I follow them for three blocks–four. They lead past the car dealership by my condo. Then the wound stops—a gathering of drops. They must think, and think fast. They move on and pull me across the street. I flash to an incident, see a knife, a tear in flesh, a sprint.

I follow still. They pass my door. Leave me to my couch and pillow and book shelf and blue screen and dreams of country. They walk, talking six-foot steps and disappear downtown.

~

When Abraham walked down from that stony hill in Moriah, having escaped indictment, what glory was there left to him? Still, he was blessed, apparently, added to, which his wife found more than amusing. But like drops of blood on a sidewalk, there is far more to the story.

Of course every death, has its own deep anguish. Still, there is something unique about a death in the service of the Nation—in this case, our country’s military mission on behalf of Afghanistan and the War on Terrorism. That uniqueness is driven home during every repatriation ceremony. In the public liturgy of commemoration, in the genuine heart-tearing comments of family and friends, and later, through the homiletic charges from the Minister of National Defence and the Lieutenant-General for steadfastness to military creed and the renewal of faith in the mission—the death taken on a revelatory mark and invites special veneration.

But now an exceptionally rare thing happened. The grieving family of Pte. Jonathan Couturier, 23, a victim of another IED strike, tells what for them is the truth of the matter—that this particular mission is “futile” and “useless” and lives are being lost in vain.

The rejection of the faith is profoundly disturbing to the Canadian high command and must be handled. Accordingly, Maj-.Gen. Lewis MacKenzie has stepped up:

"The fact is that it’s totally and absolutely unique to date in the mission."

"It’s one in over 130 fatalities so I’m amazed and emotionally encouraged by the support the military and the mission has had to date."

Unquestionably there is support for Canada’s role in the Afghan war. Not the least of which is from many military families. But apparently it’s not unanimous. And the energetic denial of this minority view seems almost to underscore the fragility of the National Defence Department’s claim and refrain. So the simple question is: Will the death of  Pte. Jonathan Couturier open and animate new and genuine debate about the war in Afghanistan? Or will the internal momentum of war, supported by a seemingly “pooled” media, roll over the comments of the young soldier and his family without a ripple? (Christie Blatchford’s latest column, Let’s focus on all the success mentions Couturier’s death but nothing about his being “fed up” with the war.)

Noting Canada will pull out most of its military in 2011, McGill University professor and international security expert Stephen Saideman said,

“The latest remarks won’t have much of an impact. I think it won’t make a difference because Canada’s future is pretty much fixed in Afghanistan."

Saideman recalled that the last time Quebec’s Van Doos regiment entered Afghanistan there was plenty of speculation that a few casualties might change public opinion – but that turned out to be wrong.

All loss of life is tragic. With absolutely no disrespect to military families–what is tragically unique about the deaths of soldiers in combat is that their deaths support and maintain the military agenda. “The cause, wrote Chris Hedges, sanctified by the dead, cannot be questioned without dishonoring those who gave up their lives.” That is, wars are kept alive and go unquestioned through the death of combatants. War’s casualties is war’s sustenance.

But when death is not sanctified, when it is questioned by those on the inside, those asked to do the killing, war is thrown out of kilter. And it’s in this new uncertainty where different questions and true dialogue can surface.

Here are some questions: Because the West’s occupation serves the ideological cause of the Taliban, is it possible to undermine the Taliban and their radicalization of youth, through a longsuffering active nonviolent occupation of aid and education? There has been reconstruction, and there are social improvements, but what has to be done for these advances not to collapse after 2011? Is it really a complete delusion to think the Taliban is not evil incarnate? What movements and ideas have yet to be explored that have come from within the resilient hearts of Afghan people? What progress are our militaristic solutions impeding or preventing?

The comments of Jonathan Couturier and his family has, if only for a moment, undressed the Department of National Defence. Jonathan’s death can never be in vain.

The Elders are shining a light on a weekly Palestinian demonstration, and in doing so supporting one of the longest-running and best organized protest operations in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s a protest that draws several hundred Palestinians every Friday, and has for almost five years, and is, for the most part, nonviolent.

With the moral weight of The Elders behind the protest, the pressure on Israel to withdraw increases–perhaps dramatically. That’s optimistic but Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela and the others are no strangers to the international scene and they understand that success in undermining apartheid will only come through more efforts at exposing what is happening in places like East Jerusalem.

Here’s to The Elders continuing the campaign for a Palestine free from occupation. The Wall must be dismantled and the Palestinians given a home.

In the mean time this once anonymous farming village will continue to be a symbol of Palestinian civil disobedience.

