Empire Burlesque | November 9 2012 | Thanks, Paul
To all those now hailing the re-election of Barack Obama as a triumph of decent, humane, liberal values over the oozing-postule perfidy of the Republicans, a simple question:
Is this child dead enough for you?
This little boy was named Naeemullah. He was in his house — maybe playing, maybe sleeping, maybe having a meal — when an American drone missile was fired into the residential area where he lived and blew up the house next door.
As we all know, these drone missiles are, like the president who wields them, super-smart, a triumph of technology and technocratic expertise. We know, for the president and his aides have repeatedly told us, that these weapons — launched only after careful consultation of the just-war strictures of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas — strike nothing but their intended targets and kill no one but “bad guys.” Indeed, the president’s top aides have testified under oath that not a single innocent person has been among the thousands of Pakistani civilians — that is, civilians of a sovereign nation that is not at war with the United States — who have been killed by the drone missile campaign of the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.
Yet somehow, by some miracle, the missile that roared into the residential area where Naeemullah lived did not confine itself neatly to the house it struck. Somehow, inexplicably, the hunk of metal and wire and computer processors failed — in this one instance — to look into the souls of all the people in the village and ascertain, by magic, which ones were “bad guys” and then kill only them. Somehow — perhaps the missile had been infected with Romney cooties? — this supercharged hunk of high explosives simply, well, exploded with tremendous destructive power when it struck the residential area, blowing the neighborhood to smithereens.
I recently wrote a small piece on prayer for a particular CMED group of students. I send out a prayer each month to these students as part of their work with their Fate to Destiny Sacred Contracts class. As I was searching through my literature on prayer, I reviewed some of the writings of Thomas Aquinas, the renowned and rather old world Catholic theologian. One has to sift through his writings to find his wisdom as it’s hidden, but it’s still there. I selected only a slight passage – not much – in which Aquinas notes that prayer is made more powerful by a person’s clarity of heart and mind and secondly, by living in accordance with what you are praying for. That is, your life choices and lifestyle need to be congruent with your prayers rather than counterproductive. Prayers will not compensate for foolish life choices, particularly conscious foolish life choices. You cannot pray for health and then poison yourself with the wrong foods, in other words.