Friends and blog readers, The article below just came across my computer this morning and I felt it was worthy of sharing with you. It comes from the latest issue of the Mennonite Weekly Review. Have a great day. Dennis

Our world needs fewer bombs, more ice cream

By Sheldon C. Good, Mennonite Weekly Review

PHILADELPHIA — On the eve of Sept. 11, a peace activist and an entrepreneur helped us reflect on our post-9/11 world and imagine a better reality — one with fewer bombs and more ice cream Author and activist Shane Claiborne teamed up with Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream, to critique defense spending, violence and war. They also promoted faith, hope and love to the sold out crowd at World Café Live.

In short, the two self-described “ringleaders of the circus” hosted a peace and justice variety show. The two-hour live event featured a visual artist, a poet, a juggler and a welder, who beat an AK-47 into a hay fork. Ten years after that infamous day during my first week of high school, I realized, all is not well with the world.“Our country spends over $30 billion a year on our nuclear arsenal,” Cohen said.

To illustrate his point, he poured 10,000 BB pellets into a metal container. The sound, reverberating off the venue’s walls, seemed to drone on forever. Make it stop, my heart cried out.

Our current nuclear weapons arsenal equals 50,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs, Cohen said. Lord, have mercy. Cohen later arranged Oreos to show how the Pentagon’s budget stacks up, literally, to funding for social programs. The Pentagon’s wobbling skyscraper of cookies flanked multiple, almost unnoticeable, other stacks.

Terry Rockefeller, a documentary film producer, lost her sister during the Sept. 11 attacks. She spoke of her search to break cycles of violence.“There can be no war on terror. War is terror,” she said.A similar exhortation loomed behind her — “Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows” — a quote from Martin Luther King Jr.

Since May 2002, Rockefeller has with worked with September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, a group founded by family members of those killed on 9/11. They say that “grief is not a cry for war,” Rockefeller said.

In fact, they transform their grief into peaceful witness. Such nonviolent actions in pursuit of justice lead our jaded world in a different direction. Society, which so often acquiesces to the myth of redemptive violence, beckons for this kind of peacemaking.

After all, peace cannot come through war.

Logan Mehl-Laituri didn’t always believe that. In 2004, he deployed to Iraq with the U.S. Army.

“I traded my humanity for nationalism,” said Mehl-Laituri, who was later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Facing a second deployment, he applied to be a noncombatant conscientious objector. He asked to remain in service but refused to carry a weapon.

The army honorably discharged Mehl-Laituri days before he traveled to the Middle East with Christian Peacemaker Teams.

Claiborne lived in Iraq during the “shock and awe” bombing of 2003. At an Iraq hospital, a doctor asked him, “Has your country lost its imagination?”

Before the Philadelphia event, I asked Claiborne that question too.

“Our imagination is hemorrhaging right now,” he said. “We’re spending $250,000 a minute on war as the country goes bankrupt.”

Claiborne believes Mennonites play a key role in illuminating this “elephant in the room.”

“The distinctiveness and peculiarity of the Mennonite witness as a prophetic and creative call and a front to the world we live in is really critically relevant right now,” he said.

He called Mennonites, “who might be tempted to tone it down a little bit, in order to be more relevant to the culture,” to share their peacemaking tradition.

“There’s a whole generation that’s grown tired of militarism and the emptiness of materialism and is longing for another way,” he said. “I think the integration of faith and practice of Mennonites is what many people are hungry for.”

Cohen, a secular progressive, considers himself a “natural ally” with Christians.

“We are saying the same thing in two different languages,” he said by phone Sept. 7.

Cohen, who has received numerous awards for socially responsible business, told me his passion for social justice comes from a sense of compassion and fairness.

Growing up on Long Island, he recalls occasionally driving into poverty-stricken Harlem with his family.

“I thought it was unfair that because somebody was born on one side of a line that they ended up living a life of poverty,” he said.

Multiple Anabaptist-related groups supported the event: 1040 for Peace, Christian Peacemaker Teams, Heeding God’s Call and Mennonite Central Committee.

Groups like these help us put our faith into action for peace and justice. There’s a real opportunity for Mennonites, 10 years after 9/11, to proclaim that Jesus’ way looks different from the world’s.

So let’s keep inviting our neighbors to join us on the journey toward a world with fewer bombs and more ice cream.

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