More than 1,000 Afghans civilians have been killed so far this year, 24 per cent more than in 2008 and 50 per cent more than 2007. Although the Taliban cause the majority of civilian casualties, air strikes still kill hundreds and occasion far more outrage and attention.

Meanwhile, 289 foreign soldiers – including 21 Canadians – have been killed to date in 2009. Casualties are up 50 per cent over last year and roughly five times the levels in 2004. No one keeps track of Taliban deaths, but the number is believed to be in the thousands.

Hundreds of Afghan government soldiers and police have also been killed so far this year as the vast influx of U.S. troops have turned all of southern Afghanistan into a battleground.

And now, because the war is going so badly there’s a call for at least another 20,000 soldiers. This after the “surge” that sent 35,000 American soldiers to put down the internecine conflict that apparently would have spun the country into civil war. There were many who saw this as a beginning to even greater escalation. With the additional troops the West will have as many troops in Afghanistan as the Soviets did at the height of their conflict. A few years ago people who compared this war to Vietnam were dismissed as alarmist. No more.

So now the question is whether or not Obama can stand up to the Pentagon. Because, always, the Pentagon’s solution is bigger guns wielded my more soldiers. And if no other solution is found you can bet, if the Harper government is still in power, the deadline of withdrawing Canadian troops in 2011 will be extended.

It’s a win-win for the settlers. They get their revenge looked after while preparing to  appropriate more Palestinian land, and, they make Netanyahu’s government think twice about taking down more outposts. And in this little twist, the Israeli government can convince itself of its benevolence towards Palestinian farmers by easing up on any further dismantling.

(Left: June, 2009 AFP photo of illegal setters burning Palestinian fields.)

Yesterday the "price-tag" came in the form of 30 or so Israeli settlers on horseback, taking to Palestinian olive grooves with torches and burning down an estimated 1500 trees and injuring a few Palestinian’s in the process.

Farmers themselves, the settlers know the cost of their actions. Olive trees take a decade or more to establish themselves and produce fruit. Destroying Palestinian farmer’s olive trees is like cutting off the hands of a cabinet maker and leaving him to ponder his fate—his state.

But for the settlers, any discomfort with conscience is quickly rationalized by a perceived 2000-plus year old entitlement to the West Bank. Religious Zionists have been at the forefront of the settlement movement and they see their presence there as fulfilling a biblical mandate preparing and quickening the coming of the Messiah. They believe it’s their self-appointed role to resettle the Land of Israel, ushering in a theocratic Jewish state, where in ancient times, Jewish kingdoms existed. So it is that many Zionist settlements are founded around biblical sites, supposedly justifying their presence and giving them a sense of connection with their biblical roots.

So Palestinian roots, and Palestinian rights can be torn up, and quite literally, burned. And in the meantime the settlements continue under Binyamin Netanyahu’s watch despite an Israeli freeze, and despite pressure from Obama and Brown.

Being told, in dying colour, night after night, about the insurmountable climb, the great gulf, between we plebeian and our fabled Utopia–deadens the soul.

And of course if you’ve watched any amount of blue-screen news, you’ve already bought Utopia. And you already know that the distance could be covered if only "those bastards over there" would accelerate and implement that targeted legislation.

TV news is safely-distant while giving the illusion of being unmediated. It is both passive and aggressive, and so conforms nicely to our culture. It seals us from engagement while providing us with an appropriately packaged emotional response. It is both hook…and sinker.

Print, on the other hand, requires engagement. It can jar, but done well, will require you to bring your own response to the argument. Done right, you’ll have to work out your misery, which can be a kind of healthy coping exercise. Done right, print can, without ignoring our foibles and failures, instigate personal and collective action.

Print is suffering. Newspapers, news magazines, will only survive if they stop trying to be print versions of the nightly news.

…we live in an atmosphere in which the very real concept of negotiation cannot possibly be taken seriously. But one of the real messages of Pacem in Terris is that to be a Christian today one must be able to have enough confidence in the divine image in human nature to believe that there can be some vestige of truthfulness in man and to act accordingly. For the first step is going to have to be a serious indication that we are willing to trust an enemy, even in an issue that may involve our own survival. Inability to do this means the end of our civilization. That is the problem in a nutshell.

Consider now the intransigence of Zionism and Christian Zionism with Rabbi Yisroel Weiss’ view:

Even though the thing is on a rotary, I sense no one here quiet believes the coming click-over of a New Year. Least of all the pony-tailed hippy by the window, with the Dog River Clothing Co. hoodie. My assumption of course, but he’s here every morning pouring over the same old daily news–and I speculate, like me, he wonders why the passage of time changes nothing expect the cosmetic.

