 July/August 2002
American Friends Service Committee Peacework Magazine Patrica Watson, Editor Sara Burke, Assistant Editor Pat Farren, Founding Editor 2161 Massachusetts Ave. Telephone number: Fax number:
pwork@igc.org Peacework has been published monthly since 1972, intended to serve as a source of dependable information to those who strive for peace and justice and are committed to furthering the nonviolent social change necessary to achieve them. Rooted in Quaker values and informed by AFSC experience and initiatives, Peacework offers a forum for organizers, fostering coalition-building and teaching the methods and strategies that work in the global and local community. Peacework seeks to serve as an incubator for social transformation, introducing a younger generation to a deeper analysis of problems and issues, reminding and re-inspiring long-term activists, encouraging the generations to listen to each other, and creating space for the voices of the disenfranchised. Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC. |
Tools for Optimism
Colman McCarthy, I'd Rather Teach Peace. Maryknoll,
NY: Orbis Books, 2002. 140 pp. $18.00
These books helped, as I was drawn into conversations with junior high, high school, and college students, church and community activists since September 11. Generally, they acknowledged widely discordant and painful feelings about the extended war on terrorism, the escalation of conflicts in Israel and Colombia. They spoke about feeling isolated, angry, confused, reacting with genuine horror at the behavior of the Bush administration, yet with concern about the injustice of the attacks and about people risking their lives to alleviate suffering in Afghanistan. At the same time, Dr. Bernard Lafayette, among several others, argued that "it is a great time for nonviolence." His saying this while helping to build zones of peace in Colombia, at great personal risk, gave his assertion special meaning, as did the books I discuss here, which grew directly out of classrooms devoted to nonviolence theory and practice. The first is Colman McCarthy's characteristically witty and practical account of teaching nonviolence at a youth prison, a school without walls, public and private high schools, a law school and a university in the Washington, DC area, as well as a six-week mini-course for college students interning in the city. Since 1982, McCarthy has taught more than five thousand students that "alternatives to violence exist, and if individuals and nations can organize themselves properly, nonviolent force is always stronger, more enduring, and assuredly more moral than violent force." McCarthy's narrative is tightly written, informative, and occasionally hilarious, reflecting his skills as a columnist for the Washington Post for twenty-seven years and as a teacher "in the trenches" for twenty years. I hope that the brief passages in the sidebar suggest how readable and useful it is. Michael Nagler's book on nonviolence is equally valuable, in a different, more personal mode of reflection and explication. Winner of the American Book Award, it traces his own "journey to nonviolence," including his founding of peace and conflict studies at UC Berkeley, in addition to his distinguished career as a scholar of Greek and Latin literature. Nagler wears his learning lightly, while pointing to example after example of times when nonviolence worked, and how nonviolence philosophy and strategy inform one another. In an interview to be published in the September issue of Peacework, the author will speak for himself. If that interview doesn't urge one to read his book, nothing will. Another book providing concrete reflection about "what must be done" is Jack Cook's Bowery Blues: A Tribute to Dorothy Day, by one of the best writers ever to appear in the monthly Catholic Worker. Author of a classic prison memoir about his time as a draft resister during the Vietnam War, The Rags of Time: A Season in Prison (1972), Cook understands Day's genius in uniting radical politics and traditional spirituality in a manner that contributed to the enduring vitality of the Catholic Worker movement. In Nonkilling Global Political Science, Glenn D. Paige, University of Hawaii political scientist, specialist on Korea, and founder of the Center for Global Nonviolence, treats a nonkilling society as a possibility. Achieving that goal depends on changing the academic discipline of political science, he argues, and its assumption that "killing is an inevitable attribute of human nature and social life." In recommending Paige's book, James MacGregor Burns said that he has never seen "the possibility of nonkilling analyzed more hopefully, or the implications for political scientists presented so persuasively--all in spare and moving language." Since September 11, teachers of peace studies and nonviolence education have faced particular challenges, in listening carefully and responding to young people in considerable pain, confusion, anger, and uncertainty about the future. The response of a Wesleyan University student in David Adams's class on "Cultures of Peace" is representative. Asked why he enrolled in the course, the student answered, "I enrolled in this course to learn tools for optimism." Both practically and pedagogically, these four books are an aid to anyone trying to remain purposeful in building and sustaining cultures of peace. So are the poems of Denise Levertov, as I suggested at the beginning. Few writers have succeeded in conveying so accurately and eloquently what it's like to think and to feel at this historical moment. Although they were written five years ago, Levertov's The Great Unknowing: Last Poems, edited by Paul Lacey, return to themes that preoccupied Levertov throughout much of her life. It's a time, as she says in "Immersion," when "There is anger abroad in the world, a numb thunder, because of God's silence." Although attentive to the threat of nuclear war and social injustices, Levertov always retained her delight in the world around her. The opening lines of "Aware" are representative: "When I opened the door/I found the vine leaves/ speaking among themselves in abundant/ whispers." Similarly, in another poem, she speaks about "What patience a landscape has, like an old horse,/ head down in its field," and about "what patience a hill, a plain, a band of woodland holding still, have, and the slow falling of grey rain." Acknowledging an attribute that gave her lyric poems such resonance, she says that "Memory demands so much,/ it wants every fiber/ told and retold./ It gives and gives/ but for a price." Remembering what war and killing are really about, these writers in prose and poetry offer sustenance, an essential tool for peacemaking--and for optimism--over the long haul.
--Michael True, peace studies scholar and frequent
Peacework contributor, is a member of Worcester (MA)-Pleasant
Street Friends Meeting. From Colman McCarthy's I'd Rather Teach Peace. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002 Anyone who says, "I like to avoid conflict," should be given a one-way ticket to Mars, Neptune, or Pluto. The US Congress gives $700 million a day to the Pentagon, which is $8000 a second and three times the Peace Corps budget for a year. Educationally, I learned that my students were hungry to explore the unknown landscape of pacifism, nonviolence, and peaceful conflict resolution. On earth, what Whitehead called a third-rate planet revolving around a second-rate sun, we have conflict. By definition, conflict means only this: we need to change our way of dealing with one another, because the old way isn't working. What I have surety about is that students come into my classes already well educated, often overeducated, in the ethic of violence. The educators? The nation's long-tenured cultural faculty: political leaders who fund wars and send the young to fight them, judges and juries who dispatch people to death row, film makers who script gunplay movies and cartoons, toy manufacturers marketing "action games,".....
Whether it's across a living room or across an ocean, conflicts
will be faced either through violent force or nonviolent force.
No third way exists. 
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