Love Your Enemy

Jesus did not say, "Love your enemies" for their sake, but for our sake, to prevent us from becoming the very people we hate.

Because we did not listen to him, we have become the terrorists. That's what hate does: it turns us into our enemies. But when we love, it turns our enemies into us.

I grieve not only for the Afghan people, but for the broken families of the U.S. military community who live all around me. When I look out my back window, there is a house with a little boy who never knew his father, killed in Afghanistan seven years ago. When I look out my front window I see the home of a Congressional Medal of Honor winner with his hands blown off. He has an American flag over his door and never comes out. When I walk down the street, just past his house, I meet another little boy, from another home, who is huddled in the rain, trembling and crying. He wants to borrow my cell phone to call 911. I ask him why. He says, "Because my step dad kicked me in the jaw and threw me against the wall of the garage." His step dad just came back from his fourth tour of combat.
Now 16 civilians have been murdered by a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan, a soldier from this military base, one mile away. 

We have lost all credibility to condemn the atrocities of dictators and terrorists, because our own soldiers commit acts of terrorism. We destroy the souls of our men and women in uniform with a foreign policy whose mission drifts further and further away from national defense, into arrogant imperialism, claiming the right to occupy and bully other countries into serving our will.

This is not the fault of the soldiers, but the fault of a civilian population too long myopic and disengaged from its duty. Our Constitution makes it clear that the military is governed by the civilian authorities, and the civilian authorities are elected by the people. 

We the people must now rise up, not only in defense of Afghan families, but in defense of our own abused military families, and demand an immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from the Middle East.