Last Monday's horrifying airstrikes on the large relief caravan entering Aleppo show every evidence of having been launched by Syrian and Russian aircraft, according to extensive reporting in today's September 25th New York Times. These Middle East tragedies miniaturize the foolish political scenes in the U. S. where endorsements of Hillary Clinton by prominent Republican newspapers and visible disaffection of many other Republican loyalists may carry the day for her but to what end?
What's not clear at all is if Hillary Clinton offers a new day for Aleppo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, etc. We must vote for her, but boatloads of drowning refugees and bloodied children ask the question of the relevance of our shameful politics to this horrendous theater of death and dying; as do the Charlotte and Tulsa shootings ask the dreary questions about a nation enamored for centuries with the slave-master relationship.
Watch for Donald Trump to try to drive Hillary Clinton to the wall over the eight years of Middle East war. Watch to see if she carries new policy proposals to fend him off. Just as Donald Trump aligns himself with Putin when it seems useful to him in his usual strange way, as in "someone he knows knows someone else," Hillary Clinton has aligned herself with the team of President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry and insistently wrapped herself in their colors. Yet their eight years of war in the Middle East and continuing loyalty to Israel and its settlement expansion in the Palestinian's West Bank may no longer guarantee her election .
Neither Putin's reported brutalities nor the long running fiasco of Israel's settlements any longer defines the staggering complexity of U. S. foreign policy challenges around the globe. The enormous financial benefits of both the raw materials and land ownership markets are the oceans on which the nations, the regional private-sector oligarchs (from Goldman Sachs to China), and the less powerful actors sail. It's a tide made for mega investors.
On the other hand, in the "other world" of middle class security the comfortable life prevails, but the stirrings are hopeful. No one appears any longer to believe that public discussion amid talk television is more than a money-making enterprise. Growing signs of peacemaking abound: the peace accords in Columbia, the breakout from traditional politics from the Brexit rebellion and in the British Labour party, the Sanders millennial explosions--all suggest that a better and more up-to-date perspective may be coming into view as a glass half full. The large crowds debating ferociously but peacefully on university campuses, the hundreds marching over inequality and racism, the myriad citizen action groups, the revival of strength in Labor union, and a new generation of cool-headed leaders in the churches and synagogues have become a talented and growing throng of steadier hands.
There are connection and engagement problems to be solved, of course. The comfort cells are, well so comfortable. Still, remarkably impressive new organizations for peacemaking abound among the millennials, who still may not know the route to engagement with the demons of Aleppo and racism. There's evidence they're starting to get that there is a connection from the prophets to themselves. They're starting to notice that the biblical peace and justice movements happened outside, near the bombing, at the ruins caused by racism and cheap grace. The prophets could have used more allies, more connections. To rebuild the ruins of Aleppo may be the only route to a new day. No other way, and before it's too late.
No comments:
Post a Comment