Popular Posts

Thursday, February 21, 2013

DRONES AND SOULS


From the Sojourners blog comes a post by Church of Christ pastor Phil Haslanger asking a different question about the use of drones, the kind of question one could imagine Martin Luther King asking were he alive today: 

Yes, drones are efficient, effective, and economical. But what do they do to the soul of this nation, to the psyches of those who push the buttons from half a world away?...When we so disconnect our warriors from the realities of war, what does that do to their souls and to our collective soul? Do we lose sight of the horrible human cost of war? Do we become arrogant in our perceived ability to rule the world from a computer terminal?
As commentator Bill Moyers said in an essay on Feb. 7, our recent wars in Vietnam and Iraq and now with drones all share a “blind faith in technology, combined with a sense of infallible righteousness.”
That’s a recipe for an illusive short-term victory at the cost of the moral high ground that ought to set our nation apart. It’s a policy that is increasing animosity in the nations we target, opens us to counterattacks in the future and corrodes our inner selves. 


No comments:

Post a Comment