PEACE WITHOUT TYPOS

You never know where a SeacoastNH.com article will suddenly reappear. A piece we published two years ago has been reprinted this week by an anti-war newsletter from California. The group calls itself the Association for the Integration of the Whole Person (AIWP). But there’s a pretty big typo.

The article focuses on our local hero the Rev. Andrew Peabody, a pacifist who protested the American intervention in Mexico in 1847. Peabody ministered to the Unitarian Church in Portsmouth. But according to the AIWP version, SacoastNH.com editor J. Dennis Robinson "devoted much of his literary career to researching and writing five volumes about the life and works of Rev. Andrew Peabody".

Not quite. The actual elapsed research time was about a week, and we don’t have a clue where the five-volume thing came from. AIWP, according to its web site, offers college degrees to people in exchange for their experiences in life, so perhaps they got a little carried away.

But the point of the article is not lost. Even now it reads well. For example, after the American attack on Mexico, as church bells rang out in other Portsmouth congreations, Rev. Peabody refused to celebrate the bombing of a foreign nation and the killing of innocent civilians. Back then Peabody, standing alone, said in his Sunday sermon:

"I pity, from the bottom of my heart, the man who can have so much as a momentary feeling of exultation at such horrors. What! rejoice at the explosion of those infernal missiles in those late peaceful homes, -- at the scattering of those dissevered limbs and mangled corpses of those hundreds of women and children?"

More than a year after the unilateral attack on Iraq, those words still express our response.

READ: Ain't Gonna Study War No More