May 2000

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

From the editor's desk

Quakers in the Boston area have held a silent vigil for peace on the Boston Common each Good Friday since 1961 when a wise Friend started worrying about nuclear weapons and unrest in Indo-China. The Year 2000 leaflet focused on the cruelty of sanctions against the people of Iraq. It was a raw event. For one thing, there was a cold rain. But more immediately, the Quakers stood along a sidewalk where a number of homeless people tend to gather, and the vigil encroached on their space. The intersection of the two groups was jagged. Quakers, accustomed to the civility of Cambridge's Brahmin Longfellow Park, with our Easter message of compassion; street people firmly rooted in the despair and fury and darkness of the present day reality of Good Friday: "What about us? We're hungry." "They're our enemy." "Nuke 'em."

Plenty of lessons here that occupy us as we lay out Peacework's May offerings. Food, for starters. It's hard to talk policy reasonably on an empty stomach. On Friday, Food Not Bombs arrived on the Common with their weekly noontime meal, and things calmed. Quakers might take a lesson from that direct ministry to clear needs, and of course many, including AFSC, do. But from university halls to the streets of the capital, debate does not calm down. What about genetically modified foods? Who benefits? What risks? Who profits? Who decides? Phil Bereano and Florian Kraus, writing as scientists, suggest the Europeans are right to worry about these questions.

Donella Meadows and her students agree. She takes as her final example the explosion weirdly nicknamed Trinity, when atomic science spun out of control. That image moves us into the nuclear arena where we honor two--Mordecai Vanunu and Philip Berrigan--who have chosen to dissent through sacrificial witness. Vanunu's disclosure of Israel's nuclear bomb-making mirrors Berrigan's stand against weapons made from depleted uranium. And thus to Iraq, where DU-enriched bullets were deployed, and victor and vanquished both are the worse for it. Iraq is also, of course, where our government is using denial of food and medicine as a weapon of mass destruction.

In Bolivia there have been protests about water; in Boston and around the US, against the militarism which eats up the tax dollars which might alleviate hunger, for instance, and which engenders a dangerous brand of soldiering and of thinking about soldiering. Witness the use of children as soldiers and our own country's reluctance to give up the option. Witness also the nightmare juxtaposition we find on Peacework's page 12: demonstrations against the School of the Americas on the one hand; on the other hand, the uprising in Cochabamba, Bolivia, where officials at all levels are comfortably allied with multi-national corporations, turn guns on their own citizens, and are graduates of that School.

In Washington, questions about hunger, war, profit, power, governance all converged last week. The powerful protest movement which has forced the questions into the open is still very much a work in progress. People who landed in jail, in many instances after arbitrary arrests, encountered shocking treatment at the hands of the US criminal justice system--homophobia, judicial deception, and old-fashioned brutality. "Their resolve is stronger than ever," said an organizer, "but their faith in the system is diminished."

Finally, in Okinawa and Korea, citizens are deeply worried about a peculiar US export--again militarism. We have appeals from both countries in this month aptly named Asian Pacific American Heritage month. One of our volunteers found some poems in his bookshelf which speak to that troubled legacy.

Right in the middle of all this, Peacework offers you a father's account of how he and his young daughter came to write a book about squashing ants. They ask their readers the peacemaker's question, the question Quakers were trying to ask themselves, passersby, and, yes, the street people on the Boston Common: "How would you feel?"