The Last Rose
With all the rain recently and now the cold, the growing season is ending. This picture is of the last rose our backyard garden will see this year. This is sad but we know the rose bush will grow once more next spring and roses will come and go in spring, summer and fall.
Tonight at the Peace and Justice Studies Association conference at Marquette I watched a movie called “Soldiers of Conscience”. It was a well-balanced account of how the military now trains soldiers to kill instinctively, without thinking. The military has learned from past wars that when soldiers thought about what they were doing they were sometimes reluctant to kill another human being.
One of the scenes in the movie was from a ROTC class, the kind Marquette hosts, where the teacher was telling the students about this way of fighting and the merits of it.
However, the story was also about four soldiers who put conscience over the military value to kill without thinking. They were rejected, imprisoned and dismissed from the military. One has been in the military for over 10 years but just could not kill without conscience any longer.
The military does not allow selective conscientious objection; one must be against all wars to be an official conscientious objector, and even that is made difficult and painful.
The military justifies this type of training, on the campus of Marquette or at another military base, because they know that when conscience is a priority, as our Catholic faith teaches, many will not kill and blindly follow orders.
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