PEARL HARBOR TWO?
A Sermon by Rev. Robert M. Eddy
Delivered 7 October 2001
At the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Emerald Coast, Valparaiso, FL

Reading for the children:
THE WOLVES WITHIN (A Native American Tale)
There was once a young member of our nation who was for no apparent reason beaten up and seriously injured by another boy. He came to his grandfather and said, "I hate that boy!"
The Grandfather said.
"I too, at times, have felt great hate for those who have taken so much, with no sorrow for what they do. But hate wears you down, and does not hurt your enemy. It's like taking poison yourself and wishing your enemy would die.
"I have struggled with these feelings many times."
"It is as if there are two wolves inside me; one is good and does no harm. He lives in harmony with all around him and does not take offense when no offense was intended. He will only fight when it is right to do so, and in the right way. But … the other wolf …ah! The littlest thing will send him into a fit of temper. He fights everyone, all of the time, for no reason. He cannot think because his anger and hate are so great. It is helpless anger, for his anger will change nothing. Sometimes it is hard to live with these two wolves inside me, for both of them try to dominate my spirit."
The boy looked intently into his Grandfather's eyes and asked, "Which one wins, Grandfather?"
The Grandfather smiled and quietly said,
"The one I feed."
Reading: Letter to the Editorial Board of the Pensacola News Journal
from Robert M. Eddy
Written 9/18/01 (published 10/2/01)
"Thank you for your editorial, 'US military attack requires patience' especially your support of Secretary of State Colin Powell's efforts to 'use other means - diplomacy, law enforcement and financial pressure - to shut down the terrorist networks ….'
It seems ironic to some that the highest ranking military officer in the government is calling for restraint but he, unlike our President, knows personally, the cost in human lives that a military response involves. Recent history should teach us how futile conventional warfare is against the kind of threat we now face.
This is not a "crusade" -- that hideously inappropriate word President Bush used given its meaning to Muslims. This is a struggle to promote civilized as opposed to barbaric ways of resolving disputes. Reverting to a wild west mentality, as the President seems to do in his off the cuff remarks, makes us look, not only ridiculous in the eyes of our allies, but dangerous as well.
I am grateful that a man who knows the realities of war is our Secretary of State. I am sorry that an "arm chair warrior" is our President."
SERMON
Twenty-two days ago I was privileged to share the platform at a prayer vigil with a Rabbi, an Imam and an Escambia County commissioner. The other two clergyman gave prayers and short homilies, I said a few words abut the need to affirm life and love and then read the words to the song this congregation sings at the end of each service. I'm still trying to affirm life and love over death and hatred.
The next day I spoke to our congregation in Pensacola and organized my remarks about the words: Patriotism, Vulnerability, Religion. I'll have something to say about each of these this morning plus three other subjects: Ignorance, Peace and War, Empathy.
Let's start with Patriotism and Empathy. Of the many thousands of words I've read since the eleventh of September, perhaps the most remarkable were these of Charley Reese, a columnist who lives in Orlando, Florida. He wrote,
"Americans have shown enormous sympathy for the victims of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. I hope we can also develop empathy. Sympathy is simultaneously feeling emotions similar to someone else's. Empathy ….is mentally identifying with someone else ..." Now that we have been bombed ….. we need to employ our empathy to understand that the people our forces bomb feel the same way we do."
"We have seen the grief, the fear, the rage that a bombing produces. We need to understand that people in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan and anywhere else experience these exact same emotions when we bomb them. ….
The most obscene statement I've heard is [was spoken by] some character -- who said the American people will have to be "strong and accept that there is going to collateral damage.' That is precisely the mindset of a terrorist. "Collateral damage" is the … euphemism used to describe the murder of innocent people. It is time to tell our government that collateral damage is not acceptable anymore.
We cannot say, as decent human beings, that 5,000 of our civilians killed are victims of terrorism, but the 5,000 of someone else's civilians we kill are just "collateral damage."
Now, one could object, "But we do not deliberately target civilians. We make every effort to limit civilian casualties -- going so far as to put more of our own military in harms way so as to save civilian lives."
That's true. But that is something we're likely to forget if our government persists in seeing the attempt to bring Terrorists to Justice as a "war against terrorism." As one commentator said, "war against an abstraction is nonsense." Terrorism is an abstraction. Terrorists are not. They are everywhere. Even here on the Emerald Coast.
I know a little bit about terrorism. I was interim minister of the Pensacola Unitarian Universalist church for eight months beginning September 1, 1999. In that role I was asked to preside at the fifth annual service honoring all those who have been killed or injured by terrorists who by bombings, and assassinations, and intimidation, to frustrate the law that gives a woman the right to end a pregnancy. A member of the Pensacola congregation, Lt. Colonel Jim Barrett, was killed and his wife June seriously wounded, by a terrorist, in the parking lot of a Pensacola Abortion clinic.
That particular memorial service was filmed and some of the footage was incorporated into a documentary titled, "Soldiers in the Army of God." You should see it. It is about an organization whose members believe it is legitimate to kill abortionists because abortionists are, in the eyes of these people violators of "Gods law," "murders" who kill thousands of "unborn children" each year. Their cause is, in their eyes, a holy cause. When I led that memorial service 16 months ago, I was taken aback by the sheriff's offer to provide me with a bullet proof vest. You see, some of these terrorists now believe it is God's will that they kill not only the doctors, but "accessories" that is anybody who aids in providing abortions. One "soldier in the Army of God" actually included supreme court justices in that category.
One of these anti abortion terrorists escaped from jail a few weeks ago. His long list of targets was found in a car that he abandoned after he was in an accident. Some of my friends in Pensacola are on that list.
