From the editor's desk

At the memorial service this morning for Henry Hampton, the master film maker of Eyes on the Prize, the minister said "All's well with Henry, but all is not well with us."

It's been very hard to put this issue of Peacework together-there is simply too much going on as we shamble toward the year 2000. Our list of topics on the cover is ridiculous. Yet this is what we go to bed with every night; this is what we wake up to in the morning.

There are odd convergences and collisions in the material we've assembled:

The findings of a Nobel laureate, economist Amartya Sen, working in Africa and on the Indian subcontinent, have direct application to Central America struggling out from under Mitch and the effects of social and environmental degradation and global bankers' mandates. Those findings apply as well to the plight of poor and homeless families in the US whose message Cheri Honkala relates.

Desmond Tutu in South Africa and the Pilgrimage of the Middle Passage making its way along the route this country's slaves took are both mapping lesson plans for Pinochet's heirs. Ireland is in the midst of its own "middle passage"-that fearful voyage between freedom and enslavement. How will the Irish define the words "truth and reconciliation?" Upon which shore will they debark?

Kwame Ture, difficult prophet of Black Power, died last month. Martin Luther King, whose birthday and wisdom we celebrate this season, phoned Ture (better known in this country as Stokely Carmichael) the night before King made his statement opposing the Vietnam War. Two books with roots in that war have been sitting on our desk for a while, awaiting review-poems by Daniel Berrigan, and a collection of veterans' stories. Our reviewers are themselves veterans-survivors and witnesses-of that war. It was a war that, in the view of many, disproportionately sent poor black young men from this country to kill poor brown people in southeast Asia, all to preserve a dubious empire.

Phillip Berrigan, brother of the poet Daniel, was released from jail Thanksgiving week. Some readers may take issue with reviewer Michael Uhl's assessment of him. We do. The judge who sentenced him called Berrigan "a man of considerable conscience." He went to jail for witnessing against the same holocaust the Hibakusha protest. Those survivor-witnesses of nuclear disaster-from Japan, from the Marshall Islands, from Kazakhstan, from Russia, from the ranks of US "down-winders" and Navajo uranium miners-are joined by a new class-Iraqis exposed to the depleted uranium shells of the Gulf War.

So what's an article about 1968 doing here? Didn't Peacework deal with that in our April issue? Well for one thing, no book is ever closed; for another, we really liked Marty Jezer's piece. 1968 was a convergence year, a Kairos if you will, full of opportunities and promise-to establish civil and human rights, to stop making war-all made messy by electoral politics. Since, as Jezer observes, we blew it, we're back again, stuck with the same agenda-civil and human rights; the messy US political system; atomic weapons, war, and the victims of war.

Thus back to Henry Hampton. He was a supreme artist-teacher; he believed in stories as political weapons, and he believed in the healing power of truth. Eulogizing Henry, the great African American historian Vincent Harding asked, "Who is left to heal the world?" Harding's terrifying answer was, "We are."