Birthdays, which I am marking today, always prompt me to reflect on my life and take stock of the world, and I have been doing a lot of that over the past few weeks. What I have seen leaves me with pain in my heart and a gnawing feeling in my gut that we as a nation are as close as we have ever been to the moral and spiritual bankruptcy Martin Luther King Jr. warned us about nearly 39 years ago in his powerful "Beyond Vietnam" speech.

Over the past two weeks LA Times columnist Joel Stein has received numerous death threats from people angered by his editorial column "Warriors and Wusses" in which admits he does not support our military troops in Iraq - a position I share - stating that "we shouldn't be celebrating people for doing something we didn't think was a good idea in the first place" and correctly noting that "the people who pull the triggers and drop the bombs are ultimately responsible for their actions, whether they are following orders or not." These are the same conclusions drawn by the Nuremberg Court after World War 2.

The human truth of Stein's position was illustrated last Sunday at the Peace Concert at St. John's Episcopal Church, where Cole Miller, founder of No More Victims shared powerful stories of just a few of the 30,000 or more Iraqi children that have been wounded or killed by those same troops who I keep hearing I am supposed to support, using weapons I and all of you paid for.

On Tuesday evening, just prior to Bush's State of the Union address, Cindy Sheehan was forcibly removed from the US Capitol Building - the people's house - for simply exercising her constitutional right to free speech by wearing a T-shirt bearing the number of US troops that have been killed in Iraq, an uncomfortable reminder that there is more to war than bumper stickers and yellow ribbons.

Meanwhile the State of the Union speech described an Orwellian fantasy world where war is peace, dissent is treason and government is the problem not the solution. The next day, Bush submitted to Congress a request for $493 billion in new military spending PLUS another $120 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This was the same day that Congress voted for $96 billion in tax cuts for the wealthy and significant cuts in student loans, childhood nutrition and health care for the poorest Americans.

Several hundred years ago, political philosopher Edmund Burke wrote that "the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing." Today, as I look around, it appears that evil, in the form of militarism, corporatism, and Christian fundamentalism, has indeed triumphed. Where, I ask, are all of the good people?

In closing, I want to come back to Dr. King's words:

"Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. . The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours. We must continue to raise our voices if our nation persists in its perverse ways. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative means of protest possible."

"We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest."

Business as usual is not an option.