I was at the Bryn Mawr Post Office this afternoon, distributing literature that explained how nearly half of the federal budget relates to military expenditures. I was suggesting that this is the place for cuts to be made, not in essential services. I brought an article from the most recent issue of Time Magazine that made the same argument. Nice to be able to have available a well-known conservative source for support, in response to those who dismiss the facts by simply jumping to their standard ad hominem argument of the Quaker/academic/hippie/socialist sort.
One woman asked me about my views on dropping the atomic bombs on Japan. I explained that I could not support their use because the war would have soon been over in any case (Japan was already asking about peace on the same terms that we later accepted) and hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved. She said that they saved her life – that her parents had been interred in Java and would have been killed in the intervening time, in which case she wouldn’t be here today, and so she was approved of dropping them on Japan. I am reminded that I likely wouldn’t be here if my father had not been turned down for the chaplaincy, apparently for being too pacifistic and intellectual. And so should I be grateful that the U.S. military only wants militaristic chaplains, not ones that might ever question the mission?