referenced his having been “stationed in Guam.” In sorting through my Dad’s papers to write his obituary in August 2013, I discovered his certificate for Distinguished Service as a Navigator in nine successful air flights, 1943-1945, to drop bombs on Japan during World War II. I stared hard at the aged photograph of the young crew in uniform, standing proud in front of their Boeing B-29 Superfortress. Renown for its ability to fly higher and faster than Japanese planes, the B-29 four-engine propeller-driven heavy bomber was one of the largest aircraft of its day, with very advanced features such as a pressurized cabin, an electronic fire-control system, and remote-controlled machine-gun turrets. My fears were relieved when further research assured me that Dad had not been on the flights that dropped either Fat Man or Little Boy – codenames for atomic bombs detonated over Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

Dear Friends: The National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund is seeking a volunteer in each congressional district to communicate with their representative about the Peace Tax Fund Bill and urge its passage. Time commitment is two to four hours a month.