 October 2004
American Friends Service Committee Peacework Magazine Sara Burke, Managing Editor Sam Diener, 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 As we head for November, I'm starting to think there must be something to this voting thing after all, or people wouldn't try so hard to keep other people from doing it. Across the US (not only in Florida), strenuous efforts are underway to cheat of their votes the same people who have been cheated of so much else. In this issue, the People for the American Way Foundation offers some critical information about these shocking efforts, and about ways we can help reclaim the awesome potential of the vote.
Part of reclaiming our power comes from being able to see and hear each other, in all our numbers. As Rachael Kamel observes in her notes on the recent demonstrations in New York, this is what was partially prevented by the city's denial of permission to rally. We are renewed when we brave the police to march together, when we ignore the protest pens to gather for mutual education at events like the Boston Social Forum, and when we greet our neighbors at our voting places. Please join us on October 21 for an evening with historian, educator, and author Howard Zinn. In the tradition of his compatriot Pat Farren, in whose memory we hold this annual event, Howard offers perspectives that are illuminating, inspiring, and useful. (Furthermore, he speaks with equal clarity, and listens with equal respect, to people of all generations. Bring along a high school student!) We chose for this issue to include a "speech" Howard Zinn wrote for LBJ -- the speech we longed for then as we long for it now -- explaining to the people of the United States why we were bringing the soldiers home and ending the war. When neighbors are successfully stirred up against one another, the divisions are never as neat as the rhetoric that demands them. Mike True shares with us the work of Amitav Ghosh, whose books probe the places where families, towns, and nations are torn apart, and also the ways they grow together again. In the Caucasus, lives are sacrificed to a centuries-old conflict between "two peoples who are both losing a shameful war," says an appeal addressed to the UN from both Russians and Chechens. In Darfur, Sudan the divisions are not old, though they are being effected brutally and on a horrifying scale. Amnesty International offers a clear, practical, and imperative plan for healing; one which will not go forward without strong pressure. In both conflicts, the United Nations can be the lever, but we must apply the force. A number of articles in this issue touch on how we raise our children to understand the wars of their times (and the wars that came before them). As generation after generation of parents discovers, the lessons parents themselves choose to offer make up only a part of what is learned. In his overview of a global, war-based economy driven especially by a narrow conception of US interests, Joe Gerson notes that it was his fourth-grade teacher who, if unintentionally, gave him his first clear view of "the mercantile theory of history." Yitzhak Laor, heavy-hearted in Israel, describes the Independence Day visit to his nine-year-old's classroom of a uniformed Israeli Defense Force colonel. The officer assured the children that "we don't kill unless there's a really good reason." This assurance has also been offered throughout military history to the soldiers doing the killing -- offered not as a caution, but as a tautology, a justification. If we killed someone, there must have been a good reason. The soldiers who speak in Laor's piece about their experiences patrolling the area near the settlement at Hebron have rejected this bankrupt reassurance. The unbearable gift, of course, is that every child is our own. Faced with this devastating responsibility, each of us feels again and again the overwhelming inadequacy of the brand-new parent. We should be overwhelmed -- there are so many children to protect, and so many dangers! But think how many parents there are, and think of our ferocity in the moment when we cease to deny our responsibility. Will we allow other people's children to settle, in their hunger for attention, structure, and opportunity, for JROTC "classes" instead of the real education they need? Read Hannah Zwirner's searching reflection on conversations with her peers in Boston's high schools, take note of the many excellent resources available to resist the military recruitment of children, and heed the call. 
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