Stop the Next War Now (33 page)

Authors: Medea Benjamin

For the first time since the founding of our country, our nation’s foreign-policy blueprint calls for global military domination—an “American Century.” In his speech at American University on June 10, 1963, John F. Kennedy spoke of seeking genuine peace, “not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war, not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave.” George Washington, a century earlier, recommended that the United States conduct its foreign policy as “our interest, guided by our justice,” directs. He cautioned against passionate attachments to foreign countries and warned against militarism. Yet the very priorities outlined by the current advisers to our current president go against the very cautions and concerns that both George Washington and John F. Kennedy expressed.

What can we do? How can we navigate with conscience a terrain littered with the remains of those who sacrificed themselves before us, but who now seem like a distant memory? We can steep ourselves in the intergenerational dialogue that allows us all to be students in wonderment of how much we can accomplish when we love one another, stand up for one another, defy conventional wisdom with one another. A new possibility can be created. The war machine must stop now.

We’ve seen it happen before. From the Africans who passed through that portal of no return, to the Maroons who escaped slavery high in the Jamaican mountains, to the workers on the South American
latifundias
. Our story has been written by our resistance.

College students in Greensboro, North Carolina, wrote the page on sitins at lunch counters across the South; they all contributed to the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Young black children facing dogs and fire hoses began the chapter on harassment, threats, intimidation, and death; four little girls blown to bits in church don’t even end that chapter. Agitation for the right to vote contributed to the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Just imagine what America would have been like if Sojourner Truth hadn’t journeyed across America and told the truth! Suppose Fannie Lou Hamer had gotten sick and tired of being sick and tired and just left the movement to someone else?

Who among you will step forward and continue the struggle against injustice? And if no one is willing to do it, what kind of America will our children inherit?

The new America that is being made right now.

“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”

—Eleanor Roosevelt

TO THE

NEXT GENERATION

OF PEACEMAKERS

ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN

Adrienne Maree Brown is a writer, pleasure activist, and singer living in Brooklyn, NY. She is coeditor of
How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office
(available at www.indy voter.org). During the day she is the program director of the League of Young Voters, a national nonprofit voter-organizer-training organization.

If Churchill was right, and the power of the heart gives in to the cold calculations of the mind with age, then those who are young must beat now, while their hearts still know how. Rarely do young people start wars, but often they must carry the burdens, the shame and guilt of the struggle, long after it is over. But you must understand—war isn’t something any of us merely inherit, even if a conflict is well under way when we come of age; we play our own part, either exacerbating or impeding it. We must battle back.

How? Begin by developing a revolutionary analysis. Challenge yourself to imagine the world without superpowers, without profit-driven education and health care, without advertisement-based media. Create your own sacred vision, and make your mind a home for your revolutionary dream.

Next, holding tight to this dream, wake up a realist. Who could you elect into what positions who would help realize your revolutionary dream? Some argue that we can’t work within the current political system—that we must reject it, wholesale, or otherwise be trapped in a negative, reactive process. But on some level, I think, we must acknowledge when we are backed into a corner and we must learn with our hands the shape and walls of our corner in order to break free from it. You must understand your prison, the system, to change it and escape it. Don’t give up on your radical dream; instead, actively promote it with each word, each action, each vote.

Music vs.Military. Linocut.

Question everything. Trust no one’s rhetoric, even mine—we all want to be believed. With a loving heart, be critical of those who would presume to lead you. Make your own voice heard in letters to the editor and on the airwaves.

Don’t be active only in election years—the stage for war is set in the years when we’re not watching. Involve yourself in the politics of every day. Stand up for human rights today, tomorrow, and the day after that. Don’t buy the coffee that builds walls through Palestine. Don’t buy the shirts that bear the blood of weary fingers. Don’t travel with the oil our brothers died to steal. Don’t fund wars. If you truly want peace, you must invest in it. Research where you spend your money and where your schools spend their money, and fight to pull resources out of the war effort.

Remember that war is not only the dropping of bombs, though we do that. War is not only the torturing of prisoners, though we do that. War is also the daily oppression of people through prisons and poverty. If your luxury demands war on other nations or the oppression of people on the other side of the world, live a simpler life. Do everything you can not to be indulgent at the expense of other people’s lives.

