April 2000
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. |
From the editor's desk
Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote --Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, circa 138701400 It's the time, in e. e. cummings' words, of "just spring / when the world is mudlucious and puddlewonderful." Of course, April has also been indelibly described as the cruelest month. Assassinations and suicide peak; spring seems to be a time of unbearable contradictions, dangerous impulses, and grim anniversaries. The material in this April Peacework takes us, if we dare, on pilgrimages--those journeys of repentance and hope--to some of the dark places. US troops fled Vietnam 25 years ago this month. That beautiful peninsula still bears the scars of its decades-long war against colonial and post-colonial powers; the conscience of this nation also bears deep scars. Doug Hostetter revisits his sojourn there. Helen Prejean has performed the journey of accompaniment on death row. We readers go with her to confront our peculiar institution of state-sanctioned murder. The Prison Dharma Walk, now underway, is an actual pilgrimage--we can join the walkers if we choose, filing past sites of executions and places where people languish, condemned to die. Michael Moore takes us to mourn a death in Flint, Michigan. But we need not travel so far, he reminds us; we can find deadly instruments in our own communities--poverty, abandonment, and, of course, guns. Many will make a pilgrimage to Washington, DC in May to join the Million Moms marching against handguns and our bizarre national passivity about (or is it love affair with?) lethal weapons. Marty Jezer ponders the perils of such weapons in the hands of police, while the young people at De Militarized Zine take this thought a step further and consider the effects of the militarized national mind on the social fabric at home and worldwide. What's to be done? Well, take heart. Take a lesson from youth in California as they "take Prop 21 personally" and battle to get money out of prisons and into schools. It may well be that this spring is a Kairos--a teachable moment. Riding the crest of Seattle, many movements to correct the social order, to address injustices, are afoot. (See our back page for important notices.) How we set about doing the job is critical, lest the moment and the power be lost. This Sunday afternoon in Copley Square we watched parade marshals committed to nonviolence patiently engaging with provocateurs at Boston's "Biodevastation2000" rally. It's a crucial question whether the nonviolent activists will be able to hold steady. Roy Morrison talks about organizing and what's at stake. Those of us who care about the issues--global corporate power and greed, environmental degradation, nuclear proliferation, human rights, the genocidal Iraq sanctions--had best be ready to be organized. Yet the job ahead is not simply defined and serious people disagree, as Joseph Gerson's discussion of the two Chinas and trade relations reminds us. Mozambique presents an example of a place where "natural" disaster was partly caused and hugely exacerbated by the environmental folly and the corporate greed of the world economic policies which the protesters at Seattle set out to address. For most of us, a pilgrimage to Southern Africa must be by means of letters to policy makers and world bankers, and by our support for long-term reconstruction. It's jarring to consider the ghosts of racism and bigotry raised by Joerg Haider in Austria during these same spring days when Pope John Paul II is visiting the Holy Land and places where many Muslims, Jews, and Christians believe "God chose to pitch His tent." He made a pilgrimage of remorse to the Hall of Remembrance, Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, in Jerusalem on March 23: In this place of memories, the mind and heart and soul feel an extreme need for silence. Silence in which to remember. Silence in which to make some sense of the memories which come flooding back. Silence because there are no words strong enough to deplore the terrible tragedy of the Shoah. "Spring is the season when wars break out in the Balkans," write the Women in Black. Thus has it always been. Here we are, in April of the Year 2000. We've got some serious traveling to do.
|
|
|