Culture Of Peace

Over on Quaker Oats Live, Cherice is fired up about taxes again and proposing a peace witness for next year:

My solution: Quakers, Mennonites, Brethren, and whomever else wants to participate refuses to pay war taxes for a few years, and we suffer the consequences. I think we should campaign for a war-tax-free 2010 in all Quaker meetings and Mennonite/Brethren/etc. communities. What are they going to do--throw us all in jail? Maybe. But they can't do that forever. No one wants to pay their taxes for a bunch of Quakers and other pacifists to sit in jail for not paying taxes. It doesn't make sense.

A commenter chimes in with a warning about Friends who were hit by heavy tax penalties a quarter century ago. But I know of someone who didn't pay taxes for twenty years and recently volunteered the information to the Internal Revenue Service. The collectors were nonchalant, polite and sympathetic and settled for a very reasonable amount. If this friend's experience is any guide, there's not much drama to be had in war tax resistance. These days, Caesar doesn't care much.

What if our witness was directed not at the federal government but at our fellow Christians? We could follow Quaker founder George Fox's example and climb the tallest tree we could find (real or metaphorical) and begin preaching the good news that war goes against the teachings of Jesus. As always, we would be respectful and charitable but we could reclaim the strong and clear voices of those who have traveled before us. If we felt the need for backup? Well, I understand there are twenty-seven or so books to the New Testament sympathetic to our cause. And I have every reason to believe that the Inward Christ is still humming our tune and burning bushes for all who have eyes to see and ears to listen. Just as John Woolman ministered with his co-religionists about the sin of slavery, maybe our job is to minister to our co-religionists about war.

But who are these co-religionist neighbors of ours? Twenty years of peace organizing and Friends organizing makes me doubt we could find any large group of "historic peace church" members to join us. We talk big and write pretty epistles, but few individuals engage in witnesses that involve any danger of real sacrifice. The way most of our established bodies couldn't figure out how to respond to a modern day prophetic Christian witness in Tom Fox's kidnapping is the norm. When the IRS threatened to put liens on Philadelphia Yearly Meeting to force resistant staffers to pay, the general secretary and clerk said all sorts of sympathetic words of anguish (which they probably even meant), then docked the employee's pay anyway. There have been times when clear-eyed Christians didn't mind loosing their liberty or property in service to the gospel. Early Friends called our emulation of Christ's sacrifice the Lamb's War, but even seven years of real war in the ancient land of Babylonia itself hasn't brought back the old fire. Our meetinghouses sit quaint, with ownership deeds untouched, even as we wring our hands wondering why most remain half-empty on First Day morning.

But what about these emerging church kids?: all those people reading Shane Claiborne, moving to neighborhoods in need, organizing into small cells to talk late into the night about primitive Christianity? Some of them are actually putting down their candles and pretentious jargon long enough to read those twenty-seven books. Friends have a lot of accumulated wisdom about what it means the primitive Christian life, even if we're pretty rusty on its actual practice. What shape would that witness take and who would join us into that unknown but familiar desert? What would our movement even be called? And does it matter?

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Anyone interested in thinking more on this should start saving up their loose change ($200 commuters) to come join C Wess Daniels and me this November when we lead a workshop on "The New Monastics and Convergent Friends" at Pendle Hill near Philadelphia. Methinks I'm already starting to blog about it.

It's hard to know what to say about yesterday's horrific massacre at Virginia Tech, where a gunman killed 32 people (at latest count) in two separate incidents. Is this an indictment of an American culture of violence? Virginia Tech has a strong military tradition, so is our war mentality to blame? Guns?, can we blame guns? Or how about the alienation of so many young people in our society?

Any answer seems glib and besides the point. This isn't the time to be a pundit. People snap for all sorts of reasons and usually for multiple reasons that can never really be untangled.

