MEMORIAL MILE

          I drove past 6,957 tombstones yesterday, each one representing an American soldier killed in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars since 2001.  I wasn't spending Memorial Day weekend in Arlington or some other national cemetery, but on a tree-lined boulevard in Gainesville, Florida.
 

     For eleven years the local Veterans for Peace group has set up the display to remember their comrades and every year, more markers are added.




    Each has a soldier's name, age, hometown, date-of-death and branch of service. They lead to a tent where I chatted with some of the veteran volunteers. Many of them have seen what most of us have been spared of, the horrors of war. They want speed the end of war by promoting peaceful solutions to armed conflict.

   An older woman, Sara Marks, told me if I stuck around I could talk with one of their leaders, Scott Camil. This surprised me. I graduated from Hialeah High School with Scott in 1965.  

                                                           Scott Camil
    It was a huge school and we really didn't know each other but I knew when I was joining the University of Florida, he was enlisting in the Marines Corps. After combat in Viet Nam, receiving two Purple Hearts and numerous  citations, he came home and enrolled in the University Florida as well. Not long after, he joined the peace movement and the Viet Nam Veterans Against the War.
    It was the actions of him, and thousands of people like him, that led to the end of that fifty-year-old conflict that killed millions.
    Scott Camil is fairly well-known for being one of the "Gainesville 8", a group of 'Nam veterans who were charged with conspiring to violently disrupt the 1972 Republican Convention. It got a huge amount of publicity back then and at the end of a long trial, all were found not guilty.

    When I spoke with Scott yesterday, who I had not seen in 54 years, I thanked him for all he has done, and for all he continues to do. The mile-long roadside cemetery, he says, shows the public the cost of war. They plan to display it every year until all wars end.  
    He could only talk with me briefly. He had a mission to accomplish and like a good soldier, he went off to get ice for his men.
 
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THE UNBORN

In my last piece I wrote about the post-dead.  Today, I turn my column over to an Alabama pastor and his thoughts about the "not yet breathing". 
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THE UNBORN                                                                                               By Dave Barnhart
                                                                                                                                                                                               June 25, 2018 

"The unborn" are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don't resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don't ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don't need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don't bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. It's almost as if, by being born, they have died to you. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus but actually dislike people who breathe. Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn. 

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Dave Barnhart is a United Methodist pastor in Birmingham, Alabama.