Children caught in the crossfire of armed conflict around the world pay a steep price for the battles of their elders, often forced to sacrifice their bodies, their families and their lives to battle.

Worldwide, one child in four--some 540 million--lives amid instability such as war, according to a United Nations Children's Fund report, "The State of the World's Children 2000." Within the past decade, 2 million children have been killed and 6 million wounded in armed conflict.

But in the face of such a grim reality, faith-based organizations are planting seeds of hope for the youngest casualties of war, helping them not just physically but emotionally.

"Part of the problem is that traditionally when faith-based humanitarian organizations have responded to relief work we have been so busy feeding and distributing blankets and food that no one really has ever been there to listen," said Sharon Pittman, chairwoman of the Andrews University department of social work. "It's extremely critical that those emotional needs get dealt with so that these kids will have a full emotional recovery."

It is ironic that human beings who are capable of designing such inhumane weapons rely on the humanity of others for the weapons' effectiveness.

Anti-personnel landmines are designed not to kill, but to injure. The makers know that, in battle, soldiers will stop fighting long enough to help an injured comrade.

"Landmines are designed to cause non-fatal injuries to legs and genitals if stepped on, or to hands and faces if handled," explains Craig Crosby, who works for World Vision in Laos, overseeing the clearance of landmines.

"Their purpose is to wound combatants severely enough so that several of the enemy are needed to carry them to safety. The idea is that military personnel and resources will be diverted from fighting to evacuation and medical care."

Long after the war is over, landmines are still killing and maiming. When the Soviet army left Afghanistan, the Vietnamese withdrew from Cambodia, the U.S. ended its bombing of Laos and Iraq stopped bombing its Kurds, the landmines remained.

They rip into flesh, shatter bone and drive dirt and fragments of plastic and metal deep into the wounds of their victims. They kill about 24,000 people a year and injure twice as many. Somalia, Mozambique, Angola, Iran, Burma, Sri Lanka, Croatia, Kosovo, and now Chechnya are littered with them.

No one knows how many there are, but the estimate is between 60 million and 70 million uncleared landmines in 70 countries. They can remain active for about 50 years.

And many of these weapons were made in countries we think of as civilized. In Angola, mine-clearance workers found mines made in the U.S., Italy, Germany and other countries that speak loudly about human rights.

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Making the world safe for hypocrisy

Choices in the election were startlingly clear. Citizens who believe that America's international conflicts should be solved with military violence should vote. Those who believe that military violence is immoral, ineffective and an incalculable waste of public money should not vote.

As a pacifist, I'm in the second group. I wish that I could vote. I'm told it causes a warm patriotic tingle. But my conscience says no, cooperate as little as possible with an electoral process that guarantees a presidency and Congress constitutionally committed to violence.

How? Read Article I, Section 8 and Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution. Unambiguously, it is spelled out that the president "shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy" and the work of Congress is to raise money for the military.

Voting for politicians who are sworn to support the violence of war-making means agreeing with the idea that it is morally good to pay soldiers to kill people whose behavior or thinking is disliked by U.S. policymakers. Voting assures that the United States will remain the world's most martial nation and a military monstrosity.

According to the Center for Defense Information, the U.S. military budget at $305 billion is 22 times as large as the combined spending of the seven countries Pentagon officials label as potential attackers (Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria).

Except for astronomers, the $305 billion figure is too large to comprehend. Better to break it down. Congress gives the military $700 million a day--three times more than what the Peace Corps gets in a year. Still more comprehensible: $305 billion a year amounts to about $8,000 a second. The military receives 49 percent of the federal discretionary budget, or roughly $4 a day--every day--from each man, woman and child in the U.S.

The numbers suggests that Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1967 judgment still holds: "The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today [is] my own government." And: "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

When telling my voting friends that I can't in conscience vote, and that people who do vote unwittingly endorse killing as a way of settling disputes, I'm chided, denounced or damned for being a misguided purist, an addled idealist and a despicable ingrate who dishonors brave men who died in combat to keep democracy alive. How dare I not vote.

I dare. I'd like to see some evidence that voting has made the U.S. government less militaristic and more humane.

