kerry Posts

That man with the funny name is going to be President. And all I can think about is the pride I feel that we've finally made it to the White House. We? Well yes, I am about as white as they come. Put me on the beach for ten minutes and I'm burnt through. Blue eyes and blond hair, my boys would have no sign-up problems for the Aryan youth league. But that skin color masks a complicated family history and abstracted ethnicity. My father, like Barack's, had multiple families and my mother, like Barack's, had children with different fathers. I have paternal half-siblings I've never met and a maternal half-sibling who I've always simply called my brother. No one in my family shares my Irish last name, which is fine by me because my only real Irish heritage is the name of my father's father's father. My accent, my tastes and my cultural references are all pretty much generic American.

A few generations ago everyone in my family had clear ethnic identities. They lived in enclaves of people like them, went to churches full of people like them and worked the jobs their people worked. I never had any of that. In school I was always vaguely jealous of the kids who had strong roots and relationships that were familial. But I was always an outsider to those networks, always sitting at the lunch tables of other outsiders. As I grew older I became more adept at finding outsider communities and my identity remains largely self-chosen and self-created.

This is kind of complicated identity is increasingly common not only in the United States, but throughout the world. And even the complexities of the complicated swirl about when you think of the ever-increasing gender identities and the minority of families now made up of a mom, dad and 2.5 kids.

This election is a victory for merit over family. George W Bush was a lousy student who never would have even been accepted to Yale if his father and grandfather hadn't been prominent U.S. Senators. The Navy would never have given mediocre student John McCain a fighter jet if his father and grandfather hadn't been admirals (and they would have taken the keys away after he crashed one after another after another before that final crash over North Vietnam). Al Gore? Son and grandson of U.S. Senators. John Kerry? Not quite so golden, with a secret paternal Jewish ancestry so hushed up that even Kerry didn't know about it, but his mother was from the Forbes family and a rich aunt paid his way through school.

Bill Clinton is the only recent presidential politician I can think of with a truly complicated family life and like Barack and Michelle Obama he owes his education to scholarships received as the reward of hard work and merit. A revolution took place a generation ago when universities started opening up and accepting students based on grades and that revolution has swept into the White House, first with Bill Clinton and now even more dramatically with Barack Obama.

And me? Well, to be perfectly honest I'm still a bit jealous of those who belong somewhere. I remain vaguely embarrassed by my last name. I can be defensive that I didn't inherit my religious identity. I still have a deer-in-the-headlights moment of anxiety when someone casually inquires about my ancestry and I live in a town where you're a transient if you don't go back three generations. If you want to ask me about my family life, you'd better be ready to invest a couple of hours studying flow-charts. But come January I'll be able to look at the President of the United States and see someone who looks like me. And increasingly like us.

Michael Kinsley asks if there's ever before been a war that so many people disapproved of but so few wanted to stop?

Today's antiwar cause doesn't even have a movement to speak of, let alone an agenda. It consists of perhaps 47 percent of the citizenry -- the ones who voted for John Kerry -- who are in some kind of existential opposition to the war but aren't doing much about it and aren't very clear about what they would like to see happen. Meanwhile, American soldiers die by the hundreds and iraqis -- military and civilian -- by the thousands in a cause these people (and I'm one of them) believe to be a horrible mistake.

I have to say I agree with him. Nonviolence.org is a top ranked antiwar publication according to all-knowing Google, and after nine years we're a safe bet, yet our annual donations from readers barely cover the relatively miniscule internet bill. With the exception of a few Democratic Party front groups, peace groups are not being supported. Organized opposition to war is limited to large rallies that assign all the blame on war on particular politicians rather than upon our own suburban S.U.V. gas guzzling lifestyles.

The average peace-espousing tax payer sends much more money to the Pentagon than to grassroots peace groups (anywhere from 40 to 49 percent of taxes support the military). One needn't break any federal laws to support peace groups to the same extent one supports the Pentagon but it's not happening. Grousing about presidential party politics and token donations to play-it-safe foundations is about as far as most people go. It's pretty depressing really. Money won't create a culture of peace on it's own, of course, but the lack of funding echoes the parallel lack of real commitment.

Kinsley's article found via the excellent Picket Line.

In this election, religious conservatives were able to craft a message making same-sex marriages look like an afront to apple pie and baseball and of course people voted against it. What if we could have somehow framed this election with the details of human suffering that these laws suggest?

Now available for the fashionable Bush-era bumper. Proceeds go to support the Nonviolence.org websites:
  

President George W. Bush has been re-elected for four more years. The man who led the United States to two wars in four years and whose policies in Afghanistan and iraq continue to create chaos in both countries will get four more years to pursue his war of terrorism against the world. Americans will not sleep any safer but will dream ever more of conquering and killing enemies. We'll continue to sow the seeds of wars for generations to come.

I was worried when Senator John Kerry unexpectedly picked up in the primaries to become the Democratic presidential candidate. In his patrician upbringing he was very much like President Bush, and they actually agreed on many of the big issues — war, gay marriage, stem cell research. But in his personality, style and temperament Kerry was too much like former Vice President Al Gore.