Like all humans, I'm shocked and saddened. I've spent time on the campus and the students and faculty I met were always warm and hospitable, gracious and open. What must they be going through? Think of the fear of the trapped students, the fear of parents turning on the news, the fear of survivors who will have to live with the memories of this nightmare for the rest of their lives. I add my humble words to the millions of prayers that have been murmured these last twenty-four hours. May God comfort the victims alive and dead, including the shooter, who must certainly be a victim of something himself.

How do we stop the violence? How do we show our youth that violence is not the way? And how do we get these damned guns out of their hands?

A project from Estonia, a blog of postcards for world peace. From the site:

The idea is simple: Send us a postcard from your country/city (or any postcard you want) writing in the backside a message of peace to the World. All the postcards will be uploaded in the blog, and there will be a record of how many postcards per country we receive (including a map showing the coverage).

The tragedies were reflections not on the power of nature but on the power of our human disregard for one another.

When the ramparts of New Orleans burst and flooded its streets and homes, I was at a hospital preparing to welcome a child. As my partner and I celebrated new life we saw images of people trapped in attics, heard tales of loved ones swept away as they sought to protect their children. We watched other new parents and their vulnerable children caught without food, water or services in a city suddenly unable to operate.

The tragedies show our human disregard. The trapped were almost all African American. They were almost all poor. Stories on the news--shot-at helicopters, mass violence in the Convention center--reflected America's racist imagination more than reality. The levees failed because our political leaders ignored the recommendations of government engineers and scientists and slashed spending on storm protection. Even the hurricane itself was supercharged by a century of burning fossil fuels, our disregard for nature and our stonewalling over the reality of global warming.

A favorite image of pacifists comes from a line in the Book of Isaiah, that part in that talks about beating the swords into plowshares. But surrounding passages have been echoing in my ears lately. Like this one:

Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me; the new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting. Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hatest; they are a trouble unto me; I am weary to bear them.... Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings before mine eyes; cease to do evil. Learn to do well; seek judgement, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, please for the widow. Isaiah 1:13-17.

The righteous indigation that followed the images from New Orleans is fading. Life is returning to normal in Washington DC and the high costs of recovery (and the continuing costs of Bush's wars) will be shifted to the poor. We cannot stay silent to the vain oblations of our government. It is time to do well and protect the poor. It is time to relieve the oppressed and demand justice for the human decisions that led to broken levees.

This isn't all finger-pointing: we each need to seek a self-judgement about our American lifestyles that have fuelled global warming with its consumeristic disregard for consequences. We need to depend upon each other more, seek a community deeper and more interlaced than that offered by Walmart and McDonalds. We are all part of one another, part of the earth and brethren to our human family. We need to gather together as a people who know that government and consumerism alone can never address our society's deepest needs and that vain oblations alone will do nothing to put away the evil of our doings. We need to get angry and sing a song of change. We need more Isaiahs.

I'm away from my usual haunts on work-related duties but the news sites have plenty of articles about the horrible bombings in London; there is no need for yet another list.

It is always tragic to see the cycles of violence, terrorism and state-sponsored war feeding one another to new acts of violence. Our prayers that the new round of heartbreaks in London don't lead into a kind of retaliation that will only harden hearts elsewhere. We need to envision a new world, one based on love and mutual respect. It's impossible to negotiate with the kind of terrorists that would bomb a packed bus but we can be a witness that hate can be confronted with love. We must bandage our wounded, mourn our dead and continue to build a world where the occasions for all war have been transcended.

Bill Moyers, a recently-ousted PBS journalist and the elder statesman of responsible journalism recently gave a great speech on media trends:

One reason I’m in hot water is because my colleagues and I at "NOW" didn't play by the conventional rules of Beltway journalism. Those rules divide the world into democrats and republicans, liberals and conservatives and allow journalists to pretend they have done their job if, instead of reporting the truth behind the news, they merely give each side an opportunity to spin the news.

(Thanks to Beppe for the link.)

Howard Zinn, one of our favorite progressive historians looks at the tool of nationalism in this month's Progressive:

Is not nationalism--that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder--one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred? These ways of thinking--cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on--have been useful to those in power, and deadly for those out of power.

