Give War a Chance

I imagine that I am one of the “hostile, nasty” people Dave Depp (“Peace Patriots,” Oct. 23) is confronted by when he and his rag tag group of “patriots” assemble for their weekly protests. Not only am I a proud veteran of our nation’s armed forces, but I also work right next door to the Fourth Circuit Courthouse and am invariably forced to run the gantlet between his group and my place of work.

Going to war to protect the sovereignty and safety of civilized societies is not contrary to Catholic doctrine or theology, as I am sure Sue Frankel-Streit and her “anarchist” Little Flower Catholic Worker Community know. It is an exemplification of what St. Thomas Aquinas, in “The Summa Theologica,” called a “just war,” one that “has the object of securing peace, of punishing evil-doers, and of uplifting the good.”

We wage war because to do nothing, as we have seen from the attacks on Khobar Towers, the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the U.S.S. Cole, is to invite even more deadly actions against our citizens and our interest overseas.

I am sorry that Dave and his well meaning, albeit hopelessly naive, friends are forced to endure occasional vitriolic, verbal tongue-lashings. It could be worse. They could, for example, reside in a country in which freedoms to assemble and to speak are not fundamental liberties. Perhaps they would feel more comfortable under the truly repressive laws of Ba’ath Party Iraq or Taliban-controlled Afghanistan?

There will always be ingrates who greedily reap the blessings of liberty but smugly refuse to undergo the fatigues of supporting it. The U.S. Constitution guarantees them the right to speak, but no intelligent person should take them or their specious cries for pacifism seriously.
John Lowery

Corrections

Katharine Barrett, director of the Sabot School of Etiquette, was formerly a waitress in the tea room at The English Garden, not the sales manager, as reported in the Oct. 23 issue of Style. That position is held by Sandra Harvey. Also, Barrett says she has never dipped a napkin in a finger bowl. Finally, the name of Miller & Rhoads was egregiously misspelled in a caption in the Calendar