Unspeakable

There aren't strong enough words of condemnation for this.

Or this.

Obsessing

I am obsessing just a little on the Bill Ayers/ Weather Underground story. It is being discussed a lot since Bill Ayers has broken his silence after the election. It makes me want to read his memoir Fugitive Days and see the Weather Underground documentary.

One reason that it interests me so much, is that this is my childhood history. Madison, Wisconsin -- where I grew up and still live -- was one of the "hotbeds" of anti-war activism, along with Berkley, et al. I lived about a mile off of the university campus and during riots, vestiges of teargas clouds would waft through our neighborhood. My parents, who were a doctor and a nurse, would go down to help patch students up after a meleé.

One of the decisive events that turned the anti-war movement around actually occurred here in 1970: 4 young men who identified with the Weather Underground, detonated a car bomb outside of a university building that housed the controversial Army Math Research Center. Like the WU, they wanted to destroy only the property and thought that by doing it in the middle of the night there would be no people present. Unfortunately, there was a graduate student working in his lab, Robert Fassnacht, a man with a wife and young children, who died in the blast.

Of the 4 men, 3 of them were eventually apprehended and served time in prison. One of them, Leo Burt, has never been caught. He is still on the FBI's "most wanted" list. The oldest of the 4, Karl Armstrong, was identified as the "ringleader." At the time he was arrested, he professed to be largely unrepentant for his act and cited the context of the war on Viet Nam. As you might imagine, this did not sit well with many people, even those sympathetic to the cause. (I have friends who are friends with Fassnacht's widow, and I understand that she has not been able to forgive Armstrong and the others. Karl Armstrong has expressed remorse as time has passed.)

Daily Kos has a post up today discussing Ayers and the tactics of the WU. He also is adamant about looking at the context. While I consider myself to be a pacifist and absolutely do not condone any violence as a means to an end, I understand what he is saying. Karl Armstrong says that he became a revolutionary when his head hit the ground while being beaten by Chicago cops outside the Democratic National Convention in 1968. (My nephew said something similar when, at the age of 17, he was arrested at the WTO/IMF protests in Washington, DC. While he was in custody, a federal marshal told him that he would "mess him up so bad, his mom wouldn't recognize him." Nice.)

In the late sixties there were groups of people in the US who felt that war was being waged against them, and evidence shows that it was not far from the truth. And then consider that many of these people were in their late teens or early twenties ... it's the whole frontal lobe development thing!

I am nearly 50 and a practicing Quaker; as I said before, I do not condone what was done. But I certainly understand it in its context. (Believe it or not, I understand what Timothy McVeigh did, in its context. In fact, I have to condemn violence in all forms, because the actions of a Timothy McVeigh seem to be the logical conclusion of the "destroy property, not people" actions of a group like the Weather Underground.)

One of my all time favorite documentary films is The War At Home. It is about the anti-Viet Nam war movement as it unfolded in my hometown (though it easily could have been made in any number of places.) If any of this interests you, I'm sure that the film is available through Netflix.

Oy, too much thinking for a Sunday morning when I really need to be doing some laundry.

Peace, friends.

Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad Idea

HARROLD, Texas — A tiny Texas district will allow teachers and staff members to carry concealed firearms to deter and protect against school shootings when classes begin this month, provided the gun-toting employees follow certain requirements.

The small community of Harrold in north Texas is a 30-minute drive from the Wilbarger County Sheriff's Office, leaving students and teachers without protection, said David Thweatt, superintendent of the Harrold Independent School District. The lone campus of the 110-student district sits near a heavily traveled highway, which could make it a target, he argued.

"When the federal government started making schools gun-free zones, that's when all of these shootings started. Why would you put it out there that a group of people can't defend themselves? That's like saying 'sic 'em' to a dog," Thweatt said in a story published Friday on the Fort Worth Star-Telegram's Web site. (Read the rest if you can stomach it.)

What would Molly Ivins say about this?

Texas -- the state where you're not allowed to buy a vibrator, but guns? Hey, no problem.

Sheesh.

Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization

Human Smoke explores the roots of war through the lens of World War II. Using newspaper articles, diaries, letters, memoirs, and official documents, the author, Nicholson Baker, assembled hundreds of discrete vignettes into a compelling narrative that should dispel numerous myths about the early days of the "Good War." The evil of the Third Reich hardly needs more exposure, but this book offers further insight into the warped and perverse ideals that drove Hitler and his followers.

What surprised me in this book was the depth of the racism that motivated Winston Churchill. If you took speeches that Churchill made, and substituted the word "Jew" for "Hun" you might be hard-pressed to know that you weren't listening to Hitler. It was the British that began the indiscriminate bombing of the civilian population of Germany, for which "the Blitz" was retaliation.

