From the Editor's Desk

If solidarity is, as Miguel D'Escoto Brockmann declared on assuming the presidency of the United Nations last month, both the means and the result of following "the promptings of love" - then it will be strange and wonderful indeed if it starts being the order of the day at the United Nations. I mean, if we want to be united, why even have nations?

Between waging wars on each other, waging war on their own citizens, and coercing poor people into doing all the actual fighting in both kinds of wars, it isn't surprising that governments are too busy to figure out how to renounce violence. I celebrate D'Escoto's vision, and his determination to bring the voices of the world's ordinary people into the exalted halls of international diplomacy. Meanwhile, we won't wait. The promptings of love won't allow it.

Without the strongest motivation, surely no-one would accept the challenges that real solidarity brings. Our cover photo this month shows some of the many Palestinian, Israeli, and international demonstrators who were tear-gassed and beaten for participating in an October demonstration against the construction of a border wall. Week after week, people go back, often with similar consequences. The wall, and the checkpoints and the settlements, are too screamingly insulting to ignore. They were designed to gall, and they do. The powerful miracle is not that people are protesting, but that they are doing so with actions that are explicitly nonviolent. Only by reaching across, around, and through those fear-built barriers can we begin to create a space where no-one will feel the need to build another one. As a group of young Israeli conscientious objectors says, "In a place where there are humans, there is someone to talk to."

Throughout this issue of Peacework, people testify to the price they paid - or fear they may pay - for acting in solidarity. William Stafford's pacifism, a refusal to see others as the enemy, led him to spend several hard, isolated years working in the Civilian Public Service Camps during World War II. Azalia Mitchell, a community public health worker, travels to areas where there is no comfortable denial of the fact that easily preventable and treatable diseases are killing people for want of the most basic education. In a call to US faith groups and peace organizations to be more proactive in supporting the rights of Muslims and Arab Americans, Nancy Milio warns that people in these communities may be justifiably wary, having endured so much harassment and so many broken promises.

But it's hard to move around when there are walls everywhere. It's hard to see the world, find God, love your family, when you have to negotiate hostile border guards every time you try to take a step. In what has to be one of the most breathtaking examples of tearing down walls, Hutu and Tutsi participants in community healing workshops find that they can speak openly with each other about their experiences as perpetrators and victims of the 1993 Rwandan genocide, and can walk in trust together. Many describe how afterward, for the first time since the violence that tore their lives apart, they feel human again.

Let us support each other in every way we can to be so brave, so attentive to the promptings of love. As William Stafford wrote during his conscientious objector service in 1943:

I am meeting you wherever you are.
I am on my way.
Do not let the distance and the time
Of that way influence you.
I am coming toward you.