High Ground Underground

Last year I gave a talk at church on reconciliation – something that seems timely right now. There is much lip service to it, how much more is needed, and sometimes too little recognition of the efforts made. Some of our most sacred memorials have been defaced, including even to the president and some soldiers who freed the slaves. In my talk are examples of reconciliation offered by that president and one amazing officer. We can learn from history -- read on. “As I pondered examples of reconciliation, I was impressed by two magnanimous and profound conciliatory gestures by great men in our national reconciliation at the close of the Civil War. On one wall of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. is etched Lincoln’s 2nd inaugural speech, given just a few weeks before the end of the great and terrible Civil War. It had taken 620,000 lives (2% of the population, and more than all our combined foreign wars until Vietnam) and was marveled at across the world. In the address he quotes...

I was a Korean War baby, so the war has technically never ended for my entire life. Not to count the chickens before they've hatched, but this is heady stuff -- at least apparently the closest we've been in 68 years. It reminds me of the reunification of Germany. Of course it took some initiative by the S. Korean leader, and maybe the nuclear threats by the North to wake us all up. But surely the change from decades of pussycat diplomacy to "Fire and fury" by president Tr ump also woke up Kim. That, maybe together with the tightening sanctions, increasing defections, and Trump's saying that Kim was on a suicide mission -- I think he realized that the path he was on was just that. And the Korean Olympics was also timely. But with all their subterfuges and broken promises of the past, the standard for verification of denuclearization and peaceful intent needs to be much higher before any relaxation of sanctions, signing peace accords, demobilization,...