And lest you think the European arm of the war was about freeing the Jews, guess again. Churchill's 1941 blockade of food, medicine, and clothing to the German-occupied countries caused the death of thousands and thousands of civilians, many of them Jewish refugees that had been expelled from their homes. Not to mention the Jewish refugees that were rounded up and imprisoned in concentration camps in England, because they were Germans too and might hold German sympathies.

Then there were the refugees that actually made it onto ships and escaped the carnage in Europe. The United States and countries of the British Commonwealth [i.e. Empire] enforced strict quotas as to how many refugees would be accepted every year. There were many instances of ships carrying refugees turned away from port after port. In some documented cases the ships were actually shelled at sea, killing most of their passengers.

(I remember my mother once telling me that the blame for the war between Israel and Palestine lay with Britain and the United States, for turning their backs on Jewish refugees. I had no idea of the magnitude.)

While Churchill is lusting for the blood of Huns, FDR is actively fomenting the Sino-Japanese War while tightening the noose around Japan, hoping to provoke them into an attack on the U.S. The attack on Pearl Harbor, when it came, was not a surprise. It was fully expected and the date that it occurred was anticipated, so essentially the 2000+ people that died in the attack were used as bait.

Baker also shows the profiteers: the arms manufacturers, the scientists and academics who saw war as a cash cow for their research, the opportunists (like Wisconsin native son, Frank Lloyd Wright, who thought the total destruction of those old European cities was a good thing, so that new cities could be built following a new plan -- his. What a weenie.)

The other thread of the story that Baker tells -- one that has not been told enough -- is that of the pacifists who actively resisted the war by working for diplomatic solutions, by defying Churchill's blockade to feed the starving population of Europe, by going to jail rather than fighting. Gandhi figures prominently, as do Clarence Pickett, Herbert Hoover, and Rufus Jones of the Religious Society of Friends. He mentions the Socialist Party and its leader Norman Thomas, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and the War Resisters' League. Congresswoman Jeanette Rankin is lauded for casting the lone dissenting vote against joining the war. Many other individuals are mentioned as well, people in many countries.

Baker does not draw any parallels between his narrative and current events as we are experiencing them, but the parallels are clear. Just as the seeds of World War II were sown in World War I, we see the seeds of the Viet Nam War being sown during World War II. Violence begets violence, that is the message of this book.

Invariably when one is a pacifist, someone will say, "Yeah, but what about World War II?" Baker did impeccable research and presents reams of evidence that World War II was not inevitable, that like all wars it was motivated by a lust for power and profit, predicated on propaganda and lies.

Baker dedicates Human Smoke to "the memory of Clarence Pickett and other American and British Pacifists. They've never really gotten their due. They tried to save Jewish refugees, feed Europe, reconcile the United States and Japan, and stop the war from happening. They failed, but they were right."

I highly recommend Human Smoke. It is not a pretty book, many parts are painful to read, while others will infuriate. It is, however, in a format that is quite easy to read and I think you will find it absolutely compelling.

One More Heartbreaking Effect of War

This is an exceedingly sad article, from Truth Out, about domestic violence among military families and the Pentagon's failure to deal with it. It highlights how troops with pending domestic abuse cases against them are being shipped off to Iraq and Afghanistan for multiple tours of duty, then come back to a slap on the wrist, minimal treatment for post traumatic stress disorder and -- in a shocking number of cases -- go on to commit violent abuse, or murder, against estranged spouses and young children.

This last paragraph makes my blood boil:

The Army examined Erin Edwards's death as part of a fatality review program recommended by the Pentagon task force "to ensure no victim dies in vain."

A one-paragraph summary of the review seemed to discount the findings of the civilian police investigation. The summary noted that Erin Edwards had refused the assistance of the base's family advocacy program, while William Edwards had enrolled in it. It added that William Edwards had "appeared to comply" with his restrictions. Until the day he "eluded his military escort" and killed his wife.

Don't you just love how the report appears to blame the wife for her refusal of "the assistance of the base's family advocacy program" while the husband "had enrolled in it." Clearly then, she is to blame for her own death at her husband's hands.

And what the hell does that statement mean, "to ensure that no victim dies in vain." In vain?

It is such a travesty.

Maybe we do need a woman for president ... Just a thought.

Guns Don't Kill People, Eh?

Two school shootings reported today, one in Illinois and one in California. The one in California sounds as if it may have been motivated by homophobia. I am so sickened by our country's addiction to violence. There is another way.

Update from Huffington Post:

The shooting was the fourth at a U.S. school within a week. [my emphasis]

On Feb. 8, a woman shot two fellow students to death before committing suicide at Louisiana Technical College in Baton Rouge. In Memphis, Tenn., a 17-year-old is accused of shooting and critically wounding a fellow student Monday during a high school gym class, and the 15-year-old victim of a shooting at an Oxnard, Calif., junior high school has been declared brain dead.

