Kicking and screaming

This from Duke Magazine from 2002. The article presents questions asked by an audience to Stanley Hauerwas of Duke Divinity School.

[Another member of the audience asks:] What’s the point of defending a society that’s built on spending? We’ve been terrorized by Madison Avenue for how long, through the television and such?
Be careful with that kind of language. You’ve been manipulated by Madison Avenue–I’m not sure you’ve been terrorized. And it’s very important to get the description right. As a response to September 11, for academics to roll out all the things that they’ve thought have been wrong with America and American foreign policy is–the word I’m close to is “duplicitous.” It is morally inappropriate. Nothing that America has done in the world justifies, excuses, or explains September 11.
It is therefore all the more important for us–and this is the use of the word “us”–to try to understand why it is that many people in the world find it satisfying that this has happened to America. On September 11, America was dragged kicking and screaming into the world. We think of ourselves as global, but our globalization has remained safe within the boundaries of our ocean, and now the reality of the world has been brought home. We’re mad as hell because we didn’t really want to deal with this kind of world on an everyday basis. It’s a very important moment for national self-examination, and I would like to be as helpful to that as I can as a Christian. If you are a pacifist, you don’t want to withdraw–you want to be as helpful to your neighbor as you can.

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