This is from Catherine Whitmire's Practicing Peace: A Devotional Walk Through the Quaker Tradition.
E. Raymond Wilson, one of the founders of Friends Committee on National Legislation, is said to have commented: "If you open your toolbox, and the only thing in it is a hammer, everything will look like a nail." ... We don't spend one percent of [our federal budget] -- not one percent of that -- on peace. So everytime we open our toolbox, the only thing, as a country, that we have are weapons ... If the only thing in your toolbox is a weapon, then the only thing you can think of to do is hit the nail. Everything will look like a nail.
Mary Lord, 2004
And I'll just add, if every time you hit the nail, you, your friends, your daddy, or your daddy's friends get even richer, there is not a lot of incentive to dig a little deeper in the toolbox to find the other tools. I believe it is an essential piece of the solution that Congress outlaws war profiteering. Not that I think they will or that this despotic administration would care even if they did.
Months ago I posted about Mark Kurlansky's book, Nonviolence. I urge you to look up the book and read it. Individual by individual, we can pick up and work with a different set of tools.
2 comments:
and if you've left behind your coke and booze addictions for hitting nails with hammers, that's your new addiction.........violence, weapons, endless war......
True enough. I think we, as a society, are addicted to hitting nails with hammers.
It's time for a different paradigm. Canning tomatoes, eh?
Post a Comment