It’s a sad and sickening thing that Syrians are suffering so much at the hands of another in a long series of sickening and clearly evil leaders. And as Christians we should be in frequent prayer for the strife and suffering in Syria to somehow come to an end–and for strife and suffering in other violent places around the world to somehow come to an end.
But we should also pray, I think, for truth, which Jesus so utterly insisted upon since he was the truth personified, to finally prevail over so much hypocrisy in our own great nation.
It’s too bad that America’s President and supportive Congressmen don’t have a lot of moral high ground to stand on in their flaming the fans of war by invoking the depressing number of children, not to mention other innocent people, that were killed by Syria’s own leader.
No one can deny that using poison gas is an atrocity.
But here’s a question from a moral standpoint:
Where is the high-minded moral leader in America who stands up anytime we kill an untold number of children and innocents as we did when we dropped a single, atrocious “shock-and-awe” bomb in Iraq in an attempt to kill a single man who had gassed his own people way back when we were “friends” with him because of his oil?
Who stood up and raised holy hell when Saddam Hussein, who for so long was our great oil-rich friend, gassed his own people?
Who dares remind us of our own history of atrocities like napalm and agent orange in Vietnam or white phosphorous in the more recent war in Iraq, where we were to be greeted happily and at a low cost in lives and treasury ($50 to $60 billion)?
Where is a prophetic voice like that of MLK Jr., who was willing to shine a light on any and all atrocities whether in civil rights or war?
Where, for gosh sakes, are the church leaders with the kind of moral and Christian courage to call America out for her own sins, and forcefully so, when we commit them?
Whatever the right thing to do in Syria–and we can only hope and pray we’re about to do something really right–we might ask the good Lord to forgive us our blind spots and hypocrisies and repent of our own evil and complicity in it around the world.
right on.
I don’t know what to think about the Syria problem for the reasons you have stated so well above. I especially am appalled by our own actions in Viet Nam as well as our holding of prisoners at Guantanamo without charge.