and profound peace, till the moon be no more. — Ps 72:7
“Profound peace” — this is what we prayed for in the psalm for Epiphany. Not just peace, a simple cessation of hostilities, but a peace so deep, we could not claw our way back to war. Not just peace, tenuously enforced with threats, but a just peace.
We prayed for that peace, for justice, as the US went in with guns blazing to decapitate the government of Venezuela. It was hard to avoid the irony.
The government would have us believe that this invasion, police action, whatever, is to protect us from fentanyl (which their own data says is not produced or trafficked from Venezuela). Venezuela does traffic some cocaine, but even if every cocaine related overdose in the US could be attributed to this route (and it’s not among the top three sources) the number of cocaine overdose deaths is about the same as the number of people in the US who die from hunger each year. (More than 20,000 people in the US died from malnutrition in 2022.) The current administration didn’t think that suspending SNAP benefits to the hungry last fall was an emergency, so why is this?
Could it be that feeding the hungry doesn’t make for stirring military videos?
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For two weeks of the entire US military budget, we could fund a full year of SNAP benefits.
There hasn’t been much support for addressing drug addiction either.
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