We Must Remake the World

Barbara Schulman is a longtime feminist and anti-racist activist, and currently a member of Jewish Women for Justice in Israel/Palestine, as well as the Boston Coalition for Palestinian Rights. This is the text of her speech at the "United We Stand against the Cycle of Violence" vigil Copley Sq., Boston, 9/23/01.

Thank you all for being here today. Gatherings like this one that are taking place all around our nation are the brightest beacons in this moment of terrible darkness.

Barbara Schulman, Copley Square, Boston, Sept. 23 © Ellen Shub

Our presence here today represents a choice, a choice with which every one of us in this country is now faced--and it is not the choice George Bush has presented to the world. It is a choice to resist the propaganda of hate that saturates our society. It is a choice to refuse to be divided by racism, terror, and warmongering. It is a choice to ask ourselves hard questions about our country and its policies. It is a choice to open our eyes rather than continuing to look at the world around us with our eyes wide shut.

I want to talk today about the tasks before us, which are many and difficult. I also want to talk about the opportunities that are open to us, if we are thoughtful and courageous enough to embrace them.

Speech, silence, and power

First, I want to talk about speech, silence and power. For many of us who have long been critical of US foreign and domestic policy, it has been difficult to find words to describe our responses to the September 11 attacks. Although we have known that the need for our speech, for our words, has never been more urgent, we have been at a loss to find the right words. The enormity of the horror and the immediacy of the loss have conspired to keep us silent, partly out of respect, and partly out of our own inner turmoil.

But speak we must, for every moment that we continue to be mute about what we know to be true, we allow those who would manipulate public confusion and fear into consolidations of national identity that create an "innocent us" and an "enemy them" to fill the space of our silence with their words, their symbols, their agendas, and their justifications for actions that will only lead to indescribable catastrophe and a loss of lives that dwarfs anything we have yet seen.

We must be willing to suspend our emotional and material investments in the innocence of our nation's policies and practices, to look beyond the lies we are fed promoting the United States as the world's great benefactor. We must be vigilant against the excesses of nationalism and blind tribal loyalty that have wrought so much devastation throughout the history of the world. We must recognize that our own nationalist impulses are too easily coopted into the service of the same deadly outcomes. We must refuse to allow every crevice of public space to be filled with the dangerous expressions of militarized patriotism. We must instead fill that space with our voices and our visions for an alternative world, a world in which such terrors as we are experiencing are never again visited upon any member of the human family.

And there is space for our speech, because all over this country people are asking themselves life's deepest questions: What matters to me? What are the values I support? How do I really want to live? It is up to us to ensure that another question is added to that list. How has our ignorance about what our country does in our name, our willful ignorance of the sufferings we have wrought around the world, contributed to this disaster?

Yes, we must speak what we know to be true about the context for this tragedy, but we must lead with our compassion and speak from our hearts, not from our rhetoric. We must reach down inside ourselves, past the unbearable grief, the terrible gripping fear, the potentially deadly rage, and find clarity in our vision for the world in which we want to live. And then every one of us must bring that vision to words and speak it out loud and write it on every surface, everyplace we go and with all the power we can muster.

Compassion, awareness, and hope

Second, I want to encourage us to look to the compassion, awareness, and hope that can be mined from the depths of our fear and our pain. Yes, the scale of this horror has generated a foundation of terror and grief that bonds us all in common vulnerability; but the lessons of this tragedy will be lost if we do not use it as an opportunity to build new understandings of the differences in our daily experiences of safety, danger, and the presumptions of "freedom."

At this time when deathly fear has been made more palpable than it has ever been for us as a nation, we have an opportunity to understand the variety of chronic regimes of terror under which many in this country and around the world live every day, but which go largely unnoticed by those not directly affected: the terror of racial profiling, the terror of immigrant-bashing, the terror of not being able to feed one's children, the terror of having no choice but to perform backbreaking labor under inhuman conditions, the terror of being regularly beaten by one's lover or spouse, the terror of being attacked on the street for holding hands with one's same-sex partner, the terror of being taken from one's home in the middle of the night, the terror of living under constant threat of bombardment and siege, often by weapons manufactured in and supplied by the United States and supported by our tax dollars.

This new knowledge that our empathy and compassion can yield is our best hope for transformation. We each have before us a tremendous opportunity to reach out beyond our communities of interest, identity, and comfort. This is not politics as usual: we all have lessons to learn and we must listen to one another with new ears. And what we learn by listening must then shape the actions we go on to take. People of conscience of every identity, people who have been struggling for justice on every front, can find a place for the issues that matter to them in the movement we must build together. And make no mistake: what we must build is no less than a movement to remake the world.

The leadership of women

Finally, I want to urge us all at this time to look to the leadership of women. From the local to the national to the transnational level, let us learn from the examples of women who have been collaborating and organizing across the differences intended to divide us. Let us look to the heroic refusal of Rep. Barbara Lee of California, the lone member of Congress to vote against awarding George Bush unlimited powers to pursue a deadly war. Let us look to the work of the international movement of Women in Black, which was just nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for its work in the Middle East and in Serbia, and to Women Waging Peace, an international network of women's groups that have been working for the shared interests of their peoples in numerous contexts of war and devastation. These groups have exposed the ways that ideas about "manhood" and "masculinity" are consolidated to advance militarist goals, and ideas about "femininity" are used to relegate women of vision and courage to a shadowy background, always to be acted upon, never to be actors. These organizations advance a true vision of "international security." They offer us models of hope that we must embrace.

I will close by reiterating that we are faced with a choice. It is a choice to form our reactions to this tragedy from the best we have to offer, rather than the worst. It is a choice to remake the world in the image of a beloved community of global citizens, a community that we help to bring into being by gathering in grief, hope, and resistance, and by the actions we each continue to take in our personal and political worlds every moment of our lives from this day forward. Let us all make that choice, and let us all go forth and make that world.

Previous Article      Next Article