The Call To Love Thy Neighbor

Every great moral theologian, great thinker, truly great statesman and stateswoman worth his or her salt had some compelling deep concern and the need to speak for the welfare of others, the "common good" the advancement of goodness not just greatness to bless others. Today George Soros proved he is no exception. Lecturing before his Foundation and friends in Washington today he reminded us that we too must determine as a priority to care for the wellbeing of the world, not just our national or personal security as our private obsession to which we demand enscriptment of the world. If one truly does that it requires that we minimize collateral innocent casualties of war waged in the name of our national security. The call to love is a call to elevate, to enliven, to lift and redeem. It is not a call to accidentally collaterally destroy. In this case this has been a wholly unnecessary evil.
The war on poverty must be fought not just because it has repercussion on our national self interest but because it is a worthy goal in itself to eliminate the suffering of poverty because we have compassion and empathy on those suffering it. To reduce everything meaningful to strategic twists on a "War on Terror" is to live a false metaphor through which we view everything through a paranoid narcisism.
It is unacceptable to have continuing accidental collateral death in the hundreds daily in Iraq or anywhere. The only excuse for perpetuating it is if we know that to leave will be the trigger for more accidental deaths. Soros is of the view that we are sitting on a civil war in Iraq that is not "getting much oxygen now because we are sitting on it." But if we immediately leave, which he does not support, it will collapse into a civil war and threaten a larger regional conflict. He views Iran's nuclear capability as "unacceptable." But believes we have to engage them to make peace. You make peace with your enemies not your friends. Making peace requires diplomatic engagement- by definition.
Our national psyche has been perverted not merely strained by the self centered self obsessed narcisism of viewing everything in the world through a prism of what threatens our security which demeans and cripples our ability to view the world as something we need to positively engage to mutually encourage creative mutually beneficial enterprise in a positive balance of trade and creativity. Instead we are spending ourselves in a hole dug clear through to China to wage death and destruction in the name of our protection. Dieu Tout Puissant.
If each of us individually and collectively as nations and states has a limited time on planet earth; generously say 100 years a person, 100 years a leader, times all the leaders of the world, to leave the world "better of" than when we got here, what would we do? Would we destroy nations and peoples to make us more secure, or would we try -really hard- to make the world a place where instead Love ruled- on earth as it is in heaven-- Where swords were beaten into plowshares-and people shared the plowing. Plowing in tandem doesn't work if one side knocks off and out the other.
Soros envisioned a future Iraq with power sharing along lines of oil revenue licensing rights distribution. The shift from mutual self assured destruction to mutual collaborative positive growth is something that comes from moral leadership of which we can't afford to squander any more.
When you were a kid, you didn't imagine growing up to kill anyone so that your place on the planet was secure? The obsession has raped our national innocence just as much as the original tragedy that inspired it. Our national insecurity doesn't have to be healed with more killing and never will be. Or national insecurity will come by building bridges of peace through loving our neighbors all around the world as ourselves ---just as He said.



Love keeps you young
I've heard it said
- turns your grey head
It lifts your heavy wrinkled brow
- turns your glaring frown toward the clouds
Love keeps you young
I've heard it said
As you astonishingly watch God's breath
through mysteries and miracles
that couldn't be but for his eye
that guides your flight silently
and connects you to the unreachable
Love keeps you young
I've heard it said
and when you can no longer
lift a foot over the other in steady pace
love still keeps you young
in parallel time and space
where your heart exists in perfect peace
where sworn enemies
become your brothers
who share your grief in atoning
moaning
Love keeps you young
I've heard it said,
it can even raise the dead.