It is not the world that needs peace; it is people.
When people in the world are at peace within,
the world will be at peace.
Tuesday, May 27, 2014
Monday, May 26, 2014
Personal Reflections on Memorial Day
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| My great-grandfather Frederick Smith Strong's grave at Arlington National Cemetery. We buried my grandfather, Brigadier General Frederick Smith Strong Jr., at West Point in 1986 on what would have been his 99th birthday. A Different Story To Consider: Being the Peace Our World Yearns For |
Since 9/11 in particular, it has also become important to me to look at what it means to "serve our nation" and, ultimately, to question the stories we have collectively embraced in American culture around patriotism, military service, nationalism, what it means to be an American, and what it means to be a global citizen.
I come from a long line of military people. Toward the end of his life, I was able to have many deeply meaningful conversations with my paternal grandfather - who many knew as "the general." We grandchildren, however, always knew him as "Super" and our grandmother as "Sugar." After my grandmother died in 1970, I grew especially close with my grandfather. The last time he traveled from Michigan to Oregon to visit me he was 96 years old. At age 90, Super also had read Steinbeck's "Travels With Charlie" and decided it was now or never. So he got in his car and did a 10,000 mile solo trip driving all over the country visiting family and friends. Super was super!
My grandfather sometimes referred to himself as a "maverick", and I believe that in the twilight of his life he increasingly questioned, explored, clarified a great many of his beliefs, experiences, values, personal and collective stories. I knew that my grandfather's grade point average at West Point was not surpassed for many decades after he graduated in 1910. I knew that he had taught Eisenhower at West Point, that he'd served in both World Wars, that he knew Patton. I didn't know until toward the end of his life how horrified he was with the "completely unnecessary bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki," and how he believed that the most important work he did was after he served in the wars and was able to be part of the development of prostheses for wounded veterans.
Super encouraged me to think outside the box. And I believe he would be proud of how fiercely I discouraged my youngest son from enlisting in the years that followed 9/11. I believe that my grandfather would be proud of how fiercely I have set about educating myself since 9/11, which was a huge wake-up call for me because, while I was hearing that "they hate us for our freedoms," I knew in my bones that this was not why we were attacked. I also recognized that I had no idea why we were attacked. So I determined to engage in this quest to find out. And I followed one thread to another to another and was ultimately shoved full-on through yet another doorway into a greater awakening than I had known before that horrific day nearly thirteen years ago. And I gradually came to realize that I had been deeply, deeply ignorant of American history, American foreign and domestic policies, our unsustainable way of life, and that the values we profess to embrace are often not in alignment with what is done in our names. It was a profoundly humbling, disturbing, illuminating and life changing experience, and continues to be - to awaken to realize the great fog I'd been living in regarding this beautiful country I call home.
And Super would be proud. Because it takes courage to think outside the box, to be a "maverick" of sorts, to look deeply, to not believe everything we think and are told, to question and think critically, to grow my heart and that which I care about even bigger. My circle of caring continues to grow and grow and grow. Heck, I don't even eat meat. And I weep for all those who have died for what they believed was service to a higher good for our nation.
I also wonder how it is that we as a nation are okay with teaching our children that it is in the highest good to learn to completely shift what we know to be true in our deepest being - that it is not okay to kill another human being? How is it that we don't consider the trauma to one's soul when we send our children to war?
I've sat through Veterans events in which veterans told their stories - some for the first time since the Vietnam War and even back further - through essays, poetry, songs, tears, rage, terror, forgiveness, and more. Their courage was beyond amazing! And so was what they lived through. I've forced myself to stay through all three parts of a Winter Soldier event here in Portland in which I witnessed first hand the stories of veterans so trauma-filled, so horrific, so over the top unbearable, that I simply ached, ached, to leave the room and not stay through the whole event. But I did stay because I told myself that if they can live through these actual experiences, I can live through bearing witness. And I did bear witness - with all of my being, my heart and mind, my spirit and soul - to the horror of war.
