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A local farmer called his pastor the other day to say he was having a hard time sleeping.

"I thought he was responding to a column I'd written, but he hadn't seen it," the Rev. Bob Moritz, pastor of the Hadley Lutheran Church and the Trinity Lutheran Church in Chandler said.

In his newspaper column, Moritz had claimed he would rather go to war with Iraq himself than to send his son, his son-in-laws or his grandchildren.

"I think it's terrible the way we sacrifice our young people," Moritz said.

So does Richard VanderZiel, the Chandler area farmer who called Moritz and who is spearheading a peace rally Oct. 20.

"I feel a great need for people to be praying for an alternative to this war fever that's in our nation," VanderZiel said. "I just feel like it's an overreaction, a bloodthirsty reaction being guided by things other than pure motives for peace and weapons control."

Consequently, the two men, along with other religious leaders and citizens in southwest Minnesota, plan to hold a peace rally at 2 p.m. Oct. 20 at Independence Park in Marshall. Demonstrators will listen to speakers and then march up Jewett St. to the Lutheran campus religious center at Southwest State University for a nondenominational prayer service starting at 3:30 p.m.

"I don't expect a lot of people, but I sure hope that we have some real people," VanderZiel said. "We can be called unpatriotic -- I realize that. But this is one way for me to try to put some sense into it for my own conscience, for my own mind, and also to try to reach out to other people who I think are feeling the same way."

Speakers will include Paul Neufeld-Weaver of Worthington, a Christian peacemaker who has spent time in Latin America. Also invited are professors from SSU's English department to discuss how language can make it possible to kill someone without having pangs of conscience, Steve Rasmusson, pastor of the Lutheran campus religious center said.

"If you dehumanize the other, you don't have to treat them as you would expect to be treated," Rasmusson said. "Words can set the stage for great acts of violence that have no justification. We don't have to look back too far in history to figure that out."

Rally organizers haven't any great theological point to make or political stand to take, they just think prayer is appropriate to remind everyone that despite those who presume to be in control, there is only one in control, he said.

Janet Timmerman, of Lake Wilson, said she plans to participate partly because the war posturing goes against what she tries to teach children in her work with the New Horizons Crisis Center.

"They hear in the media that when someone hits you, you hit back harder and more fiercely, and it's just the opposite of what we teach them in their interpersonal relationships," Timmerman said.

Timmerman also has an 18-year-old son.

"It just gives me cold chills to think of sending him to Iraq," she said.

Moritz, who doesn't want anyone's children going to war, favors trying to work things out through United Nations inspections and sanctions first, and he is disappointed that Congress has given President Bush a green light.

"I see us rushing way too much into what I would consider to be an unwise decision," Moritz said. "This (rally) is a way in which those of us who are not in favor of the attack can express ourselves."

Moritz has taken stands before that were unpopular, at least initially. He opposed U.S. involvement in Vietnam early on, citing that country's uranium as a motivating force.

"And I feel Iraq is also one of those countries," Moritz said. "It has the natural resource of oil, and we are interested in the oil as well as what else we can do."

It bothers Moritz that America would attack Iraq without first producing proof of a "smoking gun" or proof of Iraqi connections to terrorists who attacked America. If the U.S. attacks every country suspected of harboring or having harbored terrorists, it must go to war with itself, he said.

"There's quite a history of our country and Iraq," Moritz said. "During the Reagan years we were very good buddies with Saddam. In fact, we provided him with anthrax back in the eighties, and so all of that stuff is coming back you might say to haunt us. He was our buddy when Iran was our enemy, and it's just crazy how we jump around and pick and choose."

Moritz believes Iraq is partly a smokescreen for the administration's failure to solve the anthrax cases, its inability to say whether Bin Laden is dead or alive and its silence about the economy's downslide.

"It's all Iraq, Iraq, Iraq," Moritz said. "But it's not going to be near as clean a war as the administration thinks it will be."

Expectations of killing Saddam Hussein without sending in ground troops is wishful thinking, Moritz said.

"I think that was what we were told in Afghanistan -- we'd bomb and we'd be able to get (Bin Laden), and that would be it," Moritz said. "And we're still chasing him."

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