Cranky letter to the editor

I've been cranky most of the week, for a variety of reasons--but then, I AM the contentious introvert! Got very annoyed by a column in the Star Tribune by Katherine Kersten--she was essentially making fun of a group's effort to study the peace movement in Norway. I was so irritated by the tone that I dashed off a letter to the editor, but the StarTrib is apparently not going to print it. But, ah-ha! Having a blog takes care of that--no editor whose approval I need. Here's the letter that the daily newspaper didn't think was worth printing:

To the editor:

Let’s be clear about this: the issue of “terrorism” in our world is complex, and there is no simple recipe for understanding it or dealing with it. And I will freely admit that there are times when “bullies” must be confronted with force.

Having said that, I regard Katherine Kersten’s cynical commentary on a cabinet-level department of peace and nonviolence (Star Tribune, January 30) as emblematic of the mindset that, ironically, is the very reason we are mired in military messes such as Iraq in the first place. Frankly, she is in no position to imply that she has more “geopolitical savvy” than those who want to create peaceful alternatives.

Kersten would have us believe that those devoted to “peacemaking” are simplistic and naïve. Yet she seems to have her own overly simplistic world view: apparently, the world is just full of bullies, these bullies hate America for no reason whatsoever, and, presumably, their goal is simply to kill as many Americans as they can. The world, in essence, is some sort of grade B cowboy movie, where white hats and black hats are the only attire. So, thank goodness the U.S. wears the white hat and can stand up to these bullies.

Unfortunately, the issue is more complicated. Whether we like to admit it or not, there are reasons for terrorism, and some of those reasons—not all of them, but some—are connected to the policies and actions of our own nation. Kersten manages to blur and suppress all of these factors by pulling out Adolph Hitler as her trump card. Yet she can not show a meaningful connection between 1940 and today; it is in the end a rather cheap shot. In many ways, history is not “repeating itself” at the moment; the issues and the personalities are substantially different.

Kersten and others who have decided that “violence is the answer” need to seriously consider what has happened in Iraq. In particular, she needs to realize that our military presence in that part of the world is directly tied to the number of “bullies” that there are, and their level of zeal. At the very least, I would hope that even Kersten would agree that in the long run, a mutual killing fest is not the answer—the consequence of her stance is protracted violence that fuels itself in a virtually endless cycle of hostility and aggression. Finding and killing Osama bin Laden, for example, simply will not put an end to terrorism; if anything, it could increase it.

Rather than resigning ourselves to violence, we need to find economic, cultural, and diplomatic ways to manage the tensions in the world, and to construct a different world in the process. That takes vision, commitment, and creativity, but it really can be done. Kersten might regard such thoughts as naïve and idealistic, but violence is simply not the only answer. At this point, one can only imagine what might have been possible in the Middle East had we pursued a non-military course of action with the same incredible amount of money, energy, and passion that we threw into the war. But thanks to people such as Katherine Kersten, we will never know.

David Lapakko
Richfield

There! I guess I told HER off! Now all I have to do is find a few hundred thousand people who might actually read it.