31 Marines died today in Iraq in one instant. We need a new way of thinking. Here is a passage from a memorial service for Dr. King this year.

"How simply he makes this point in the passage(from Martin Luther King Jr. "Letter from the Birmingham Jail") we have heard. “Before you have finished breakfast, ... you’re dependent on more than half the world.” A great and lasting power in Dr King’s preaching is his capacity to place us in the physical world in ways that engage our moral imaginations, and the poet Shelley calls the imagination the great instrument for good. As I drink my morning coffee, Dr King brings before my mind’s eye those who grow and process the coffee beans, and as I acknowledge my part in the “inescapable network of mutuality” I have to ask whether I am giving back what I owe to those who serve me. If you and I think about “fair trade coffee” and “fair trade” as a general principle for transforming exploitation into mutuality, it is because we have begun to imagine what it is like to be the coffee grower, not just the coffee consumer. And we think about our indebtedness to vast numbers of migrant workers upon whom our economy depends. They travel with the harvests to pick our crops, they work in sweatshops to produce our cheap consumer goods, they fill the most menial jobs, but they receive little protection from oppressive working conditions, have no health or retirement benefits, and have no political influence in the communities in which they live and pay taxes. For a moment, if we imagine ourselves into that hard life, we feel on our own pulses, in our own bodies, how the interwoven patterns of cause and effect might play out as justice or injustice, fairness or oppression..."

Paul Lacey, Clerk, American Friends Service Committee at this year's memorial service for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the National Cathedral.

I do not know who is right or wrong, but I know I am human, falliable and weak just as are all my brothers and sisters. We are all on this planet together. We can't go on the way we are going for much longer now, can we?