Why?

Some of you may be wondering why I am a pacifist and consider this so important. There are a lot of reasons, but lets start with my reasons for being a pacifist.

Some of you may think that I grew up in a pacifist, passionately anti-war, anti-military family, and you couldn't be more wrong. Well actually you could. My father was actually a former air force officer. He had left the military in order to work as a scientist for NASA and had no real problems with the military himself. He never told us that we should become military people like he was, but he never discouraged us from it. We were always told as kids that we could be whatever we chose to be. We were never a pro-war family, but I never got the feeling that I needed to be anti-war and especially not anti-troops.

A lot of the things that I feel about how to live are based around my religious beliefs. This is important and not one that I have touched on yet. I plan to discuss this, but wanted to start with the secular reasons for pacifism. I grew up like many people in a mainstream evangelical Christian church, but I pent my summers at a Quaker camp. This may seem weird since I didn't attend a Quaker church, but my mother grew up Quaker and attending this camp. If you don't know much about Quakers one thing you should know is that they are religious pacifists (first real exposure). At that point in my life though I was anything, but a pacifist. I had even toyed around with the idea of joining the military.

I started developing my pacifist ideals around 2001. Any guesses as to what happened that might have encouraged these beliefs to foster in me. On September 11th of that year I turned 16 (not my best birthday) and I fell right in with the people calling for war and "justice". I wasn't aware of to much that was happening except that there was a war and the PATRIOT Act had been released. The next school year my U.S. History class really started discussing current events. I started to wonder about aspects of the PATRIOT Act, but I never really questioned the war in Afghanistan. We had already started discussing the possibility of a war with Iraq and I saw no reason. I argued that reason would prevail and we wouldn't go to war with another country over vague reports of weapons of mass destruction. My Dad especially was worried about the possibility of a second war because of the danger of stretching our troops thin and we talked about it a lot at home. Then in March of 2003 we invaded Iraq, found no WMDs, and began an eight year "peace keeping" operation in that country.

It was at this point that I more or less started to really question war. Things that I had read in the bible led me to believe that war was not a Christian reaction. The problem with this line of thought was the single mindedness of some people at my church. For them it was almost non-Christian to question the war effort. For these few people it was a Christian honor to defend American freedom in the Army and people who chose to fight were elevated for their sacrifice for "freedom". Please understand that I am not ripping on my church, just outlining some of the issues that led me to pacifism. Due to this stance on the war, and the belief prevalent at the time that patriotism meant supporting the war effort, I only got one side of the argument: that we were fighting a near holy war against the muslim encroachment (that may sound over the top, but I kid you not). So to get other sides I had to talk to people outside my church. This started with my family. My father, as I mentioned, was against the war in Iraq. He supported the troops themselves, but thought that opening a second front was ridiculous. My mother fell back on her pacifist roots and really got me debating the validity of war as a solution. Add in two intellectualist, liberal brothers and you can see where this went. Another source of discussion was my best friend. Kyle was a mormon so his views were, of course, very different then my church. He is also a conservative though a moderate one. Unlike many people discussing the war he didn't insist on the correctness of one view over another. We talked about it from a point in the middle, neither for or against, and it allowed us to develop a balanced view. Kyle, like me, was discovering pacifist ideas and so we talked about this ideology. The third point of view for me was my Senior year English teacher. Mr. Richards was an Oxford (God I hope it wasn't Cambridge or he'll kill me) trained academic originally from the United Kingdom. Naturally he had a very different point of view on the war. For him it was never an issue of patriotism to support the war.

By this point I had decided that the war in Iraq was not a justified war because we went in based on a lie. I know that Saddam Hussein, was a violent, tyrannical, murdering ruler, but this never seemed the reason for the war. Even if it had been, it was not the place of the US to unilaterally police this part of the world. I was still not a pacifist, but the seed was planted and growing. College challenged many of the things I believed about war and religion. The discussions about church and world history opened me up new ways of thinking about wars of the past. I had already been introduced to the literature of World War I poets and their view on the futility of the war, but now we started to think critically about other points in history. This experience had different effects on me and my college friends. Many moved much further into their conservatism (small Christian school) others way out into more radical liberalism. For me it drew me more center. I started to see how the fights in Washington DC were driving the country more radical in both directions with little chance to meet in the middle. Plus, the wars had now been going on for almost nine years with little to show for them except death.

With the end of the Iraq War and the realization that we had a whole other war to finish I began to get even more discouraged. My church and college had challenged many of my personal views on theology and I started to see the biblical view of war much differently. When Osama bin Laden was killed and people started to celebrate his death in the streets I realized we had gone way too far. We should never celebrate the death of anyone, no matter what they had done. Our country had descended into infighting between parties, violent rhetoric was prevalent on all sides of the aisle, and people had started to sink into a limited xenophobia around muslims and muslim countries. It was at this point that I realized that pacifism was the only real answer.

We chose to react to a horrid incident of violence against our country in a violent way and it caused even more violence and death around the world. Innocents were dying in Iraq and Afghanistan, terrorism grew more common rather then less, and my country had descended into near civil war over ideological beliefs. I began to posit on the causes of this. They all seemed to point back to the wars. Spending on defense had ruined the US economy racking up huge deficits prior to the bank collapse and the divide between Democrats and Republicans continued to grow as each side, spurred by earlier disagreements over the war and PATRIOT Act, continued to insult and attack each other. Had we chosen peace over violence I feel that things would have been better. Spending on defense would have been way down without the war, the PATRIOT Act, created in reaction to the terrorist attack, may have not been passed and another cause of division in the US would have never happened, and I know that thousands of deaths could have been averted. It would have been hard for us to not seek revenge, but I believe it would have led to a better present. I really created this blog because I know that there are many misconceptions about pacifism and I felt the need to get my ides out, even if no one reads this.

That last paragraph was purely speculation of course, but is a possible other future. To be honest, it may not have turned out any differently, but I feel very strongly that the choice to seek peace instead of war would have been a better choice. I will discuss the religious aspects of my beliefs in more detail later in the year, but I thought it would be good for you to know a little bit of why I think this was a necessary discussion.

Please feel free to leave comments and tell me what you think. I don't care if you want to call me an idiot or question what I've said. I ask that anything you say in comments is conducive to more discussion and not just a direct insult of anyone. I will censor any comments that insult anyones beliefs.