A family friend is getting married this week, and I’m officiating. When I met with he and his fiancée to discuss the wedding, I asked where they were going on their honeymoon. “The beach,” they said. Then he asked where we had gone on ours. I told him we had driven to Colorado in a Honda Civic without air conditioning, two thousand miles round trip in record heat. The car was brand new, but we couldn’t afford air conditioning, so we went without.
We were saved by Harry Truman, or more accurately, the air conditioning in the Harry Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Missouri. My honeymoon not only began my love affair with Joan, it began my affection for Harry Truman. I knew nothing about him at the age of 23, but visiting his library sparked my interest and I began reading about him. His mother-in-law didn’t like him. She warned her daughter Bess not to marry him, that he would never amount to anything, which coincidentally was what Joan’s mother said about me, so Harry and I share that in common. Except that Joan’s mother and I grew close before she died. I wished she were still alive, and for that matter I wish Harry Truman were still with us, still in the Senate, doing what he did during World War II, which was investigating and prosecuting war profiteers. With a budget of $15,000, he recovered $15,000,0000,000, while saving the lives of thousands of American soldiers from the consequences of shoddy equipment.
Harry Truman understood what too many American leaders refuse to admit: war too often enriches the wealthy and unscrupulous at the expense of ordinary people. Over the past several months, we have considered our nation’s appetite for war and our Quaker resistance to it. We began by naming war as America’s drug of choice—an addiction we seem unable and unwilling to break. Its casualties include not only those killed on battlefields, but also those who knew and loved them. We have said that war is why we cannot have nice things: universal healthcare, education, and childcare remain out of reach, and our infrastructure crumbles. War is the organized abuse of children. If an individual did to children what war does, that person would go to jail. War also destroys young people’s dreams. Just as they begin moving toward the lives they have imagined, war says, “No, you may not. You must go kill other people.” Instead of allowing them to pursue their passions, we bind them to our worst impulses and force them to do the work we, their elders, refuse to do: the hard work of peace, reconciliation, and justice.
In this final message, I want to say that war transfers our nation’s wealth from the middle and lower classes into the hands of the wealthy. More than almost anything else, war plunders our national resources and robs us of economic equity. It is Robin Hood in reverse, taking from the poor to give to the rich.
War gives birth to poverty. It kills economic opportunity by pilfering our common coffer, filling the pockets of the prosperous. This is the most insidious aspect of war, that those who benefit economically from war are the same people who have placed in power the same leaders who take us to war, thereby ensuring their ongoing wealth and our ongoing poverty, their luxury and our ruination.
Think of the moral indifference one must possess to acquire wealth at the cost of human life. For those who profit from war, peace is not a blessing to be pursued, but an economic condition to be avoided, a threat to their financial well-being. Were war not profitable, it would disappear. If war harmed the wealthy to the same extent it did the poor and middle-class, there would be an outbreak of peace, an epidemic of goodwill. If the implements of war could never be sold for a profit, if military industry stocks plummeted at the first whisper of war, if war led to economic ruination for all and not just some, we would find a way to live in peace. What the Apostle Paul said to Timothy is doubly true today, that “the love of money is the root of all evil.”
Our passion and love for money causes us to do things we would never do otherwise. I purchased a car last month from a family member. When he signed over the title over to me, I pointed out that if he wrote “gift” in the price box, I wouldn’t have to pay $1,260 in sales tax. He said, “I won’t do it. That would be dishonest.”
My first thought was, “He voted for Donald Trump, and now he suddenly has a conscience.”
But he was right. It would be dishonest. If someone ever asks me what my integrity is worth, now I know. One thousand, two hundred and sixty dollars.
The love of money is the root of all evil. Because of its power to make us jettison every value and virtue we possess, if we’re not careful.
The love of money causes some of us to lie.
It causes others to cheat or steal.
It even causes some people to maim, kill, and destroy.
Just as the love of money causes some people to forget their humanity, it causes churches to forsake their calling, and entire nations to abandon their founding principles.
When you visit the Harry Truman Presidential Library, you can see a replica of the Oval Office during his presidency, along with the sign he displayed on his desk while president, given to him by Fred Canfil, the United States Marshal for the Western District of Missouri. The sign read, “The Buck Stops Here.” It was Truman’s reminder to himself and others that his ultimate responsibility was not to his own well-being, but to the well-being of our nation. Living as we are in these topsy-turvy times, it is good to remember our duty to decency, our obligation to others and not ourselves.