This also touches me so deeply because I am a mother of three sons. And I do not understand how it is that we as a nation continue to be okay with sending our children to war? It is one thing to slap a "Support Our Troops" bumper sticker on our car, but what does that mean?? Then there's the bumper sticker I saw just the other day: "Support Our Troops or Go Stand In Front of Them!" Somehow I am thinking that that person does not have any understanding, or desire to understand, how it is that I support our troops.
It takes courage to go off and risk dying for what one believes is an act of ensuring and protecting American freedom. Again, what is freedom? How do we define "freedom"? Are the 20,000 vets who are homeless on any given day in this country free? How about those who return with PTSD? Are those who commit suicide also acknowledged, considered, and honored among those others who have died as a result of their service? Why not? How many Americans even know how many of our soldiers and veterans commit suicide every day? How many veterans don't receive the help they need? How many come back poisoned from exposure to chemical weapons? How many suffer from traumatic brain injury and other devastating wounds such as major depression, substance abuse and addiction, and relationships that spiral into domestic violence? How many know who makes the decisions about going to war? Where, why, when - who makes these decisions?
This is the shadow side of our fallen heroes and those who survived that all too often is neglected, minimized, ignored, denied. Such denial, to me, is not how we honor our troops. To honor another human being it is necessary for that person to feel seen, truly seen. Turning the other way to the true suffering of so many is turning away from seeing our veterans and what it is that they live with day in and day out.
Meanwhile, today millions of little American flags and colorful flowers adorned cemeteries all over the country. People wept, celebrated, talked of the "ultimate sacrifice". Others simply had barbeques, drank beer, had a much needed day off from work.
As I reflect and am mindful of this day, my heart aches. I ache for the thousands - and millions - who have died and continue to die in wars because humanity hasn't yet resolved that there is another way. It is still considered normal in American culture to believe that war is peace. And so millions and billions are spent on missiles and drones and training our children to kill the children of others in far away lands while our own children all too often go to bed hungry here at home, or kill the children of their neighbors in American war zones, or play violent video games, etc., etc., etc. And meanwhile I drive by what looks to be a Vietnam War vet holding his sign up on the street corner - "Veteran. Anything helps." And I live knowing that more than 22 veterans committed suicide today. And many others are living lives of despair, terror, depression, and quiet desperation because the war they tried to leave has followed them home. Yet, we continue to believe it is normal to send our children to war. We continue to believe that one has to learn to kill others in order to protect our "freedoms." It is all insane to me. And it sickens my heart. So I write...
And I reflect knowing that my Brigadier General grandfather would be proud that in my own little way in my own little corner of the world I am working for peace. Beginning in my own heart. And then expanding outward.
Truly, another world is possible. Let us increasingly join together to make it so. My deep prayer is that humankind - Americans and all humans everywhere - will increasingly grow into remembrance of what we have forgotten. That we will stop the insanity that is sure to follow whenever we make someone - anyone - into an "Other" to objectify, demonize, destroy. War does not make peace. It simply doesn't. As Howard Zinn wisely states, war is terrorism.
May we awaken now and together open to the new stories that are awaiting for us to create, know, and live by. Stories in which we hold life in reverence. All life, not just those closest to us, or those who believe like us, or those who look like us. May we humans reach a tipping point where enough of us become "super", open to thinking outside the box, and do whatever it is that we each can do to make this world a place the children of today and those yet unborn on into the next seven generations will be grateful for.
There will be a day when we are held to account. Let's all take a stand for freedom, true freedom - the freedom to live in peace inwardly and outwardly. We can stop glorifying war. We can create new stories in which we teach our children compassion, kindness, caring, courage, and the interconnectedness that threads through us all. Can you imagine such a world? We can be that brave. We can be that change, the peace our world yearns for.
Peace & blessings to all ~ Molly
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Arundhati Roy: Laying Siege To Empire
Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.
The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.
Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.
Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu: Do Your Little Bit of Good Where You Are
If
you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have
chosen the side of
the oppressor.
