by Robert Shine
Chemical weapons. Napalm bombs. School children slaughtered. 100,000 dead. Violence in a most raw way pierces our otherwise sanitized media reporting and shakes world consciences as collectively we ask, “How did this happen, again?”
Talking with a close friend in the anti-mass atrocities community, he has repeated these past months that no one in government, no one in nonprofits, no one anywhere knows how to respond. All the writing, scholarship, plans, programs, funding, and political will conjured up by those who cried, “Never Again!” after the Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda, Serbia, Darfur…the litany is unending, and all this is for nothing. The Syrian regime and the Syrian rebels persistently assail life without true challenge.
We simply cannot think up, never mind agree on, a viable solution to end the killings and begin a path to peace. This war and violence a world away brings spiritual turmoil in my deepest recesses. I am terrified with my personal inaction, with America’s apathy for three years, with a world paralyzed in the face of evil incarnated in massacres and gas attacks. What to do? It seems simple to affirm military intervention because it is something, rather than nothing. I know that it won’t lead to peace though, only greater destruction. The haunting question, “How to promote peace and nonviolence in Syria?” remains.
For guidance, I turned to the Sisters of Loretto…