Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2001 12:00:19 -0400
From: Randy Schutt <rschutt@vernalproject.org>
Subject: Alternatives to War, Part I
Dear
friends,
So what
should the US do to respond to terrorism? If not war, then what?
These
are difficult questions and progressives have not had very satisfying answers.
The public is demanding a good, quick answer. We know that war is morally wrong, is likely to kill more
civilians than the 4,800 killed on 9/11 (perhaps leading to the starvation of
hundreds of thousands or millions of Afghanis this winter), and also is likely
to be counterproductive in stopping terrorism. But progressives don’t have any
obvious, quick alternatives.
However,
as my friend Carlos Alcala wrote regarding this question, the problem is not
our solutions but that people want a quick fix and there is no quick fix for
terrorism:
“I, too,
would like to see positive proposals. I, too, fail to come up with any. Or at
least, anything novel.
“Perhaps
the real failure is not admitting that the changes we seek are not responsive
to slogans or new programs. They depend on wholesale changes in the ways people
around the world, and not just in our country, behave. Framing things in terms
of a response to terrorism is opportunistic, and short-sighted. We need to
continue to build a better society a little piece at a time, educating others,
reforming our power centers, and using our moral yardsticks on ourselves as
individuals as much as on others as interest groups. This is hard and painful work that will do little, visibly, to
end terrorism in our lifetimes and yet is the only thing that can ever do it.
“I’m not
certain that what the protesters (at their best, anyway) say is wrong; that
what they suggest is not positive. Anti-war activists have not “failed to answer
the most obvious question...: ‘Well, what then?’” It’s just that the answers do
not satisfy those who want a quick fix. It’s just that the answers don’t look
like they’re about terrorism, at a time when addressing terrorism is presented
as the only issue. The answer is: build social justice here and abroad. The
answer is: disarm the weapons of mass destruction. The answer is: promote
sensible use of resources. The answer is: spend your time thinking about ways
to help people, not thinking about ways to thwart people.”
There
aren’t any quick fixes. Instead we must build a just and peaceful society (as I
call for in my book, Inciting Democracy).
Below is a good article by Cynthia Peters of Znet <http://www.znet.com> discussing how to do
basic social change: talking to people.
·
Randy
It’s
Simple. It’s Not So Simple
By
Cynthia Peters [Znet Commentary]
Oct 21,2001
Now is
the time to be talking to people. Communicating, sharing information,
listening—they are the core of social change, of changing minds, of exchanging
rationalizations and cynicism for vision and empowerment.
It’s
simple, really. A terrible crime is being committed in our name. Millions of dollars worth of bombs are
raining down on an already decimated country. Beyond the military terror and
destruction, the terror of starvation almost surely awaits millions of Afghans
unless the bombing stops and a full-scale aid program gets food in place for
the winter. This is a calculated crime against humanity that differs from
September 11th only in scale; that is: it is many times larger.
That the
U.S. is taking part in the killing of innocent people is not new. What’s new is
that people are paying attention. Before September 11th, I tried
talking to people about the 500,000 Iraqi children dead thanks to the U.S.
economic embargo. And people’s eyes glazed over. But during these last few weeks, as I’ve staffed an information
table on the main street that runs through my town, I’ve noticed something else
during my conversations with people about the war in Afghanistan, the certainty
of mass starvation unless our current trajectory in that country is reversed,
the principles of international law, the idea that escalating violence is
exactly that and not a form of justice, and the importance of the rule of law
over the muscle of vigilantism.
What
I’ve noticed is that the glaze is gone.
People’s
eyes are opened to the world in a way they weren’t before. People are bringing questioning minds to the
problem of terrorism and the U.S. role in the Middle East and elsewhere. People
are filled with grief, awed by the courage of the rescuers, stunned by what it
means to turn a commercial jetliner full of innocent people into a living,
breathing bomb. People are curious—and I mean that—about exactly how the U.S.
has abused its power around the globe, and they are reflecting on the
consequences of that abuse.