Yes, I know Gore won the popular vote in the 2000 election and that his loss was declared by mysterious chads and a handful of senior citizen judges in Washington, D.C. But an election as close as that one should have been seen as a resounding loss, no matter what the Supreme Court verdict. As Vice President, Gore had helped lead the nation to one of its greatest economic recovers in our lifetimes. He was also clearly smarter in the President, more knowledgeable and farsighted, with more carefully articulated visions of the future. But he barely won the popular vote, making the electoral college vote close enough to be debated.

Kerry is intellectual and aloof in the same way that Gore was. And clearly there are a number of American voters who don't want that. They want a candidate who can speak from the heart, who isn't afraid to talk about faith. They also want a candidate who can talk in simple, morally unambiguous ways about war.

And what about war? Would a President Kerry have really pulled out troops sooner than President Bush will? Who knows: Democratic Presidents have pursued plenty of wars over the last century and when Kerry proclaimed he would hunt down and kill the enemy, he spoke as the only one of the four men on the major tickets who actually has hunted down and killed fellow humans in wartime.

We can make an educated guess that a Kerry-led America would leave iraq in better shape than a Bush-led America will. Kerry has the patience and the planning foresight to do the hard coalition-building work in iraq and in the world that is necessary if U.S. military power will translate to a real peace. But a Kerry plan for pacification and rebuilding of iraq could easily have followed the path that Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson's did in Vietnam: an unending, constantly-escalating war.

Did Americans officially approve the country's past two wars yesterday? It's hard to conclude otherwise. Despite the lies of mass destruction and despite the willful misleading of the American people that Saddam Hussein was somehow involved in the 9/11 attacks and possessed weapons of mass destruction, something over 50% of Americans thought the Bush/Cheney Presidency was worth keeping for another four years.

But there's nothing to say a popular vote grants wisdom. In the next four years, those of us wanting an alternative will probably have many "teachable moments" to talk with our neighbors and friends about the deteriorating situation in iraq and Afghanistan. Maybe those of us whose pacifism is informed by religious understandings can cross the intellectual divide some more and talk about how our faith gives us a simple, morally unambiguous way to argue against war. The country needs strong pacifist voices now more than ever. Let's get talking.

ps: ...and donating. Nonviolence.org is a nine years old peace resource guide and blog. It's time it gets regular funding from its million annual readers. Please give generously and help us expand this work. We have a lot to do in the next four years!

The U.S. election campaign has many ironies, none perhaps as strange as the fights over the candidates' war records. The current President George W. Bush got out of active duty in Vietnam by using the influence of his politically powerful family. While soldiers killed and died on the Mekong Delta, he goofed off on an Alabama airfield. Most of the central figures of his Administration, including Vice President Dick Cheney also avoided fighting in Vietnam.

Not that I can blame them exactly. If you don't believe in fighting, then why not use any influence and loophole you can? It's more courageous to stand up publicly and stand in solidarity with those conscientious objectors who don't share your political connections. But if you're both antiwar and a coward, hey, loopholes are great. Bush was one less American teenager shooting up Vietnam villages and for that we commend him.

Ah, but of course George W. Bush doesn't claim to be either antiwar or a coward. Two and a half decades later, he snookered American into a war on false pretences. Nowadays he uses every photo-op he can to look strong and patriotic. Like most scions of aristocratic dynasties throughout history, he displays the worst kind of policial cowardice: he is a leader who believes only in sending other people's kids to war.

Contrast this with his Democratic Party rival John Kerry. He was also the son of a politically-connected family. He could have pulled some strings and ended up in Alabama. But he chose to fight in Vietnam. He was wounded in battle, received metals and came back a certified war hero. Have fought he saw both the eternal horrors of war and the particular horrors of the Vietnam War. It was only after he came back that he used his political connections. He used them to puncture the myths of the Vietnam War and in so doing became a prominent antiwar activist.

Not that his antiwar activities make him a pacifist, then or now. As President I'm sure he'd turn to military solutions that we here at Nonviolence.org would condemn. But we be assured that when he orders a war, he'd be thinking of the kids that America would be sending out to die and he'd be thinking of the foreign victims whose lives would inevitably be taken in conflict.

Despite the stark contrast of these Presidential biographies, the peculiar logic of American politics is painting the military dodger as a hero and the certified war hero as a coward. The latter campaign is being led by a shadowy group called the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Today's Guardian has an excellent article on the Texas Republicans funding the Swift Boat controversy. The New York Times also delves the outright fabrications of the Swift Boat TV ads. A lot of Bush's buddies and long-time Republican Party apparatchiks are behind this and its lies are transparent and easy to uncover. It's a good primer on dirty politics 2004 style.

One of the big questions about this election is whether the American voters will believe more in image or substance. It goes beyond politics, really, to culture and to a consumerism that promises that with the right clothes and affected attitude, you can simply buy yourself a new identity. President Bush put on a flight jacket and landed a jet on an aircraft carrier a mile off the California beach. He was the very picture of a war hero and strong patriot. Is a photo all it takes anymore?