war

Guns not butter

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Tonight’s Olean Times Herald had a front page item that proclaimed that our new federal budget will break Medicare. The Times Herald is a pretty conservative paper. They have been unabashed apologists for much of the Bush agenda. Earlier today I read that for the first time in American history the defense budget has 12 zeros in it. That’s a one-trillion dollar budget for war. We’re not really defending anything except the status quo. The status quo in the United States is the military-industrial complex. We’re not fighting conventional forces yet we continue to fund battleships, aircraft carriers, submarines as if we were still locked head to head with the former Soviet Union.

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The War

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I read a well written post this morning by PlainFoolish who was and is directly effected by this war in Iraq and Afghanistan. I also read that the Democratic congress caved in and sent President Bush another $189 billion of our tax dollars to fund the slaughter. We have become a one party system. We have the Republicans and Democrats who put up shows and scream at each other on talk shows, but neither truly represents the American people. They do however represent disaster capitalism and AIPAC.

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Birthday thoughts

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Today is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. I read just yesterday that the feast began in 1854. Protestants and the Eastern Church don’t recognize the feast, but it’s dogma in the Roman Church. It’s too bad that the dogma of more Christian churches doesn’t include the Sermon on the Mount and the phrase, “love your enemies, do good to those who persecute you.” Somehow we’ve managed to excise that from dogma. It’s perfectly okay to kill your enemies as long as you observe dogma. The mother of Christ will always hold a special place in my heart, “the lady” as I call her always seems to intercede and there can be no doubt that Mary’s presence in the Roman Catholic Church reaffirms the sacred feminine, even if women are not allowed to be priests as they should be. Alas, that is more dogma.

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Non-violence or non-existence

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Today I came across a story of healing for a Vietnam war veteran who was so traumatized by that experience that he still bore the scars thirty years after the fact. I sent that story on to some friends today. I read the entire book three Christmases ago. Now, we learn that our president wants to start another war. He’s saying the that we need to bring peace through bombs and bullets. Its just pure bull.

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Wes Clark

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In the last five years I’ve had to listen to right wing chicken hawks impugn my generation and while they beat the war drums for their trumped up war in Iraq. Now of course this same malevolent element is trying to take us to the precipice of yet another war.

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Merton and morality

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It sometimes happens that the men who preach most vehemently about evil and the punishment of evil, so that they seem to have practically nothing else on their minds except sin, are really unconcious haters of other men. They think the world does not appreciate them, and this is their way of getting even.–Thomas Merton, Seeds of Contemplation.

This quote struck me once again tonight as I pondered the ramifications of the U.S. Senate’s recent vote to pass the Kyl-Lieberman amendment

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