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An Ethic of Life
An Ethic of Death

Paul Olson
UNL Professor Emeritus

When I was sixteen, in 1949, I went to Aspen, Colorado — before it was a Mecca for the Lamborghini crowd — for the Goethe Bicentennial celebration. Knowing little about Goethe, and so pitifully poor that I hitchhiked part of the way, I went because Albert Schweitzer was speaking. I had read Schweitzer — on St. Paul and Jesus, on issues of war and peace, and on the “reverence for life” ethic — the idea that all life should be reverenced and protected. World War II was over. And I was a teenager, looking for meaning.

I read in Schweitzer: [R]everence for life is an absolute ethic. It makes only the maintenance and promotion of life rank as good. All destruction of and injury to life, under whatever circumstances, it condemns as evil… At times we have to decide… which forms of life, and even which particular individuals, we shall save, and which we shall destroy. But the principle of reverence for life is nonetheless universal and absolute…

Whenever I injure life of any sort, I must be quite clear whether it is necessary… The farmer, who has mown down a thousand flowers in his meadow as fodder for his cows, must be careful on his way home not to strike off in wanton pastime the head of a single flower by the roadside, for he thereby commits a wrong against life without being under the pressure of necessity.

Schweitzer was the beginning of my journey toward figuring out what such reverence might mean. The journey has not ended.

Perhaps I should be a happy man now. My state has three representatives who say that they are pro-life. Adrian Smith is a “Christian,” Lee Terry a Methodist, and Jeff Fortenberry a Catholic. They are not hearing from one religious authority, but they have one “life” message. When I go to churches, I hear homilies that tell me that I would have committed a mortal sin had I voted for anyone not pro-life. Local and national religious authorities call for a “consistent ethic of life”: anti-abortion, anti-capital punishment and anti-assisted suicide. Fundamentalists on the religious right call for similar goals, especially on abortion. In the case of Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, a life-ethic meant more: a condemning of the idea of nuclear deterrence. But when Nebraska votes, it means nothing about war or most forms of death — domestically or in the world.

To take the House of Representatives as an example. The “consistent ethic of life,” the “reverence for life” that our representatives, Smith, Fortenberry and Terry, profess means opposing abortion (mostly this) and perhaps assisted suicide. They appear to accept the death penalty through inaction. They do not oppose nuclear deterrence. They do not question “shock and awe” bombs or surge raids that abort mothers in Iraq. They are, to all intents and purposes, silent when mothers in Darfur have to birth babies destined for bloated bellies and flies in their eyes as they eke out their few days before dying. They do not testify loudly enough to be heard about children in the U.S., Africa, Asia and South America starving or dying from war, AIDS, malnutrition or multi-national corporate indifference.

If we, as peace people, value an ethic of life, we may well ask, “Do our representatives represent the same ethic?” If so, why, in the 109th Congress, did all of our representatives — including Tom Osborne — vote for funding the continued occupation of Iraq with its murder of civilians? Why have they all continued to justify the initial illegal invasion of Iraq and the ouster and execution of Saddam Hussein as aspects of the “War on Terror” (which they not)? Why did they vote against prohibiting military action against Iran? Why did they oppose cutting funds for the so-called “missile defense program” that is destabilizing the international nuclear situation and prompting a new arms race? Were they ‘life-people’ when they voted to share nuclear technology with India, a non-signatory to the nuclear nonproliferation treaty? Did life-reverence tell them to oppose increased humanitarian aid for refugees? What form of belief in an ethic of life caused them to vote against closing the ‘School of the Americas’ (now WHINSEC), where Father Roy Bourgeois and his Catholic SOA Watch group have routinely documented that Latin American military officers are trained to become human rights abusers? Are these actions that a consistent of ethic of life, or even the ‘just war’ theory, teaches?

Again, to take 110th House session: why did Representatives Fortenberry and Smith vote for the 2007 Farm Bill that perpetuates a system in which most subsidy payments are sent to only 20 Congressional districts? (Terry voted against the bill because it added a bit of taxing to U. S. subsidiaries of foreign corporations.) Why vote for a bill sending one-third of agricultural payments to farms that have annual incomes above a quarter of a million dollars that sends billions to non-farming landowners and ups subsidy limits? The subsidy program pours millions into the pockets of non-farmers like David Letterman, Scottie Pippen and David Rockefeller?

Why did Terry, Fortenberry and Smith vote against the crucial “Fairness in Farm and Food Policy” Farm Bill amendment that, in Sojourners words, “shifts funds from trade distorting subsidies into other priorities, such as food stamps, conservation, and programs that help minority and socially disadvantaged farmers” and “steer[s] U.S. policies in a direction that supports family farms, healthy food and land, and fair trade?” Why did our Terry, Fortenberry, and Smith help to defeat that amendment while promoting David Letterman’s subsidies?

Our guys know that our subsidized corn, beans, rice and cotton, regularly dumped on the international markets, drive small farmers in other lands off their farms — increasing hunger, dependent urban ghettoes and the likelihood of civil strife and terrorism. They know that we — and the Europeans — have been the primary causes of the breakdowns in the Doha Round WTO trade talks designed to prevent such dumping. Do they know that there is no reverence for life in such a vote? Do they know that 798 million people in the world suffer from chronic hunger because of poverty? Do they do anything about it and can we hope that their Senate counterparts will act differently in the weeks ahead?

Why did Terry, Smith and Fortenberry vote against the Children’s Health Care Bill extending health insurance to six million unserved U.S. children (Bush will probably veto it on the grounds that it is too expensive and socialistic). Where is the “consistent ethic of life” in that vote? Or in their votes on Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, military spending, world hunger, hunger in America and world poverty? They did not get their positions from the Pope’s statements on the Iraq war, poverty, and hunger. Or from any mainline Protestant leaders’. Or from Sojourner’s evangelicals.

We Nebraskans can toot our horns until hell freezes over about how we reverence life. But we do not do so as voters in any meaningful way. We do not care when we send representatives like these to Washington. We do not care.

I just returned from a Norway poor in land and resources (save for its North Sea oil). It does not allow its own to go hungry. It has the highest human development index of any country in the world. At the same time, according to the CIA, it gives away $302.51 in Official Development Assistance (ODA) to help other countries with hunger, poverty, and peacemaking. Modest in resources, it is third in the world in giving. We are eighteenth. We, U.S. citizens, give an average of $22.91 each in ODA. Norway has enriched itself within through its external giving to others. We have impoverished ourselves with riches for our upper crust and only crusts for the least.

I am on the long journey to learn reverence, and still far from the goal. The taxes I pay wantonly strike down many single flowers by the roadside. And I am responsible. I know that my citizenship — if I am really alive and caring about life — means continued witness, advocacy and engagement. Whenever I am silent, I compound my complicity.