AS I WRITE this, one week after the beginning of “Desert Storm,” the networks have returned to their regularly scheduled programming, responding to polls the third day of the war indicating that Americans were tiring of the coverage. (Considering what we don’t hear, “coverage” seems a wholly appropriate euphemism—just try to verify reports beginning to leak out of the war zone of 100,000 or 200,000 civilian casualties.)
War news has become a mere refrain—“Allied forces continued today to pound Iraq ...”—punctuated with videotaped missile strikes or bemasked reporters and the horrific wailing of air raid sirens.
Official statements assuring that the war is going well (but don’t expect it to end too soon) have become background music to business as usual: record fourth-quarter profits for the major oil companies, signs of resuscitation in the aerospace industry. Orwellian normalcy, except for the ritual dance of protesters and counterprotesters, the harassment of Arab-Americans, the silent fears of military families...
Will the church sleep through this Gethsemane? Will our witness consist merely of donning yellow ribbons and praying for a speedy end to bloodshed? ... Above all, will we succumb to depression and impotence while the architects of war yet again “relentlessly pile wreckage upon wreckage at our feet”?
Or will we have the courage and apocalyptic clarity to nonviolently challenge the system at its roots?
Ched Myers, author of Healing Affluenza and Resisting Plutocracy: Luke's Jesus and Sabbath Economics, is an activist and theologian who co-directs Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries in Oak View, Calif. He has written and taught widely about radical discipleship at the intersection of seminary, sanctuary, streets, and soil.
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