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It was Eleanor Roosevelt who asked when our consciences will grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than to only avenge it? I asked that question all through the weekend and tonight. I am a bit lost, I cannot find an answer.

It was difficult for me to look at the pundits, politicians and journalists exulting over those “beautiful” missiles that went sailing so hauntingly over the ocean to strike the Syrian airbase that had launched the plans that dropped the bombs that poisoned God’s children.

I’ve seen this movie before, more than once, it is a horror.

Lord, I keep thinking, how much the pundits and journalists and politicians and retired Generals in Washington love war. Once again the eager analysts with their pointers were praising the precision strikes and “proportional” attacks that only killed a few Syrian soldiers and some innocent civilians. A made for TV war.

It was about time, the pundits said, excited and celebratory. America’s role as a moral force in the world had been re-established, the President had come of age. And all it took was 59 missiles from the best military force on the earth.

It is often said of war that we never learn from it, Margaret Atwood once wrote that wars are a failure of language. I see wars as a failure of imagination, but I am a Quaker by faith, and you will never see a Quaker talking about war on CNN or Fox News, or working in the White House.

What I saw on television was to me a hollow and transparent symbol.

We seem to love our wars, perhaps the penultimate rite of male political power. If you kill some people, then you finally deserve the right to be taken seriously, you have come into your own.

More than 55,000 Syrian children have been killed during that country’s horrific civil war, if you watch news in America, you may not know that.

Sunday, just one day after those beautiful missiles  struck their long overdue and very “proportional” targets, the same town was struck again by planes from the same air base. And more of those beautiful babies were killed, but the Generals and politicians had nothing to say about that, neither did the awestruck TV anchors. There were no jazzy graphics, no Generals, no special reports.

I will dream for a while of those missile launches, a staple of our high-tech, remote-controlled new wars, offered eagerly by the military to news channels as a new kind of authentic gee-whiz and easy-on-the-eyes bloodless war. The tape of those missiles streaking through the night sky was shown scores, if not hundreds of times on TV.

War has never looked so good, or so remote, the wars we love are about as menacing as a game on Facebook.

Not a drop of blood.

There was much talk of God on Friday and Saturday. The dead children were all God’s children, we were told. I can’t say for sure, God doesn’t speak to me as directly as he does to some, and for all that sacred lineage, nobody lifted a finger to save these children or rescue them, not God  himself, not us.

One might think the children of Good at least serve some food, water, shelter and shoes.

It was only glancingly mentioned in the news today, but some other beautiful Syrian babies – no one knows how many yet, every one of them God’s children – were killed in airstrikes on Khan Sheikhorn  Saturday by planes flown from the very same airbase that was struck by the missile strike hailed all day on television as being so wise and just and necessary.

Residents of the town, journalists and human rights observers said Khan Sheikhorn was bombed 24 times in the hours following the missile strike, rescue workers are still combing through the debris there. The people who live there say the town is being destroyed in retaliations for the missile attacks.

“Yesterday, Donald Trump became president,” a CNN commentator observed gravely on Sunday morning. He was quivering with gravitas. A pundit’s moment.  I did not understand that this was the criterion for being a great leader, I would love to have the chance to ask Thomas Jefferson about it..

Last week I spent time at the RISSE refugee and immigration center in Albany, New York and met some of those beautiful babies, now beautiful children, many of whom would not be alive today if they had not been taken in by America.

I am not the President and will never be, but a Syrian refugee father named Raffat  (I wrote about him on Friday) asked me in an e-mail what I would have done if I were President and those children had been gassed during my time in office.

I said I would exact the gravest and most compelling revenge, an act from the heart and the spirit. I would send a truly powerful message:

I would open the doors to my country and try to save as many of those beautiful babies as possible, so they might live to be the beautiful children I saw at RISSE last week and will be bringing art kits to tomorrow in Albany.I would show the world the soul of a just and compassionate countary.

I can’t imagine a more forceful or inspiring statement to the world. We could save more lives in a week with a boatload of food than by launching 100 missiles and we could show what it really means to be moral. Think how good we might all feel this morning if the faces on the lives were of those beautiful children given a chance to be safe in a free and generous country. What more powerful statement could anyone make to the world than that?

I hope none of the refugee children I am seeing this week ask me about the missile strikes on Syria.

I am not sure what to say to them, perhaps I would talk to them about the idea of hypocrisy. We are a great country, I would say, but we are often drawn to hypocrisy. 

Hypocrisy, says Wickipedia, is the contrivance of the false appearance of virtue and goodness while concealing real character or inclinations, especially with respect to religious and moral beliefs; hence in a general sense, dissimulation, pretense, sham. It is the practice of engaging in the same behavior or activity for which one criticizes another.

The hypocrite’s crime, wrote the moral philosopher Hannah Arendt, is that he bears false witness against himself. “What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. “Only crime and the criminal, it is true,” wrote Arendt,  “confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is rotten to the core.”

I wonder if the children at RISSE will understand hypocrisy, I have the feeling they will, they left so many beautiful and doomedl friends and family members behind, and they know too well what fate awaits them. I guess I see the world differently that the very important journalists in Washington. I saw nothing but sham and pretense.

Those beautiful babies cry out to use for mercy and compassion.

If we are speaking about symbolic acts, what about sending millions of dollars in aid to those beautiful babies, hundreds of thousands of them now, languishing, starving and freezing and living in filth in refugee camps all over Europe and the Middle East. There is not a one in the United States or on the way, here,  God’s children, who we are supposed to love without qualification,  have been banned and forbidden to apply?

Instead of missiles, food and blankets and medicine and shelter. We abandon them to their fates and tell the world how much we care.

For me, this is a new understanding of the idea of hypocrisy and of moral force and leadership in the world. What message, exactly, are those children supposed to taken from America’s proud embrace of missiles? Am I so ignorant that I simply can’t see it?

Mooning over photos of dead babies on television and invoking God’s name again and again  is not compassion. Without empathy or commitment, this flexible and highly selective empathy is simply another form of artifice. Ask the dying children and grieving parents and the blood soaked-doctors and rescue workers in Khan Sheikhorn what compassion might mean to them.

Is the lesson that it is okay to slaughter 55,000  children with horrific military weapons that often set them on fire,  but it is unacceptable, a red line to kill them with chemical gas because we forbid it? But we don’t forbid the wanton slaughter of children any other way? And be universally praised for it. Boy, am I out of step with prevailing wisdom.

Really? Is it  okay to drop barrel bombs filled with burning oil and shrapnel onto helpless children by the thousands for years on end,  but not okay to kill 20 in a way that disturbs American in their homes  with graphic videos?  And then resume killing them the usual way the very next day?

I am not really a praying man, but tonight I will say a prayer for the children trapped all over Syria and those camps all over the world. I don’t know who God considers to be his children, and who he does not consider to be his children, but I am wary of the people who claim to speak to God and invoke his name when it suits them, but haven’t heeded his commands or values.

I will also hope and pray the children of Syria are not his.

Because if they are, and he exists,  his wrath upon us will be difficult to even imagine.