I particularly like his call to "assert our allegiance to the human race." So many of the political leaders who call for war do so by whipping up fear that the enemy has already called for war against us. We justify our armies by pointing to other armies. It's like a big global racket dreamed up by the arms dealers who are often happily selling to both sides. Threats are indeed real, but we need to see beyond our self-justifying propaganda of the war machine.

President Bush has nominated a foe of the United Nations to be its U.S. ambassador. Ten years ago he declared: "There's no such thing as the United Nations," and went on to say "If the U.N. secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference." This is a fellow who called his role in withdrawling the U.S. signature on the treaty ratifying the International Criminal Court the happiest moment of my government service. The Guardian reports that fought arms control agreements, a strengthening of the biological weapons convention and the comprehensive test ban treaty. With his nomination, the Bush Administration continues its course of unilaterialism and open contempt for the world community. Not a good way to build a last peace.

Our grief goes out to the ever-higher number of known victims of the earthquake and tsuamis in southern Asia. Nonviolence isn't just protesting politicians, it's also about supporting our brothers and sisters in time of need. As of this writing, the death tool from the earthquake and tsuami has climbed over 140,000. That's many times the 3000 who died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. That's more than the estimate of 100,000 iraq civilians that have died in the two years since the U.S. led invasion. We humans seem to do a good job of creating mass misery for ourselves but nature can strike harder, faster. Who can truly imagine such instant, unexpected mass death?

Please consider a generous donation to a relief organization like the American Red Cross or American Friends Service Committee. Please also write letters to your respective governments: more can be done.

Update: reader Ric Moore says "Helping in Tsunami is good, but donors should be aware that donations to the American Red Cross go to a general response fund, whereas the International Red Cross has Tsunami relief separated (Thanks for the tip Ric!)

http://donate.ifrc.org/

It's been five years since the instantly-famous world trade protests in Seattle invented a new sort of activism. Angry confrontations with police dominated the pictures coming from the protests. The protest marked the coming-out party of the Independent Media movement, both both brought together and reported on the protests.

In the Seattle Weekly, Geov Parrish asks Is This What Failure Looks Like?:

But it's one thing to shut down a high-level meeting for a day; it's quite another to get your priorities enacted as public policy. And so, in the half-decade since Seattle's groundbreaking protests, anti-globalization and fair-trade organizers in the United States have struggled to find ways to not simply create debate but win.

I've always respect Geov, who's been one of the rare pacifist organizers who's acted as a bridge between the gray-haired oldline peace groups and the younger Seattle-style activists. So it's kind of funny to see his thoughtful article described by Counterpunch this way. Read Charles Munson's critique, Seattle Weekly Trashes Anti-Globalization Movement.

The WTO protests were a landmark and radicalized a lot of new activists. But despite being 99% peaceful, they never shook the image of the black-clad anarchist spoiled brats throwing bricks through windows. Although I had friends who donned the black hankerchiefs, the black bloc always reminded me of the loser high school kids who turn over dumpsters behind the 7-11; the high political rhetoric seemed secondary to the joy of being "bad." It was look-at-me! activism, which is fun and occassionally useful, but not the stuff to create fundamental social change.

I participated in a few post-Seattle events: the anti World Bank protests in Washington DC and the Republican National Convention protests in my hometown of Philadelphia, serving as an Indymedia worker for both. I witnessed wonderful creativity, I marveled at the instant community of the Indymedia Centers, I was fasincated by the cell-phone/internet organizing.

But there was also this kind of nagging sense that we were trying to recreate the mythical "Seattle." It was as if we were all derivative rock bands trying to jump on the bandwagon of a breakthrough success: the Nivana clones hoping to recatch the magic. It was hard to shake the feeling we were play acting ourselves sometimes.

It's good to honestly reflect on the protests now. We need to see what worked and what didn't. The fervor and organizing strategies changed activism and will continue to shape how we see social-change organizing. The world is better for what went down in Seattle five years ago, and so is North American polticial organizing. But let's stop idolizing what happened there and let's see what we can learn. For we've barely begun the work.