If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and
you say that you
are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your
neutrality.
Do your little bit of good where you are; it's those little bits of good
put together that overwhelm the world.
Vincent Harding: Is America Possible? A Letter to My Young Companions on the Journey of Hope
VINCENT HARDING, IN MEMORIAM — CIVILITY, HISTORY AND HOPE
Civil rights veteran Vincent Harding died this week at the age of 82. He had a long lens of wisdom on how social change happens. He believed America is still a developing nation when it comes to creating a multi-religious, multi-racial democracy. Vincent Harding spent recent decades bringing young people into creative contact with elders, civil rights veterans — offering experiences of them, as he said, not as figures in history books but "as living and lively and magnificent." We remember Vincent Harding and how he embodied that legacy and its wisdom for us.
Harding suggests in this essay that the dream is never finished but endlessly unfolding. He suggests that America's most important possibility for the world is not to dominate, threaten, or compete with, but to help each other in a search for common ground. He suggests that when we simply attempt to replicate our free-market materialism, we miss our most vital connections. From this, he opens the possibility that a new conversation may begin — one that might initiate a deeper journey concerning the possibilities of human community across all geographical lines.
Excerpted from 'Is America Possible?':
Taking up Hughes’ unmentioned concerns, those living beyond him in a struggle for a new America might ask us to envision a nation free from the scourge of drugs, in both our personal and collective lives. They might nurture dreams of a society in which training for nonviolent peacemaking took priority over military “preparedness.” They might call us to a time when our relationships with other nations would be more neighborly, more mutually supportive in the great multinational healing tasks we have to accomplish. Remembering King, we know these rainbow warriors would urge us to dream a world in which our country will work with others to seek economic justice for all the basic-goods producer nations who are now broken and exploited, a world where the United States takes the path of peace with all who are now threatened by our immature and unwise search for military-based “security.”
Continuously, persistently, I hear all the heroic voices of struggle joining Hughes in a common message. It says loudly that the work of discovering, exploring, and developing this true America is our work — we, the people, are in charge. Is it too much to ask our students to consider their role in this life-seeking action, both as dreamers and as workers? Are there noncoercive ways in which we may invite them to live beyond their presently defined self-limits, to participate in the re-creating tasks that await; beginning with themselves and stretching out to all “the endless plains” and the wounded cities of our land? To dream such dreams, to grasp such visions, to live lives anchored in great hope is certainly to develop ourselves and our students in the best traditions of the freedom movement, of all movements for justice, compassion, and democracy. Eventually, we might discover that it is also the path to our best personal humanity.
Once, in the midst of the African independence struggles of the early 1960s, I remember hearing a poet of that continent say, “I am a citizen of a country that does not yet exist.” Perhaps this is the paradox into which we must allow Hughes to move us. Together with those we teach, we are officially citizens of the America we now know, but we need to give our greatest energies to the creation of the country that does not yet exist. Hughes calls us to envision it, to encourage our students to use all the magnificent but underdeveloped faculties of their imagination to begin to bring it into being, and to share that work with those who have gone before. Ultimately, Langston Hughes spoke both for our personal lives and for our nation when he wrote:
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.
It is a message for all of us who are committed to teach. We are the nurturers, the encouragers of all the dreams and seeds deep in all the hearts where the future of a redeemed and rescued land now dwells. So we must hold fast and see beneath the snow, calling others to recognize their own magnificent possibilities, to see and plant and join our hope with theirs. Today, we are called to sing in our dreams and say with our actions that America (the America of Langston and Malcolm and Ella and Anne Braden and all the marchers and mourners and organizers) is possible, is necessary, is coming.
For the complete essay and more, please go here:
http://www.onbeing.org/program/civility-history-and-hope/79
Daniel Ellsberg: We Are In a National Crisis
If monarchy is corrupting - and it is - wait till you see what overt empire does to us.
I believe we are in a national crisis, which justifies and requires acts of unauthorized truth-telling. I am calling for such patriotic whistle-blowing to take place right now.