No War With Iran, No War Period

This is from Catherine Whitmire's Practicing Peace: A Devotional Walk Through the Quaker Tradition.

E. Raymond Wilson, one of the founders of Friends Committee on National Legislation, is said to have commented: "If you open your toolbox, and the only thing in it is a hammer, everything will look like a nail." ... We don't spend one percent of [our federal budget] -- not one percent of that -- on peace. So everytime we open our toolbox, the only thing, as a country, that we have are weapons ... If the only thing in your toolbox is a weapon, then the only thing you can think of to do is hit the nail. Everything will look like a nail.

Mary Lord, 2004

And I'll just add, if every time you hit the nail, you, your friends, your daddy, or your daddy's friends get even richer, there is not a lot of incentive to dig a little deeper in the toolbox to find the other tools. I believe it is an essential piece of the solution that Congress outlaws war profiteering. Not that I think they will or that this despotic administration would care even if they did.

Months ago I posted about Mark Kurlansky's book, Nonviolence. I urge you to look up the book and read it. Individual by individual, we can pick up and work with a different set of tools.

CINDY SHEEHAN ROCKS

Cindy has more integrity in a fingernail paring than most of Congress put together.
And don't tell anyone, but Chris Matthews is a wienie.

Cindy Sheehan and the State of the Peace Movement

By now, so much has been written about Cindy's Memorial Day departure from being "the face of the peace movement" that it feels like old hat to be writing anything. But I wasn't blogging at full capacity for a few days and have some thoughts on it, so bear with me please.

Two summers ago, like many people, I was riveted to the story of Cindy Sheehan and Camp Casey in Crawford, Texas. I became possessed by the idea of going there, to be part of what felt like the stirrings (FINALLY!) of a sleeping giant. So, a week before school began, when I should have been setting up my classroom, I convinced a friend to come with me, and together with our two teen-aged daughters we drove the thousand or so miles to Crawford for the weekend. It was an amazing experience (helped by the fact that Joan Baez was there too) that I wish more people could have shared.

Cindy Sheehan did so much to wake up hope in people like me, people who were opposed to the war from before it began but had been absolutely marginalized by the mainstream media and the silence of those around us. She personifies the Gandhi quote "Be the change you want to see in the world." I read about every action she took, and was inspired to take action on my own. And I was deeply saddened to hear the despair in her voice last week.

Cindy's message also spoke to me on the level of being a mother who has lost a child. In the context of Cindy's loss, everything she has done makes sense to me. Having a child die is, in my mind, the most devastating and ultimately transforming of human experiences. You fall to the lowest of lows, where getting through each minute and hour of each day is a sort of triumph (except that you know you have to wake up the next day and your child -- that person who is literally a piece of you -- is still dead, and you have to do it all over again.) It takes years to integrate that loss into your life, and you are never the same. The transformation is not necessarily for the worse; my child's death was/is an almost religious experience. Yet, 13 years later for me, there are moments when the sense of bereavement brings me to my knees.

Anyway, I believe that anyone, in the face of devastating grief, seeks to make meaning of the loss. Often that is a very private journey, and I think that we who believe in peace owe Cindy a huge debt of gratitude for making her journey so very public. I also suspect that the anger which has kept her going has probably kept her from doing some essential private grief work. The thing about grief is, it is patient. It doesn't go away, but waits for you to get to it. The part of Cindy's resignation that saddened me more than anything else, was her statement that she came to the realization that Casey had died for nothing. I hope that Cindy feels the thoughts of all of us little people who are not in the public eye and don't have the public ear: I want to say that Casey's life meant everything and I am grateful that she shared him with us.

Well, I don't mean to lapse into psychobabble. The other prevailing thought I've been having is anger at those who are supposedly on my side who attacked her. (Kind of like those who have attacked Ralph Nader, Michael Moore, and others. Sheesh. What is wrong with these people???) Particularly those who applied the label, "whore." Isn't it interesting how easy it is to fall into the old misogynistic name calling when a woman gets "uppity"?

Anyway, I am here to say that the cause of peace is not dead. Every little action that any one of us does makes a difference. It isn't easy; in fact, sometimes it seems downright impossible. But we need to lift each other up, not denigrate fellow activists. We are all the faces of the peace movement.

Peace.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

I have a difficult time with the King holiday. I teach young children, and this is the time of year when many teachers "do" (in teacher parlance) Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. While I am very glad that there is a national holiday honoring King's life and his work, it feels to me as if the powers that be want to squeeze all of the life and meaning out of this holiday. In schools -- especially with the youngest kids -- it gets distilled down to "I have a dream that ...".