The record shows otherwise. Historian William Blum has listed the countries that duly elected U.S. officials have ordered bombed since the end of World War II: China, 1945–1946; Korea, 1950–1953; China, 1950–1953; Guatemala, 1954; Indonesia, 1958; Cuba, 1959–1960; Guatemala, 1960; Congo, 1964; Peru, 1965; Laos, 1964–1973; Vietnam, 1961–1973; Cambodia, 1967–1970; Guatemala, 1967–1969; Grenada, 1983; Libya, 1986; El Salvador, 1980s; Nicaragua, 1980s; Panama, 1989; Iraq 1991–2000; Sudan, 1998; Afghanistan, 1998; Yugoslavia, 1999.

As in every election cycle, patriotic calls have been heard across the land urging the citizenry to exercise the sacred right to vote. The bromides range from the old standards--voting is a civic duty, voting is a privilege--to pietistic guff: Every vote counts, no candidate is perfect, vote for the lesser of two evils.

Such thinking failed to move W. E. B. DuBois, the black sociologist. Two weeks before the 1956 election in which the major candidates were Dwight D. Eisenhower and Adlai E. Stevenson, he wrote in The Nation: "I shall not go to the polls. I have not registered. I believe that democracy has so far disappeared in the United States that no 'two evils' exist. There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say."

Elections are charades for progress, marginal to the direct democracy of citizens getting involved personally and enduringly to create the conditions in which a just and peace-directed world can be created. Votes aren't needed to tutor at a literacy center, or mentor a student, ease a neighbor's pain or toil at any one of thousands of useful programs.

At least 100,000 people have died in armed conflicts in the past year, the majority of them in sub-Saharan Africa, the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) said in its annual report [released 10/00] on the world military balance.

Wars and civil unrest continued unabated in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, notably Colombia, and Southeast Asia, particularly Indonesia. The Caucasus region, notably Chechnya, and central Asia were the scenes of unresolved and persistent conflict, it added.

However, around 60 percent of the death toll came from sub-Saharan Africa, where conflicts were recorded between Ethiopia and Eritrea, in central Africa, Sierra Leone and southern Sudan.

There are now 14 ongoing UN peacekeeping operations around the world using the services of 28,900 troops from 38 countries--nearly three times as much as a year earlier.

Meanwhile, sales in the world arms trade in 1999 were estimated at around 53.4 billion dollars. Global military expenditures were about 809 billion dollars.

The U.S. remained the largest arms exporter with a 49.1 percent share of the global market.

The U.S. is an unrivaled military superpower, with its precision guided weapons, well-trained troops and global reach. So instead of fighting the Pentagon on its own terms, the nation's enemies have been looking for its Achilles' heel.

Harbor boats and truck bombs, not intercontinental ballistic missiles, are the new weapons of war. And the targets are overseas military compounds and the vast and often vulnerable logistics that are needed to keep the American military going.

As the explosion that ripped apart the destroyer Cole in Yemen showed, the attacks are being carried out with growing savvy.

Pentagon officials dub the low-tech threat to the high-tech military "asymmetric warfare." And the best and the brightest in the military concede that there is no easy answer.

Past terrorist attacks have been on land. A suicide bomber drove a car full of explosives into a Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, killing 241 American troops. In 1996 a truck bomb attack at the Khobar Towers housing complex near Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killed 19 U.S. servicemen. The next year, the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed, killing 224, of whom 12 were American.

Now the attacks have gone maritime. The destroyer Cole certainly was an inviting target. The length of a football field, it is equipped with a powerful radar system, long-range cruise missiles and air defense weapons.

The vessel was designed during the cold war to protect aircraft carriers and Navy battle groups against enemy air and missile attack and thus maintain American dominance of the seas. It had 70 tons of armor. But it proved to be a poor match against a single explosive-laden harbor boat.

What's behind Washington's huge, expensive military intervention to combat drugs in Colombia? Last week, the actions of the House Republican leadership suggested one possible answer: procurement. The Republican Congress, it appears, wants to help American defense firms sell helicopters for use in Colombia.

In the wake of the end of the Cold War, American companies have been eager to find new sorts of missions for which they can supply planes and helicopters. The drug war in Colombia is one such effort. Sikorsky [helicopters] is merely one of many U.S. companies that hope to take part in Plan Colombia. Last month, the Financial Times listed others, such as Textron, which is upgrading Huey helicopters, and Lockheed Martin. Other smaller, private companies will hire former U.S. soldiers to help train the Colombian military.

Nearly four decades ago, in January 1961, President Eisenhower warned in his farewell address about the influence of what he famously called the "military-industrial complex." What we're witnessing now is something new. It's the emergence of a narco-industrial complex: a proliferation of U.S. companies lining up, with congressional support, to obtain public money for anti-drug campaigns overseas.