These people are not, by and large, crazy. The man who killed Jim Barrette in Pensacola, was a Presbyterian minister. Interviewed in prison where he is serving a life sentence for murder, he tells how he wrestled with the decision but finally was convinced that God had called him to be an assassin. He was even willing to give up his life to accomplish his mission. He is considered a holy martyr by others in the anti abortion movement, many of whom would never themselves go that far.
Unitarian Universalist Jim Barrett, was not an abortionist, he was the driver of the car bringing the Doctor to the clinic. Jim Barrett was "collateral damage" as were the children in Oklahoma City Federal Building. That's what Timothy McVeigh called them, "collateral damage" but, as McVeigh pointed out, in war collateral damage is inevitable.
We must not conduct a war against terrorism. We must create a world in which the deliberate targeting of civilians to achieve any end -- no matter how noble -- is outlawed.
But, outlawed by whom?
What governmental entity exists that could pass such a law? The obvious answer is the United Nations. The United Nations was established to outlaw war. The United Nations is now conducting trials of persons accused of "crimes against humanity" in Bosnia and Kosovo.
We, as original signatories of that Charter and to a large extent the authors of that Charter, forswore the use of "war or the threat of war " to achieve any end other than self defense. Does that caveat give us the legal right to conduct war against "states that harbor terrorists?" It does not. Turn it around, what if Turkey, found that the US government had, through the CIA been bankrolling Armenian Christian Fundamentalist terrorists that were regularly blowing up hospitals in Turkish cities? Would that give the Turks the right to decimate US cities? If you say no you are supporting one law for the goose and another for the gander, one set of rules for them and a different of rules for us.
"Equal Justice Under The Law" is one of the defining concepts of American Law. Our nation should be as subject as any other nation to international law outlawing the deliberate bombing of civilian target. And, contrary to what some spokespersons are arguing at the United Nations right now, no exception should be made for peoples occupied by a foreign power.
There was a time, you know, when the deliberate bombing of a civilian targets was viewed with horror by all Americans and by most Europeans. World War 2 changed all that. In 1940 and 1941, before Pearl Harbor, we regularly condemned Germany for bombing London. We watched the newsreels of children being pulled out of collapsed buildings with horror. But by the end of WW 2 we had accepted saturation bombing of German and Japanese cities as a matter of course.
We "had a war a to win."
You all know, of course that last month's attack on the World Trade towers was not the first. Another terrorist group, three years ago exploded a bomb in the garage underneath the world trade towers, hoping to cause the collapse of the towers when they were full of people. Several of the terrorists were caught and when one of them was being interviewed he was asked, "Didn't you realize that had you succeeded nearly 200,000 innocent people would have been killed?" The "terrorist" replied, "just the number you killed in Hiroshima."
We protest, it's not the same! But tell me please, why is it not the same? If another nation had done the same to the United States, and we had lost the war, would we not have considered them guilty of a "crime against humanity?"
Please do not misunderstand me, I believe the terrorists who turned three airliners into flying missiles did commit "a crime against humanity." But I also believe that humanity as a whole must condemn, arrest, prosecute and exact justice.
Today, nearly sixty years after Pearl Harbor, have we not grown enough ethically to see that some means cannot be justified by any ends. The reality that history teaches us is that "bad means corrupts good ends.
I hear a great deal these days about clandestine operations, "on the dark side." which, the president tells us cannot be revealed even in success. Well, such operations have been tried. If you didn't see last Tuesday's FRONT-LINE with Bill Moyers, go to the web (pbs.org) and you'll find most of the text. I did. It's amazing how quickly we forget Everything that is being proposed today was tried against the terrorists of the 1970s 1980s and 1990s. I've downloaded hard copy for those who would like to see the documentation. There is no way to prevent people who are willing to give up their lives from killing us. We can reduce the risk but not even Israel has found a way to control suicide bombers. Calling them cowards and sneaks is childish braggadocio. And pretending they hate us because of our goodness is delusional. They hate us because of what we have done to the way of life they cherish - as we cherish our way of life. We find some aspects of their way of life abhorrent: the virtual enslavement of women for example; the totalitarianism of clerics. But we cannot change governments like the Taliban. Only their neighbors and coreligionists can change them or remove them from power. Let us not exacerbate the problem by pressing "solutions" that simply make the situation worse. Let us not ignore the contribution our foreign policy has made to the climate that allows Islamic Terrorism to grow ever more dangerous.
Well, I'm running out of time and I want this to be a "multilogue" not just a monologue. But there is one thing I need to mention. One strange coincidence, that may not be a coincidence. One of the many "operations" that the CIA masterminded in its heyday was a coup in South America. A bloody coup d'etat in which Augusto Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected government of Chile and killed president Allende. That was on September 11, 1973, another date that lives in infamy. Only now are we discovering what hideous things our government has done in our names. "We didn't know," we say. Perhaps we were ignorance but if so that ignorance is a willful ignorance. We in the United States, have always had more access to accurate information than citizens of any other country. But we have often not wanted to know. Perhaps we did not know, but the people whose fathers and sons and brothers and yes, mothers, and sisters and children were shot or bombed or burned because of policies of our government knew and vengeance festered in their hearts.
We must not let vengeance fester in our hearts. We must never condone terrorism, no matter who the perpetrators. We must not kill innocent persons among whom those terrorists live.
We are vulnerable but less vulnerable than before September 11th. The precautions now being imposed have been in effect in nearly every other nation with airports for decades! We somehow thought that our status as "the world's only super power" would protect us. Now we know better. We will not live in fear nor will we wait for "God [to] mend our every flaw" as we sang earlier. We will as true patriots work always for justice, for we know that justice is the only way to peace
But in a larger sense, there is no way to peace. Peace is the way.
Please join me in some moments of quiet contemplation or meditation or prayer and then, if you are so inclined, join me in singing, Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me."