America loves war. Not peace. Not justice. War.
It baptizes bombs in democracy and calls the ashes liberation. It funds genocide with tax dollars and calls it foreign aid. It builds empires on the backs of brown bodies, then asks the world to applaud its “exceptionalism.”
Jay Janson, the people’s historian, has been shouting this truth for decades. He’s documented every U.S. invasion, every CIA coup, every massacre dressed in stars and stripes. And when he met me—chaplain, poet, exile—he said it plainly:
“Sammy does as Jesus will do.”
That’s not flattery. That’s indictment. Because Jesus did not bless empire. He flipped its tables. He walked with the poor. He wept with the occupied. And today, if Jesus walked through Gaza, he’d be dodging drones funded by Congress.
Palestinians are not collateral damage. They are human beings. Children. Elders. Artists. Farmers. And they are being erased—systematically, brutally, publicly. America sends weapons. Israel drops them. And the world watches, anesthetized by propaganda.
This is not complicated. It is criminal.
Jay Janson taught me that silence is complicity. That history will not forgive our neutrality. That chaplaincy is not about comforting the comfortable—it’s about confronting the violent.
So I write this not as a poet, but as a witness. I have seen the Bronx bleed. I have walked with mothers who lost sons to police bullets. I have stood in Riverside Church, baptized by Rev. Dr. James Forbes, consecrated to speak truth. And I will not be quiet.
America loves war. But I love the wounded.
America funds annihilation. But I feed the hungry.
America erases Palestine. But I remember.
“Sammy does as Jesus will do.”
Feed the hungry.
Walk with the poor.
Speak truth to power.
Weep with the wounded.
Resurrect the forgotten.
Jesus would not stand with empire.
He would stand with Gaza.