PEACE........STILL A DIRTY WORD.

Rachel Maddow has a new book out this week entitled "Drift". It focuses on how easy it has become for our country to constantly be at war, and how little those wars impact most of the nation. Only about 1% of us are affected in any way by what's going on in Afghanistan or what happened because of our invasion of Iraq. There is no draft, and no "war effort"....no plan to pay for the five BILLION a week that we're spending right now for a war that almost 70% of the us don't want, and no one even considers any other path for resolving the issues...we're still convinced that killing the enemy is the only choice.

I don't think many of us think much about that small percentage of people who comprise that 1% who are indeed affected by these wars...how they have suffered and how the pain continues for them. Christmases come and go for most of us, but for the families of over five thousand victims of these wars there is an empty chair at their tables and most certainly tears in their eyes...and that's just in our country. (tens of thousands of Afghans and Iraquis are "collateral damage") and they don't seem to really count at all.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if all of our paid representatives and all of the religious leaders that we support would spread the gospel of peace? Instead of railing against gay equality, or birth control, or ultrasounds and bailouts? What if the conversations included plans to gather those people in the world who don't want to stand among those thousands of white crosses and listen to TAPS while they bury their kids or their Mom or their Dad...and forge more paths to world peace?

There are those voices of peace all around us, and they will never be silenced. They exist in every corner of the world, and they never give up hope.

Remember the man in Sarajevo who sat down and played his cello in spite of the war going on all around him? The beauty and hope that poured forth in that glorious act of courage exists in all of us...all over the world. How we tap into it and fill the air with it is elusive knowledge. It's very very difficult, but will never be impossible.