And that’s the shame of it. A "new" year, where nothing is new.

Perhaps if we hominids could at least undergo and annual molt, we’d have a chance at growing a new skin; and with that, who knows, perhaps some deeper beneficial mutation might occur.

–

Yesterday I spent a part of the day reading news feeds from Al Jazeera about the latest round of reciprocal violence. I zeroed in on an article on the history of Gaza, The Untold Story. The saddest part was reading the attached comments from people around the globe. All of it yobbish one-upmanship. Mirrored invective.

Fed up, I sent in my own blurt pointing out the obvious. It was rejected twice until I changed the word "violence" to conflict.

–

The hippy fetches his keys and remotely starts his car; in a moment he’s gone into the morning darkness. There was a time when we hippies dropped out. How quaint that now appears. Still, I sense my own shaky constitution plotting methods of ducking out–without, of course, appearing irresponsible.

I think about Zechariah’s prayer after the birth of his hippy-son John the Baptizer.

By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.

I wonder at the seeming impossibility.

At the table in front of me is a man who by all appearances spent part of the night outside. I inquire if he needs anything. How about a coffee, I ask? He says he’s fine…a bit shaky but fine.

I mean, is the great upshot of the gospel story about adding a phlegmatic personality to a choleric OT God? Or is it about revolutionizing our notion of God?

That is, if Jesus is the full expression of God, how can we can continue to link violence, sacrificial or otherwise, to God? How can we can keep on canonizing our ways of violence–exclusion and scapegoating–by appealing to something like God’s wrath? Doesn’t the Jesus story show that the only wrath around, is ours, not God’s?

What I see is that the fits-and-starts, nevertheless progressive revelation (story) in the Old Testament, is from God-backed wars and God-ordained genocide and ethnic cleansing, to late prophetic utterances, like Isaiah’s: that God, in faithfully bringing forth justice, "will not break a bruised reed, or quench a dimly burning wick."

So when our western hemisphere leaders and pastors stand behind pulpits in Christian churches and pray for God’s victorious help in war, we may be following a literal formula in Deuteronomy, but we aren’t imitating Jesus.

Jesus is the non-violent God who has come to undo our own violence. The way I see it, that’s the good-difficult news of Christmas.

If I lived here, I would come understand that the main reason for the formation of PAD, and the on-going anti-government demonstrations, was the corruption of the Thai government, lead by former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra.

Thaksin, bowed by pressure, is now in exile. He has been replaced by prime minister Somchai Wongsawat. However, Somchai happens to be the brother-in-law of Thaksin. And so the current  protest, from what I gather, is about abandoned promised reforms, and the “re-Thaksinisation” of the government.

Well, yesterday morning (not sure if you’re getting this news where you are) the police moved in on the protesters. Instead of lobbing the tear gas canisters, the police fired the cylinders directly at the crowd of 20,000. Many injuries, some serious, and one death–a young female protester. (picture is from Bloomberg news)

The government says the 100-plus injuries were inflicted by protesters running into each other. (However, deputy prime minister Chavalit Yongchaiyudh has resigned over the "incident.")

The protesters retaliated by throwing marbles into the police headquarters.
In the mean time, her majesty (Thailand is still theoretically a constitutional monarchy) pledged 100,000 baht to treat all injuries, including paying for a prothesis for one man who lost a leg (presumably by running into a fellow protester).

From what I’m seeing and hearing on Thai TV, (I found a Thai channel in English) the protesters are mostly women sporting yellow shirts and headbands printed with big bold letters which translate as “Save the Country.”

It has the potential to get uglier than it already is. But the Internet is still working, news is getting out, and their is no military music playing on all the channels.

So I’m taking the day to myself, and heading back downtown via Bangkok’s invigorating transit system. (Came back to the Avana Hotel last night, using the transit.)

It will work like this: I’ll catch one of a thousand possible antiquated, rust scarred rolling hulks, resembling buses. To do this I may have to cross a lane or two, buses don’t always stop at the curb. I’ll then be spilled out onto a crowded semi-sidewalk. Pressed in, shoulder to shoulder, I’ll follow the crowd–I don’t have a choice in this–and find a gate that will lead me to a very modern, overly air conditioned, sky-train, that will take me, after a transfer, to Bangkok’s city centre. A place that must be seen to be believed–and makes our place in downtown Edmonton look absolutely rural. (Yup, I’m a small town boy.)

But–having been strongly advised–I’m thinking I’ll stay clear of the Govt. House today.