I just got done reading “A Citizen’s Response to the National Security Strategy of the United States of America,” an essay by Wendell Berry. It is in a little booklet called Citizen’s Dissent which you can obtain for a mere $8 from Amazon.com or elsewhere.

I’m 3 years late in reading it, but I *highly* encourage you to get a copy and read it. It questions the sanity of our response, then and now, to the events of September 11, 2001. It questions our continued insistence that war is the way to peace, and that an isolationist willing to “act alone” is inconsistent with our desire to create a “global economy.”

Berry is a genius who put ideas in terms that simple people can understand. When it comes to politics (and most other things, I suppose) I am very simple in my thinking. Berry is very practical. If I were to quote to you the parts that I thought were important, I’d quote the entire thing. But I’ll be content with this:

It is useless to try to adjudicate a long-standing animosity by asking who started it, or who is the most wrong. The only siffucient answer is to give up the animosity and try forgiveness, to try to love our enemies and try to talk to them and (if we pray) to pray for them. If we can’t do any of that, then we must begin again by trying to imagine our enemies’ children who, like our children, are in mortal danger because of enmity that they did not cause.

May God have mercy on our great nation, and grant that we may, by putting aside our insanity, and remembering what greatness means, be great once more.