American up here...

Last Monday Steve and Nathan and I went out for lunch to talk about the conference and where we see this whole thing going next year. In response to something I said Nathan tapped me on the front of my head and said "That's because you've got American up here". This moment was probably the most outraged I've been in a long, long time. It was borderline sin. Well, okay... sin.

Lately I've been thinking about Americana and what it would be like to live there and subsequently what exactly do I think about their culture and specifically-war, because really, most of what I know about the States revolves around war. I have the opportunity to study there next year, so I figured I should really start thinking about these things, in order to avoid blindly becoming a card carrying Republican (or Democrat for that matter), if I end up going.

I think there are a ton of issues to think through here, but my initial sentiment is that I'm a pretty big pacifist. I can't really see a scenario that justifies blowing the hell (they are fighting evil...right?) out of another country- even something like 9/11. Recently I have seen two documentaries that attempt to show the other side of the war coin in America- Loose Change which is about the shadiness of the 9/11 events, and Why We Fight, which shows the war in Iraq as the result of a tradition of lies, increased Imperialism and the rise of the military industrial complex (priorities which are set to benefit corporations as opposed to what benefits the country- ie. contracts given to weapons producing corporations). Why we fight has a number of interviews with people from Iraq, who say that they supported the U.S. until they started bombing them- their neighborhoods- their parks- and until the vast majority of the people wounded or killed in this war were civilians.

I have also been reading a book by Shane Claiborne called Irresistable Revolution. He has some very interesting stories about interning with Mother Theresa and fighting policitians for the rights of homeless people in Philadelphia. He also talks about a trip to Iraq- I found it particularly interestingl- He says "essentially I went to Iraq because I belive in a God of scandalous grace. I have pledged allegiance to a King who loved evildoers so much he died for them, teaching us that there is something worth dying for but nothing worth killing for".

Maybe I only think this way because I was raised in Canada and we're the peacekeepers. Or maybe what I'm really trying to understand is what are the politics, ethics and practices of a people whose citizenship is more about a kingdom than a country.