Many
conversations are not that hard. Sometimes, just listening to the words pouring
out of someone’s mouth helps him or her listen to those words, too, for the
first time. Sometimes re-phrasing what you hear, without necessarily making a
speech complete with historical facts and figures, is enough to put a crack in
the confident parroting of the war defense. Sometimes, just being out on the
street with “Justice Not War” flyers is enough to reach the cynic who already
understands the misuse of U.S. power but believes there’s no point in
contesting it.
But not
every conversation is so easy. I don’t feel good about having some guy towering
over me, jabbing the air with his finger, spitting out his passionate belief
that, yes, we should kill as many Afghans as possible. It’s not just that it’s
personally threatening, or that it’s ethically in line with Osama bin Laden. It’s
also that it’s painful to come face to face with this particular kind of human
being.
Heartless
retaliation is not limited to this war-mongering type. Consider the educated guy in the corporate
suit who speaks in soft tones and has a pained expression on his face as he
shrugs off the possibility of millions of starving Afghans with, “Well, we have
to get Osama bin Laden somehow, don’t we?”
Rather
than scream my disbelief back at him, I try calmly repeating his own logic back
to him. “So you think it’s okay to put millions of Afghans at risk of
starvation in order to possibly catch one man?” Then I try to let the pause be.
I try not to fill up the silence with more words. I try to let him hear what
he’s saying. But this is hard to do. I feel a sort of a panic rising up. He is
a thinking person, yet he articulated his accord with an obscene and murderous
set of policies. I hold down the panic. He backs off a little from his
argument. The interaction ends.
Unlike
protesters in many countries, I don’t risk getting killed or imprisoned when I
put up my card table on Centre Street. I’m not worried about getting hurt, and
I have a thick enough skin to deal with the hecklers. But dissent has its
challenges, such as having reasonable conversations with privileged people who
have access to power and knowledge, but who nonetheless are aligning themselves
with points of view that will almost surely result in mass murder.
This is
where it becomes not-so-simple. I don’t like talking to people like that man in
the suit. They make me sick.
But
talking is what we absolutely need to be doing right now. It is the only way to
prevent mass murder. In a one-superpower world, the citizens of the superpower
are the only force that can control the superpower. It’s up to us.
Talking
has the added benefit of being the only antidote to the sick feeling. For all
the corporate suits, there are many more thoughtful people who pause, look me
in the eye, nod their agreement that violence begets violence, say things like,
“Thank you for being out here.” “I realize I’ve never quite thought about it
that way.” “Do you have more information?” “Can I come to your meeting?” “Will
you speak at my church?” “Where can I learn more?”
Many
people I’ve met in the last few weeks don’t need to hear my analysis. They
already know. And they have a lot to teach if we listen. The Vietnam vet
challenges me on how we should pressure our government when it is corporations
that seem to have so much control. The
firefighter tells me that all he hears at work is that the killing should stop.
The Haitian man wonders how international legal channels could be made more
independent and less influenced by the United States. The three women carrying
bibles talk for a long time, first with me and then amongst themselves. The
teenager starts off protesting that her parents would disagree with me, but
winds up voicing her own views.
Late one
night, someone calls from a nearby town. He has our flyer inviting people to a
neighborhood anti- war meeting, and he’s shocked that I risked putting my name
and number out publicly. I get the feeling he’s calling partly to see if I’m
real, thus making him a little bit less alone. He and his small group are
planning on marching the next day in a community-based parade featuring
marching bands and civic organizations. They will carry a banner that says,
“Our Cry of Grief is not a Cry for War.” He is nervous but inspired to hear
what we have accomplished so far in our town. The next day, they participate in
the parade. “At least a few people cheered on each block,” they reported to me
later. There are plans now for cross- town pot lucks and meetings.
It
strikes me as pathetic, sometimes, how few we are, how far we have to go, how
many steps forward, backward and sideways we will have to take. Someone
suggested that I give a short talk at the next meeting of her neighborhood
crime watch group. But at the last minute, the group, which has put tremendous
collective energy into debating the relative merits of stop signs vs. stop
lights, relations with police, and all the minutia of orchestrating their
security in the three-block radius of their homes, decides that hearing about
the war is not relevant. I’m allowed to leave my flyers, but whatever I have to
say just “isn’t our business,” says one participant.
