Pssssst. It's the sinner who commits the sins. You can stop a sin, but unless you stop the
sinner, he keeps on murdering and raping and stealing.
Of course. BUT you can stop the sinner without hating him or her. That's the difference between us. We both abhor the sin. But you abhor the person who commits it, while I consider the person diseased, out of harmony with himself, and almost always tragically unhappy. The best way to stop sin is to stop the sinner AND deal with the sources of sin. You don't do this by hating. You can kill Milosovic, but what you are going to get is probably worse.
We have the power to destroy Yugoslavia, to turn its cities into rubble, destroy all its factories, kill tens or hundreds (or even millions) of its people, destroy its power grids, its transportation sustem, its schools and colleges, its housing, its hospitals and clinics, burn its crops, kill its livestock--basically we have the power to turn it back into a country of the 1400s. We have the power to do all this.
But we will NOT destroy the hatred which created this problem in the first place -- a hatred which you, by employing it yourself, encourage others to follow.
The one thing we CANNOT bomb into submission or total destruction is the human will. That is in the end ameanable only to reason, to human interaction devoid of personal hatred. Hitler failed to bomb the spirit out of London, we failed to bomb the spirit of North Vietnam, we failed to bomb the German spirit out of Hamburg and Bonn (look at the resurgance of neo-Nazis -- the hatred is still there even with all the attempts to surpress it by force or violence.)
Hate begets hate. Until we break this cycle, as MLK said, and learn to love our enemies (NOT what they do -- but the enemies themselves) we will never have peace.
Maybe that's okay with you. Maybe it's enough for you to say in six months "We destroyed Yugoslavia, we finally killed Milosovic, hooray." But we will NOT have solved the problem. |
