Last month my wife and I bought a Toyota Prius hybrid. It conserves and recaptures energy for a sophisticated electric battery providing excellent mileage per gallon of gasoline. One of the ways it reharnesses energy is by regenerative braking using the heat energy otherwise lost when slowing down or stopping.  Surprisingly, I thought of this new car recently when I read these words of Mahatma Gandhi - “I have learned through bitter experience the one supreme lesson is to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmuted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power that can move the world.”

Commenting on Gandhi’s insight, Eknath Easwaran, the Hindu spiritual writer and founder of a center for meditation in Berkeley, California said that Gandhi’s life gives us an excellent example of how the heat of anger can be harnessed. “As a young, unknown, brown-skinned lawyer traveling in South Africa on business, he was roughly thrown from the train because he refused to surrender his first-class ticket and move to the third-class compartment.  He spent a cold, sleepless night on the railway platform.

“Later, he said this was the turning point of his life: for on that night, full of anger because of this personal injustice, as well as the countless injustices suffered by so many others everyday in South Africa, he resolved not to rest until he had set those injustices right. On that night he conquered his anger and vowed to resist injustice” through the power of nonviolent resistance.

Ghandi’s words and example are good advice for me because I’m angry. I am angry about the Iraq War. I’m angry with President Bush, Secretary Rumsfeld, the toadying generals and the glib neo-cons who naively got us into this bloody quagmire.  I’m angry at the senseless loss of
military and civilian life. Somehow those of us who are angry must harness that energy like Ghandi into a rational, peaceful, effective response.

I met someone recently in the supermarket who told me she liked my theological columns best. They made her think of her life and the Mystery of God in a fresher, deeper way.  Other readers impatient with “the spirituality stuff” want more about the environment, poverty and especially the war.

Sometimes sitting down at the word processor, I’m torn. I write different kinds of columns and readers have their preferences.  So be it, but it has dawned on me that a stark distinction between the spiritual and political is misleading. They are flip sides of the same coin. Nothing (e.g. honesty and candor) is purely spiritual and nothing (e.g. war and the environment) is completely political. Spiritual values are interwoven in all the great issues of the day.  Harnessing anger is one of them; honesty is another.

I won’t list the misinformation, the massaging of intelligence, and the false rationalizations for this God-awful war.  Several substantive reports including some from Bush’s own administration have concluded that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, no ties with Al Quaeda, and nothing to do with 9/11.  Now the Downing Street Memo, a secret British intelligence document, concludes that the Bush administration had decided to launch a preemptive war against Iraq no matter what the intelligence data.

Despite all those careful studies, the President in justifying his Iraq policy before a carefully screened military audience again co-mingled the war on terror with the war in Iraq and again and again invoked 9/11. Why does the President continue to make this link?  Sure, it’s political, but is it truthful?  Is it honest? Is it moral? I don’t think so.

Vice President Cheney said he thought the insurgency in Iraq was in its last throes.  Probably in the convoluted language of governments, he misspoke.  A few days later Rumsfeld said the insurgency could last as long as 12 years.  Currently, we’re averaging three Americans killed a day in Iraq.  Do your own math.  At that rate 13,140 more Americans and probably a hundred thousand more Iraqis will die.  Rumsfeld’s estimation might be militarily realistic, but is this carnage moral? Is it ethical? I hardly think so. Do you?

Of course we should be angry with our government, but we need to harness that energy and do something rational like urging Congressman Brian Higgins to support the investigation of the Downing Street Memo.  Or urge him to join others in congress in backing the “Homeward Bound”
resolution committing us to start withdrawing our troops by at least October 2006 without keeping control over Iraq’s oil or maintaining military bases there.

We can do more. Our Prius Hybrid conserves energy in another way.  It turns off the gas driven motor completely when the car stops in traffic or at a red light. It starts up again instantly at a touch of the accelerator.  We too should stop, reflect and do something.  We should reflect on this war, and get our thoughts together, then we might put them on papers for our representatives or the media.  It doesn’t have to be an elaborate op-ed piece. A sentence or two stating your position clearly could be just as effective.

In any case stop, harness your anger and do something peaceful to address this foreign policy disaster, which is killing our young, draining our resources -- and diminishing our souls.

Daniel O’Rourke is a former Observer Clergy Columnist.  He’s a married Catholic priest, retired from the administration at State University College, Fredonia. A mediator for the Center for Resolution and Justice, he lives in Cassadaga, NY. His column appears the second and
fourth Thursday of each month. Comments may be sent to orourke@netsync.net