It is urgent to prevent new U.S. aggression. The time is now for the world to say ‘no’ to U.S. threats of air attack against Iran, and to the very notion of a nuclear first-use ‘option’ by America or any other nation.
It is time for the rest of the world to join ... in demanding that ALL the nuclear weapons states - including Israel, India and Pakistan, but above all the US and Russia - negotiate concrete steps on a definite time table toward the global, inspected abolition of nuclear weapons.
Truth-telling to Congress and the public is not disloyal in America: it is an expression of the higher loyalty officials owe to the Constitution, the rule of law, and the sovereign public. It is a courageous, patriotic, and effective way to serve our country. The time to speak out is now.
- quotes by Daniel Ellsberg
*****
America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and
loose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.
- Abraham Lincoln
Sunday, May 25, 2014
Howard Zinn: Truth Has a Power of Its Own
The challenge remains. On the other side are formidable forces: money, political power, the major media. On our side are the people of the world and a power greater than money or weapons: the truth.
Truth has a power of its own. Art has a power of its own. That age-old lesson – that everything we do matters – is the meaning of the people’s struggle here in the United States and everywhere. A poem can inspire a movement. A pamphlet can spark a revolution. Civil disobedience can arouse people and provoke us to think, when we organize with one another, when we get involved, when we stand up and speak out together, we can create a power no government can suppress. We live in a beautiful country. But people who have no respect for human life, freedom, or justice have taken it over. It is now up to all of us to take it back.
Howard Zinn: Seeing All Children Everywhere As Our Own
I wonder how the foreign policies of the United States would look
if we wiped out the national boundaries of the world, at least in our minds,
and thought of all children everywhere as our own.
Father Daniel Berrigan: A Change of Heart
One is called to live nonviolently, even if the change one works for seems impossible. It may or may not be possible to turn the US around through nonviolent revolution. But one thing favors such an attempt: the total inability of violence to change anything for the better.
Because we want the peace with half a heart and half a life and will, the war, of course, continues, because the waging of war, by its nature, is total - but the waging of peace, by our own cowardice, is partial.
Certainly the trouble is not that we do not want peace. We have seen enough war, we are sick of it, unto death. The war has come home like a stalking corpse, tailing its blood, its tears, its losses, its despairs — seeking like an American ghost the soul of America. We want the peace; but most of us do not want to pay the price of peace. We still dream of a peace that has no cost attached. We want peace, but we live content with poverty and injustice and racism, with the murder of prisoners and students, the despair of the poor to whom justice is endlessly denied. We long for peace, but we wish also to keep undisturbed a social fabric of privilege and power that controls the economic misery of two thirds of the world's people.
Obviously there will be no genuine peace while such an inherently violent scheme of things continues. America will in time extricate herself from the bloody swamps, the ruined villages, the mutilated dead of Vietnam (Iraq, Afghanistan, and on and on). But nothing will be settled there, nothing mitigated at home. Nothing changed, that is, until a change of heart leads us to a change of social structures in every area of our lives.
The sponsors of war closely resemble the weapons they create. And smart bombs, depleted uranium, land mines, rockets and tanks, rather than protect "widows and orphans and strangers at the gate," are designed precisely to create "widows and orphans," to transform strangers into enemies and enemies into corpses.
We spoke out, committed civil disobedience, and went to jail because the peace hangs senselessly and precariously upon weapons costing billions to build and billions to improve — weapons which become more useless as we add to their destructive force. With this money we could have fed the world's people. Half the children on earth go to bed hungry — millions more have retarding and stunting protein deficiencies. Instead of building the peace by attacking injustices like starvation, disease, illiteracy, political and economic servitude, we spend a trillion dollars on war since 1946, until hatred and conflict have become the international preoccupation.
- Father Daniel Berrigan
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| Father Daniel Berrigan is arrested for civil disobedience outside the U.S. Mission to the U.N. in 2006 |
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