Anti-war?

I have known people against the war. But they aren't against the war for the same reason my lefty friends are. No, it's a whole different kind of reason. I mentioned this thing with Iran to one of them.

"We better not go into Iran," she said.

"Why not?," I asked. "Are you sick of war? I know I am too. I hate the thought of any more...but..."

"No, no. It's not that. It's just..why should we care about them? We proved our point after 9-11. Let's just focus on building some walls and securing our borders. Let's stop letting the Muslims come here and just let them blow themselves up over there. If we leave them alone long enough they will destroy each other. Good riddance"

Alright then. I see this attitude sometimes. The "who cares about them, let's focus on us" kind of thing and more people feel that way than you might imagine.

Many on the right might argue that if we don't do something about the Middle East now, then it will come back to haunt us later. They argue that if we retreat it will only give our enemy more of a feeling of power. To them it is all about keeping us safe by killing the enemy there.

But is it so hard to believe that many of us have been touched by what we have seen on our television screen? A world so backwards that at first you think you are watching a movie about the world long ago. The streets are dusty and people dress as Jesus did. Women are covered in burkas and there is no music in the air, no young girls putting on makeup or fixing their hair. Everyone has lost a loved one to brutality in one way or another. There is concrete and sadness. Has it always been this way. Will it always be?

And what about Iran? A world even worse than Saddam's Iraq. I read in Vanity Fair and posted here about the young girl hanged from a crane in the middle of the city for having sex. As much as I hate so many things about America, it's abortion and pornography, I would hate more an America where we aren't free to decide what we want in our country. I would hate an America that punishes it's sinners of the soul. We can scold them, we can protest them, we can vote them out, we can forgive them, and we can love them. But the sins of our souls is the sad slow dance we have with God and it is ours alone.

Is it so hard to believe that so many of us want a better world for those imprisoned in a desert void of dreams? Where a girl doesn't have to hide her life behind folds of cloth? Where men don't see heaven as a virginal brothel?

This world has held fast to a backward time for far too long. The birth into this century, I fear, will be a bloody and painful one. Even more bloody and painful than it has already been. Great things come at great costs. I don't have the answers and I wish to God they didn't involve war, but when a creature attacks you, do you hope to pacify it? Or do you fight like hell to kill it before it kills you? Especially when you know that beast has caused so much suffering of others and if you defeat it, then the suffering eases and the world is not so much afraid.

Don't try and tell me that we are just 2 faces of the same coin. We are not.

Because we are free.

And no one can ever convince me that being free isn't always....

right.