A Man Of Peace

As Trump and Netanyahu dropped their bombs on Iran, I happened upon the obituary for Colman McCarthy.

Who died last month at the age of 87.

He was a journalist for the Washington Post, who wrote a column on politics for 20-something years.

As I recall, McCarthy was beyond liberal, more like radical. There were very few voices even remotely like his in the mainstream media. That is for sure.

What I did not know--until I read Michael Rosenwald's compelling obituary in the New York Times--is that McCarthy took a curious route to his career in journalism.

After graduating from college, where he played on the golf team and dreamed of making the P.G.A. Tour, McCarthy wound up spending more than five years at a Trappist Monastery in Georgia.

"As a lay brother, he took temporary vows," Rosenwald wrote. "When he wasn't tending cows or shoveling manure, he basked in the stillness of time, reading hundreds of books and writing endlessly in his journal.

Eventually, the monastery's abbot realized McCarthy was wasting his talents, basking in all that stillness, and urged him to re-join the outside world.

And so, one thing leading to another, McCarthy found work as a freelance writer, speech writer, editorial writer and then columnist. He left the Post in 1997.

Through it all, and up almost to the end of his life, he had what you might call an outside gig as a peace advocate, teaching classes on the subject of non-violence to children at schools in and around Washington, D.C.

You can add former Congresswoman Lee to McCarthy's peacemaker list...

Again, from Rosenwald's obituary...

"McCarthy offered $100 to anyone who could identify a list of historical figures that included Robert E. Lee, the Confederate war general; Napoleon, the French emperor and military leader; Dorothy Day, a journalist and anarchist; and Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to Congress and the only member to vote against entering both World Wars.

"The students typically knew the warriors; no one heard of the peacemakers."

To which McCarthy concluded...

"I can always count on American mis-education. Students get the point of the quiz: they've been well taught about men who break the peace but know little or nothing about women who make the peace."

Ironically, that same edition of the Times was filled with quotes from politicians and journalists urging Trump to keep dropping those bombs.

And nary a word sounding the case for peace and non-violence.

In retrospect, I'm not sure what is more unlikely--a pacifist on the P.G.A. Tour, or a pacifist on the op-ed page of the Washington Post.

He truly was one of a kind.

RIP, Colman McCarthy.