Dixie Chicks and Peace

I like the Dixie Chicks. I liked this inside look at the turmoil surrounding the now infamous words, "We're embarrassed that the President of the United States is from Texas."

However, as I watched the rhetoric around President Bush and Toby Keith escalate, it seemed that the conflict was in the same spirit as the war the Dixie Chicks were protesting.

The words reminded me of a paragraph I had read earlier in the week in the preface to Seeking Peace by Johann Christoph Arnold. Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist Monk and peace activist, prepares the reader by sharing:

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God." To work for peace, you must have a peaceful heart. When you do, you are a child of God. But many who work for peace are not at peace. They still have anger and frustration, and their work is not really peaceful. We cannot say that they are touching the kingdom of God. To preserve peace, our hearts must be at peace with the world, with our brothers and our sisters...