To generate power for peace, run for office, or donate to community candidates so they can afford to run. Fill some of the less-glamorous roles in your local government—sheriff, school board member, city council representative. Vote in every possible election. Then pay attention to whether your representatives are acting on your community’s behalf; organize policy watchdog teams and make your elected officials accountable for their decisions. Seek out alternative media and donate to it. Make peace a constant part of your life and your world. Seek out mentors for living in peace and learn from them. Be completely engaged.

Have a revolutionary dream and then wake up with strategies to stake a claim on the power you need to realize that dream. It is not an option, as a human aware of the beauty and ills of this world of ours, to sleep.

“Life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for

those who think. It is vital to mourn for the victims of this

government but not at the expense of losing our sense

of humor. Our ability to laugh coincides directly with our ability

to fight. If we can make fun of it, we can transcend it.”

—Margaret Cho

THE OPPORTUNITY

OF IMPRISONMENT

SHARON SALZBERG

Sharon Salzberg is one of America’s leading spiritual teachers and writers. Her latest book is
Faith
. Her work has been included in
Meetings with Remarkable Women, Gifts of the Spirit, A Complete Guide to Buddhist America, Handbook of the Heart,The Best Guide to Meditation
, and most recently,
From the Ashes
. The following piece is adapted from
A Heart as Wide as the World
by Sharon Salzberg.

In 1989 Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the prodemocracy movement in Burma, was placed under house arrest for her political activities. At the time of her arrest, Suu Kyi’s sons were only twelve and sixteen, and it would be years before she was able to see them again. It took more than two years before she was even able to see her husband. By 1991, the same year she received the Nobel Peace Prize, Suu Kyi was still a prisoner.

Describing her years of imprisonment, Suu Kyi wrote, “I refused to accept anything from the military. Sometimes I didn’t even have enough money to eat. I became so weak from malnourishment that my hair fell out, and I couldn’t get out of bed.” Despite the depth of her suffering, this awakened warrior later said, “When I compared notes with my colleagues in the democracy movement in Burma who have suffered long terms of imprisonment, we found that an enhanced appreciation of
metta
(lovingkindness) was a common experience. We had known and felt both the effects of
metta
and the unwholesomeness of natures lacking in
metta
.”

How remarkable to be separated from your family, to face hunger and fear, and yet be able to view the ordeal in terms of an enhanced appreciation of lovingkindness. During her imprisonment, Suu Kyi did not have food and money, but she did have
metta
, and she did have her spiritual practice. I have talked both to people imprisoned by their bodies, who are in long-term chronic pain, and to people who have been held hostage in some way by an unsympathetic person or uncaring system. Years ago in South Africa, I talked to people who shockingly asked about the efficacy of the practice of spirituality in facing torture. I’ve known many people deeply, horribly afraid of someone or something in their lives. I myself have felt completely out of control at times, sitting in a doctor’s office, waiting to see how my own life and death could turn on a dime.

It is tremendously inspiring for me to see someone whose situation is frightening and full of personal loss, and who yet remains steadfast in the values of her spiritual practice while accomplishing what she feels needs to be done. Qualities like
metta
allow us to remember what our efforts for freedom are fundamentally about: to remember the light in this life and in this world. Suu Kyi has said, “The spiritual dimension becomes particularly important in a struggle in which deeply held convictions and strength of mind are the chief weapons against armed repression.”

About a year after Aung San Suu Kyi’s release from house arrest, the State Law and Order Restoration Council, also known as SLORC, made sweeping arrests of members of her political party. Outside her Rangoon home, Suu Kyi told a crowd of about ten thousand that her party would not bend to pressure from the military government but would push ahead toward its goal of democracy for Burma. Rumors rapidly spread of SLORC’s intention to rearrest her. Suu Kyi’s response was, “It will be an opportunity to strengthen my spiritual life.”

How could the threat of reimprisonment not make her waver from her goal for others or herself? Instead of giving up, returning to her family, and leaving the country, she made this statement: “SLORC doesn’t understand how helpful my years of house arrest were to me. If I’m arrested, we’ll go forward. If I’m not arrested, we’ll go forward.” Aung San Suu Kyi remains essentially free, even when she is imprisoned. For she knows this, and we must know it too when we face imprisoning conditions in our own lives: whether we are imprisoned or not, if we follow the tenets of lovingkindness, we will know what it means to be free.

“Hope is the dream whose time has come, whose dance is

already real—even if some of us cannot hear the music.”

—Sister Joan Chittister