[saymaListserv] Quaker in Training

[Steve Livingston]

Friends, it is right and good for us to feel and express concern for the 
abandonment and abrogation of our cherished founding principles, but it 
is also good to  reflect upon  the longer historical  context, and not 
lose sight of how far we have come as a nation, that we look upon these 
recent developments with such dismay.

Let us not forget, for example, the dozen or so previous instances where 
military forces supported by American tax dollars have invaded sovereign 
nations, just in the past forty years, under questionable circumstances 
and with little justification. Let us not forget the ongoing struggle to 
expose the training that has been going on at the former School of the 
Americas for the past forty years, and the partial victory that 
conscience has achieved over imperialism in that case. Let us not forget 
the last quagmire where our troops were bogged down, forty years ago, 
and the exponential difference in human suffering and loss of life 
resulting from that conflict compared to the present one.

It is right to speak out against the injustices of any regime. I offer 
as a hope and a caution that it is a mistake to attribute to one regime 
the injustices that have long been institutionalized and which only 
recently have begun to be addressed, and at that only partially. It's 
true that we have far to go before we have established a Peaceable 
Kingdom, but it's not so much farther than it was six years ago, ten, 
twenty, forty . . . and I would suggest perhaps not as far.

Steve