Wow! What a speech!
Pope Leo XIV receives a 7-minute standing ovation from members of the Spanish parliament after his 30-minute speech that did not shy away from some of the most debated issues in the country.
(📷: Vatican press pool)
What those who are unhappy with the pope’s comments on war need to get into their heads is that his concern – and the concern of other churchmen and theologians who have argued for a more restrictive approach to war in modern times – is the protection of innocent lives. That’s it. It isn’t pacifism, or cowardice, or Neville Chamberlain style naiveté, or misplaced sympathy for evildoers, or any of the other straw men people keep attacking. It’s the enormous number of civilians who have done nothing deserving of harm and yet are killed, or have their homes destroyed, or whose society’s infrastructure is so devastated that anything like normal life becomes impossible for them. That some war aim is good in the abstract, or that some government has done evil, does not magically make it acceptable to inflict this sort of damage on huge populations of innocent people who simply get caught up in the middle of conflict between warring armies. That A has a legitimate reason to attack B does not somehow entail that he is at liberty to do things that inflict enormous harm on some third party C in the process. Everyone knows this in other contexts, but for some reason some people wrongly suppose that it doesn’t apply in war. And when they try to rationalize this attitude by appeal to the good consequences they claim war will bring about, their reasoning is no different from (and no less morally corrupt than) the similarly utilitarian arguments others use to justify abortion, euthanasia, and the like.
I was never going to be a soldier. That was clear early. I don’t have the constitution for it, the discipline, the willingness to put my body between something and the people I love. Some people have that. I don’t, and I’ve made peace with that.
Which is why Memorial Day sits a little strangely with me. I didn’t earn anything by being here. I didn’t pay the cost. Other people did, and their families did, and some of those families are still paying it in ways I’ll never understand from the inside.
I don’t have a tidy way to talk about this. I’m grateful in a quiet way that doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker. Grateful for my grandfather who fought in WW2 in the Air Force, my cousin JW who did three tours in Iraq and Afghanistan in the Army. For my cousin’s husband Jim who spend 20 years in the military.
Grateful for people who saw something worth defending and stepped forward when I would have stepped back. Grateful that the question of whether to go was theirs and not mine.
Tomorrow, I’m going to think about that. Not the speeches or the flags, just the simple fact that a life I get to live easily was built on lives that weren’t easy at all.
This is one of the funniest things I have ever seen….for real. It’s a hour and it made me laugh the entire time
Brilliant concept and perfectly executed
You can call the insurrectionists who attacked the Capitol and 140 police officers heroes & patriots, Mr. @POTUS. You can pardon & pay them off w/tax dollars.
You can wipe the DOJ archives of these events.
But you can't unring this bell.
https://t.co/PVH51AaZ0U via @NYTimes
COMMENTARY: Let’s say it plainly: There has never been a president as corrupt as Donald Trump.
There is no close second in our history.
https://t.co/RRV6gbiZi1