War With North Korea???

Are we fast approaching war with North Korea?  I am afraid that we are.

Trump believes that North Korea will soon have both the nuclear weapon and the missile to deliver the bomb as far as our West Coast.  He believes that we cannot, must not, let this happen.  North Korea has the same mentality; they must have this nuclear capability to protect themselves so they cannot not, must not, denuclearize.  So we are at an impasse; neither country is apt to back down.

Both counties are highly militarized.   Both have millions of highly trained soldiers.  Neither country is afraid of violence, war.  Neither country has millions of citizens trained in love and justice.  The odds of war are high.

When we add ignorance, inexperience, arrogance, ethnocentrism, nationalism and the possibility of error/miscalculation, war is even more likely.

Perspective from Philip Yancey:

"Gandhi died three years after the United States dropped the atomic bomb in Japan. . . . Gandhi believed the West had forfeited its ability to lead the human race and represented a future of decadence, materialism, and armed conflict."

Gandhi was once asked this question:  "What do you think of Western civilization?"  Gandhi replied: "I think it would be a good idea."

Perspective from Jim Wallis "Hiroshima and 13th Street," The Plough, Summer 1995:

Jim Wallis lived in a Washington ghetto filled with violence;

"They have been to so many funerals, they have seen so many of their friends laid out, they wanted it to be known how they themselves should be laid out when they die.  These were 8-, 9-, 10-year-old children.  When young African-American men reach the age of 20 in my neighborhood, they have a party, a real celebration.  It's a milestone.  "I'm 20 years old and I'm still alive!"

"But I do believe that something happened to us in 1945.  Something happened to us that we have yet to really understand.  A threshold was crossed.  It wasn't only Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  It was Dresden.  It was the fire bombings.  But it was not only weapons of mass destruction.  It was the deliberate and indiscriminate targeting of civilian populations."

"In World War II my father was in the naval force that was destined and scheduled to invade the Japanese islands. . . .He was certain that he would not have survived an invasion, and so I grew up most of my life being told that the bombing of Hiroshima made my family possible.  My father really believed that.  Later, however, he turned against nuclear weapons and believed that the bomb should never have been dropped."

"What has happened to us?  Violence has been accepted as normative, even enshrined.  Violence has saturated our culture.  Violence is now everywhere."

"Violence is in the White House, the Pentagon; it's all over television, in our streets, and in our homes. . . . We have had an almost complete cultural breakdown, a complete disintegration of values."

According to Wallis, the biblical prophetic vision not only protests against evil, but it also provides an alternative vision of love and justice, of the kingdom of God.

A last word from Gandhi:  "We are not ready for freedom."  So he took two years off to fast and pray. He said, "My greatest fight is with the demons inside me.  My next fight is with the demons inside my [Indian] people, and only after that comes my fight with the British."