I have spent a considerable amount of time the last few weeks interviewing people who are activists for nonviolence.  Bill Corrigan, who is a deacon at St. Colman’s Church in Cleveland, saw the horror of war first-hand in World War II’s Battle of the Bulge, among other front line fights.  He is now involved with Pax Christi USA (National Catholic Peace Movement).  “Our country has probably killed more people than any other organized group in the history of the world,” Corrigan said to me.  This has included both military and civilians, like, for instance, one little boy…  In an article published by the Center for Christian Nonviolence, Fr. George Zabelka, the Catholic military chaplain for the World War II Atomic Bomb Group, said one haunted pilot told him that he had been doing low-level bombing down a street in Japan when a little boy appeared looking up in “child-like wonder” at the plane.  The pilot said he knew in a few seconds the child would be burned to death by the napalm he had already released…  Bill Corrigan suggested that the infra-structure of the U.S. military — with it’s personnel, it’s equipment (all terrain vehicles, cargo planes…) — would be perfect to deliver a whole lot more humanitarian aid all over the planet.  And in this, many of the ‘hot spots’ (where countries are fighting over food and other resources) would ‘cool’ in kind.  The problem is we can’t fill a whole lot more cargo planes, until many of us Americans start to house share, take the bus, lose the comfortable furniture, the TVs, the vacations in Florida… and stand at least in some — and this would still be just a little — solidarity with the poor of the world.  Question: If we knew our sacrifices as Americans could stop some of these wars through the paradigm Bill Corrigan presents, yet we obstinately continue on in our lifestyles, aren’t we tangibly contributing to the deaths of some of these other people in some of these war zones worldwide?  Answer: Well, sure. Ps… And you can save all the rationalizations against what’s proposed here for someone else.  Like, oh I don’t know, maybe a little boy looking up at a plane (tank, missile…) in Pakistan, or Palestine, or the Sudan, or…