On the
one hand, this experience is simply frustrating—something to be absorbed,
learned from, tried again someday perhaps. On the other hand, this experience
is not-so-simply rather alarming—a stark reminder that people will mobilize
tremendous resources for immediate concerns, but withhold those resources when
it comes to contesting a major human rights catastrophe in the making.
It’s not
hard to grasp the potentially genocidal consequences of current U.S. policy.
But it is a bit harder to integrate that understanding into your daily life,
and let it affect your actions. How
will this knowledge change you? What will it make you question about how you
spend your time, what you do with your money, whether you are doing everything
in your power to reduce the horror. Maybe before, when you sheltered yourself
from this knowledge, you never wondered if it was okay to spend time watching
the Yankees’ game. Now you are wondering.
And you
are looking around at the peace activists and realizing that working in
coalition with people to stop a major atrocity can mean aligning yourself with
people you don’t agree with—or even who you find personally threatening. Some
of the people fighting this war might be the same ones that, in another forum,
would be your boss, deny you a living wage, ensure more privileges for the
already privileged. Some of your fellow peace activists would be horrified by
your sexuality, find you perverse, or wish you out of existence. They may have
never learned to listen to women or take people of color seriously. You survey
the growing legions of peace activists and wonder if they’re the same people
who are gentrifying your neighborhood, planting tulips in the park but letting
affordable housing go down the drain, never showing up to protest police
violence or the gutting of welfare. Working with these people can be
alienating, disheartening, downright soul-killing.
Should
you do it anyway?
To
answer that question, keep in mind that there are ways to ease this necessary work
of talking and listening, putting ourselves face- to-face with brutal,
merciless or just plain petty thinking, and risking fragile coalitions.
1. Pick the community you can work best in.
There is a growing peace movement, but if that is not your political “home,”
then work elsewhere—in your neighborhood, your union, your place of worship,
your community organization. Don’t stop doing the political work you were doing
before, but do look for new connections. Now is the time.
2. We should appropriately acknowledge the
frustration and alarm that will be part and parcel of organizing work, but we
should also be careful not to overstate it. No matter how alarmed we might be
by people’s denial, people’s rejection of a moral stance, people’s downright
selfishness, nothing compares to the alarm of those at the receiving end of
U.S. bombs and U.S. orchestrated starvation. Keep your frustration in
perspective.
3. Join others for solidarity, support, shared
inspiration, venting opportunities, perspective, and retreat from the
challenges. Know that organizing is painstaking work, and you need to create
conditions that will allow you to do it for a long time.
4. Know when to walk away. You don’t have to
talk to everyone. Don’t waste time and energy engaging with the person who is
going ballistic, but use your energy instead for the many sensible people that
have their hearts in the right place but who lack information or support for
entertaining alternative points of view.
5. Don’t judge every interaction. It may feel like
you failed to reach someone, but people’s growing consciousness doesn’t follow
a linear path. They may ignore you, but later privately read the literature you
hand out, and this may affect how they read the newspaper the next day. Each
step is exactly that, and with others adding their efforts, each step matters
more.
6. Finally, pick the work you can do most
effectively. If a two-hour tabling stint on your main street leaves you feeling
drained, despairing or frightened, then do something else. Write an emergency
grant to help pay for all the leaflets and posters. Volunteer to manage the
data base for your organization. Set up the web site, collate the articles,
moderate the list serve, host the house parties, bring food to the meetings,
design the banners, or take part in any of the numerous background activities
that are essential to movement building.
Sound
simple? It is and it isn’t. Each of us, individually, has a responsibility to
figure out how we can negotiate the organizing challenges and moral imperatives
of the current crisis. Together, our job is to knit our individual abilities
into a mass movement that pressures our government to back off from its
bloodletting. The not-so-simple problem with this mandate is that it won’t be
easy. The simple fact, however, is that we must do it anyway.
From Z
Magazine/Z Net.
--
Randy
Schutt
Author
of Inciting Democracy: A Practical Proposal for Creating a Good Society and
initiator of the Vernal Education Project:
Working
to increase the skills and support of progressive activists
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