Perhaps theologian Walter Wink can help us understand Pete Hegseth, America’s self-declared “secretary of war” and spokesman, for God’s sake . . . for God. At a recent prayer service at the Department of Defense, for instance, Hegseth, after calling the Iranians “barbaric savages” who deserve no mercy, called on the citizens of his country to pray for victory “in the name of Jesus Christ.”
Browsing: Opinions
Two days before this year’s, a friendly neighbor asked, “Going to Thunder over Louisville, Russ?” My smart-ass reply was rhetorical—“No, how many of the thousands will consider thunder over Tehran?”—but his puzzled look led me to clarify my antipathy to military prowess parading as family fun.
In this lifetime specifically, I’ve penned this open letter on the cusp of Black Girl Speaks! The show, which is more than a show, but a movement as well, is elemental and transformative for healing. The show is needed more now than when it was first done. The show existed in a world where social media was embryonic at best. It existed before all the subsequent movements for hearing from and holding up women while they moved to bring light on how they survived assaults from men. The show existed when the voiceless were still without voice, and it was created to bring voice in those times. Now, more than twenty years later, there are questions of if there is still a place and a space for such work. The answer is yes and it is for a myriad of reasons. I want to highlight a few:
In every democracy, power is meant to transfer through ballots, not bullets. Yet whenever violence is aimed at a national leader—whether successful or not—it shakes the foundations of public faith in elections. An assassination attempt, by design, tries to override the will of millions with the will of one. And in that sense, an assassin’s bullet is not unlike any scheme that suppresses or distorts voters’ ability to cast ballots freely. Both undermine the same principle: that the people alone choose the president.
There are too many politricks and too few truths
The rising spiral of world military spending provides a striking example of how highly national governments value armed forces. In 2024, the nations of the world spent a record $2.72 trillion on expanding their vast military strength, an increase of 9.4 percent from the previous year. It was the tenth year of consecutive spending increases and the steepest annual rise in military expenditures since the end of the Cold War.
Competitiveness is one of our primary values. Competition runs the world. It orients success in business, or sports—and above all in war. Adversaries seek the transient glory of military advantage. Yet none of our four biggest challenges, the climate emergency, nuclear weapons, the rise of AI, and global pandemics are “us and them” problems. They are “us” problems. This may seem more obvious with climate change and disease, but it is just as true for AI and nukes, especially in some fatal combination of AI and nukes under theoretical consideration by the masters of war. The ruins of Gaza show us that even conventional wars can approach a nuclear level of destruction.
During the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment thinkers realized that human reasoning provided a better understanding of our natural world than the explanations found in ancient religions. The Enlightenment spawned Humanism, a non-religious, democratic, and ethical life stance that emphasized human reason, compassion, and scientific inquiry rather than divine intervention. Humanism sought rational ways of solving human problems, and it has been remarkably successful, advancing society more in the past 250 years than in all the preceding 300,000 years of human history.
Sometimes talking too much and too loudly will backfire on you. Those supporters once taking front seats are now sheepishly taking back seats. Some don’t even bother to show up. Maybe they have lost hope.
I have entirely different reasons than Trump; mine are related to actual peace, not the Trumpian peace-through-domineering-intimidation. My reasons for wishing the US would pull out of NATO are the opposite of Trump’s.