Service and Peace

I went to a peace march and rally in Concord on Saturday, along with six or seven others from our congregation. Two of our delegation participated in the reading of names, the nearly 4,000 U.S. service people who have died in the war, plus many more civilians, both U.S. and Iraqi. They read in shifts for 13 hours to say the names. And those names are just the beginning. The group Code Pink had collected shoes and lined them up along the sidewalks of the square in front of the State House -- combat boots, yes, and flip-flops, high heels, little sneakers, and other kinds of civilian shoes, to remind us not only of the soldiers, but of the everyday people whose lives have been taken by this war. As we walked to the State House from the other side of the river, passing cars honked and gave us the peace sign (one or two offered the "other" salute). We even walked with a police escort along the street for a couple of blocks, heady stuff! A very funky marching band accompanied our parade. We chanted, "What do we want? Peace! When do we want it? Now!"
For me, there was a certain bitter nostalgia. I was glad to see that many of those marching were too young to remember those other marches. Not even born in Vietnam times. Some who would not remember the first Iraq incursion. There was music -- their kind of music, and mine, too, for the day.
There were speeches. Nabil Migalli, head of the New Hampshire Arab American league, spoke passionately about the false pretenses under which the war was started and the tremendous damage it has done to our national security and our stature in world opinion. He reminded us that terrible things are being done in our names for no good reason. Then a young veteran took the stage, Will Hopkins, to speak of his experience in this war, and of the price paid by so many returning veterans in the form of dreadful injuries, and in the form of hidden injuries of the spirit -- the flashbacks, the fear that doesn't stop, the reluctance to seek treatment. We will be paying for this war in the very fabric of our own culture for a long, long time.
It's a cultural question-- we value military service to our country to defend the peace we have within our borders. And then we squander the lives of those loyal Americans who enlist for this valuable service as if they were so many electronically generated images on a computer screen. We need to reincarnate our thinking about this service so as to respect it more. Real people with real families, real hopes and dreams of life within the borders the service supposedly defends, real blood, real muscles, real arms and legs and heads.
If our faith, Unitarian Universalism, is about God, then it must be about God incarnated in everyone, the spirit of life that animates us all, the precious and sacred made flesh . The flesh too sacred to be thrown so lightly into harm's way. And from the response to the march from the passersby, I'm thinking there are a lot of Americans who share this faith without actually saying that's what it is. Wholly human -- holy human. Something divine within us all, too precious to be thrown away.