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a safer world

a safer world

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“The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.”
(Donald Trump in a Dec. 22, 2016 tweet)

This seems to me to be akin to saying: “We must pour more gasoline on the fire that threatens to consume us all until the world learns how to put out fires.” You don’t make the world a safer place by making it more dangerous. You don’t protect the people — your own people or anybody else — by exposing them to greater risk.

“I am the first one that would like to see nobody have nukes, but we’re never going to fall behind any country even if it’s a friendly country. We’re never going to fall behind on nuclear power.”
(Donald Trump in a February 23, 2017 interview)

Again, the statement is self-defeating. If it is a inviolable maxim that “we’re never going to fall behind,” then the wish “to see nobody have nukes” is an empty and meaningless and disingenuous desire. Peace, real peace, always requires sacrifice. Jesus showed the way. The unwillingness to sacrifice, the unwillingness to love an enemy — where love means the readiness to trust, or even the readiness to risk betrayed trust for the possibility of a better end for both you and your enemy — that unwillingness guarantees perpetual mistrust, perpetual conflict, the certainty of death.

Were it not for Jesus, that would be our destiny, the destiny of all of us, the destiny of the human race — certain death. But Jesus lives and we live, to live for Jesus, by choosing his way. If the world has hope, this is it: that we will choose another way, not the way of Mutual Assured Destruction (MADness!), but the way of disarming, disarming both our arsenals and our hatreds.

No path to peace can work unless it is a path we all walk together. “Never going to fall behind” is not that path, because if we all walk it ……

“i will not die an unlived life”

“i will not die an unlived life”

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I like the sentiment expressed in this poem by Dawna Markova posted today on the inward/outward website:

I Will Not Die an Unlived Life

I will not die an unlived life.
I will not live in fear
of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me,
to make me less afraid,
more accessible,
to loosen my heart
until it becomes a wing,
a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance,
to live so that which came to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom,
and that which came to me as blossom,
goes on as fruit.

I like the poem because she writes so eloquently of the sort of life I long for … but am not always ready to risk going for!

And I like it because she writes so eloquently of a life that is not merely “mine.” She doesn’t ask that her seeds might bloom — for her glory, that her blossoms might bear fruit — for her benefit, but that each might be passed on to another in whom they will work their beautiful and nurturing effects.