I struggle with how to present this profoundly important man and what he stood for to 5 and 6 year olds. Some of the story is violent and scary, much of it is way beyond their comprehension developmentally, and personally I cannot separate King's civil rights teachings from his anti-war stance. Here's a rhetorical question, and I'm trying to work out an answer, but -- is it bad not to "do" MLK for a week or two in January if, through my actions and the culture of my classroom, I am trying to embody the teachings of Dr. King throughout the entire school year?

I know there are excellent picture books about Martin Luther King, Jr.; I have them and I use them. I love the materials from Teaching Tolerance. This is just a perennial struggle for me. It would be easier if I taught older students.

About a fourth of the children in my class are African-American. But a third of my students are Mexican, and outside of maybe cinco de mayo or dias de los muertos, nobody "does" things specifically related to them. There is little recognition of Latino History Month or the birthday of Cesar Chavez, for example. This is another issue for me.

I also struggle with this: No great teachers have developed their beliefs in a vacuum, and this is as true for King as for anybody else. So when I talk about King and civil rights, I want to talk about Gandhi, Bayard Rustin, Rosa Parks, Cesar Chavez, Pauli Murray ... and so many more.

I would welcome other people's thoughts about this.

No Excuse

ABC News decided to survey the views of the senators who served in 2002, most of whom remain in the Senate. The survey indicates that those senators say that if they knew then what they know now, President Bush would never have been given the authority to use force in Iraq.

read more ...

Why do I have a problem with "if they knew then what they know now"? Because they had access to the same sources of information and more than the many people who objected to this war from before we invaded Iraq, and yet they chose to go along with it. Some members of Congress have apologized. Many have not. The Bush administration flat out lied about the threat posed by Iraq, something which has been substantiated in numerous documents. But every single member of Congress who now regrets giving Bush the authority to attack Iraq could have done basic research and objected then. It was all there -- no WMD, no plan, no nothing except perpetual war. And those same senators and representatives continued to give Bush more war funding, even as it became clear that the war was based on a series of lies.

No, there are no excuses. And no way to bring back the lives lost or to undo the destruction of both Iraq's and our economy, the pillaging of Iraq's national library, the unleashing of deeper anti-U.S. sentiments throughout the world ... and on and on and on.

But the new Congress could start by apologizing and making some substantial moves to show their remorse.

War: What is it good for?

This paragraph nicely encapsulates what initially brought me to The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). It highlights a unique process for coming to decisions, as well as Quaker peace testimony. From the book Friends For 350 Years by Howard Brinton:

If nonviolent methods, based on goodwill and an appeal to the inner sense of rightness in every man, are frequently successful in dealing with abnormal persons, they are more frequently successful in dealing with normal persons. No pacifist claims that his method is always successful. Every method fails sometimes, including the method based on violence. If two persons or two nations resort to fighting, one is bound to lose, so the method of fighting cannot at the most be more than 50 per cent successful. The nonviolent method may, however, operate in such a way that both sides win. Together they may arrive at a decision which is better than that which either one of the parties desired in the first place.

Many thinking, liberal people tend to dismiss pacifism out of hand as some wild-eyed, pie-in- the-sky notion. Some will condemn the current war (whatever war it happens to be) but insist that war in general is a necessary evil or part of the human condition.

I have to ask, when has war ever worked? WWI -- the war to end all wars? Nope. WWII, sometimes referred to as "the GOOD war"? Debatable. We were mucking about in Korea just a few years later. Vietnam? Oh, I forgot -- that wasn't a war, but it sure didn't do anybody any good. Has violence led to any kind of peace between a divided Korea, Israel and Palestine? Fast forward to the present, set Iraq aside for a moment, and let's just take a look at Afghanistan -- an intervention that many thinking, liberal people defended shortly after 9/11/01. Did it solve any problems? And Iraq? More American people are speaking out against it, but is that because they've had an awakening about the futility of war, or they believe "we" are "losing" this one? Is anybody better off because of war?

Well a small few, perhaps -- the members of the Carlisle Group, executives at Halliburton, Bechtel, Blackwater -- those who profit from the business of war. And that is what going to war is ultimately all about -- profiteering.

But why is it so difficult to convince the common people -- those who suffer, rather than profit from war -- that there is nothing unrealistic about finding nonviolent solutions. No more unrealistic than to think that fighting will lead to peace. (In the words of a 3-year old I know, "How silly is that?")

And one cannot simultaneously look for nonviolent solutions and continue to escalate the fight. (In other words, NO SURGE.)

Peaceful solutions aren't quick or easy. The official diplomatic solution, arrived at in a summit with heads of state may not produce a solution. Sometimes it has to be individuals like me or you who take the first steps toward peace, and we may not see the fruits for a long time. The alternative is a perpetual state of war, and we the people, our children, the planet ... cannot sustain or afford that anymore (as if we ever could.)