Brian’s Reflection: Monday, May 31, 2010

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket
fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger
and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, Commanding General, WWII;
President of the United States.


Today in America is Memorial Day.

May I gently suggest that the only ultimate purpose of such a remembrance day – whatever else we may be remembering – is to call us to Peace and Justice.

Our country is addicted to Militarism, as is much of the World. Let us work to return ourselves to the path of Peace. Let us spend our money and our integrity in the ways of Peace, not in the ways of war and destruction.

In war, truth is the first casualty.
~Aeschylus

We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives...inside ourselves.
~Albert Camus

Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war.
~Albert Einstein

Force always attracts men of low morality.
~Albert Einstein

A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.
~Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country.
~Alexis de Tocqueville

...Violence as a way of gaining power...is being camouflaged under the guise of tradition, national honor [and] national security...
~Alfred Adler

A people free to choose will always choose peace.
~Ronald Reagan

What the people want is very simple - they want an America as good as its promise.
~Barbara Jordan

I hope that Barbara Jordan’s comment is indeed ultimately true of Americans.

May our war dead rest in peace, and their voices call us to the renunciation of violence.

Brian+