By Wade Fulmer, Columbia

War veterans and other victims bombed, maimed, or mentally disabled may be able to tell you where he or she and fellow soldiers were on a Christmas Day, what they were doing, or what they were remembering about their last time at home with family.  Often, they may not remember details of their destructive traumas, may not want to return to where one was, or may only numbly exist while still in the politicians’ war that bleeds them and their families. They were, are, so far away, and if they return they yet dwell in that war place of interventionist hell. Soldiers seek to serve by noble duty, to move one more day closer to home, and to return to family. In faith and horror they live to survive one day at a time, to come home, and to bring their fellow soldiers home, at least alive if not well.

What is Christmas when status quo professors of religion and a self-serving Congress refuse to admit heinous responsibility for allowing and continuing repeated deployments of our same sons, daughters, fathers, and mothers, two, three, four, and more times to the killing and mental harms inflicted and bagged by the undertakers of Capitol Hill? Such a confession would require a moral spirit, empathy, and true repentance by those who suffer people of our own or of cultural sovereignty the endless pain of ending life or the violent taking away of limbs, minds, and will to live. Instead, they avoid diplomacy as work that is too hard, but fueling and taunting war harms requires no plan, only recklessness and the lack of both conscience and intelligence.

America must not only take our country back from the capitol club stagnants of Congress, but must also regain Christmas and the spirituality of peacemaking. The choice is Christmas as a path for peace, or an empty religious and preemptive precedent of another six years of sectarian civil wars, child bombing, and the destruction of our own Constitutional law and values.  Will we now act to care about and for our soldiers and families who have been recycled again and again to death because of politicians’ hypocrisy, for bloodletting legacy, and by fear mongering lies? Will we now bring them home or betrayingly allow the branches of our own fallen democracy – misled by criminal demons and campaigners of false religion – to never allow our soldiers and sovereign peoples their own homelands?  Endless war wrought by arrogant politicians only tolls more killing lies that another child and family dies, and another, and another. 

Wade Fulmer is an anti-war activist with MFSO-SC, mfso.org.