New Quaker Notebook

The challenge to peacemakers. Well, I won't be listening to Ward Churchill tomorrow night at Hamilton College, which is 6.6 miles from my house. Hamilton College president Joan Hinde Stewart went ahead and cancelled the whole program, "The Intersections of Class, Race, Gender, Sexuality and Nationality," because of security concerns. Set up by the Kirkland Project for the Study of Gender, Society and Culture, which earlier fumbled when it hired Susan Rosenberg, a pardoned 1970s radical, as a teacher and "activist in residence," the Churchill uproar now has even the Kirkland Project itself in jeopardy. Protests forced Rosenberg to resign her post even before coming to the college, and even more vociferous protests have kept Churchill away. Churchill, a Native American activist and professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, may also even lose his teaching job at the University of Colorado, or so it now seems.

Surely the essay that sparked the rage—"Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens"—is not at all something any American could really sympathize with, but it does give a voice to the dark elements which fomented the 9/11 tragedy, even if we want not to hear that voice. And yet what stands out most for me in the essay is Churchill's charge that peace advocates are systemically ineffectual and have been perhaps a hindrance to real anti-war efforts:

"In fairness, it must be admitted that there was an infinitesimally small segment of the body politic who expressed opposition to what was/is being done to the children of Iraq. It must also be conceded, however, that those involved by-and-large contented themselves with signing petitions and conducting candle-lit prayer vigils, bearing 'moral witness' as vast legions of brown-skinned five-year-olds sat shivering in the dark, wide-eyed in horror, whimpering as they expired in the most agonizing ways imaginable."

"Be it said as well, and this is really the crux of it, that the 'resistance' expended the bulk of its time and energy harnessed to the systemically-useful task of trying to ensure, as 'a principle of moral virtue' that nobody went further than waving signs as a means of 'challenging' the patently exterminatory pursuit of Pax Americana. So pure of principle were these 'dissidents,' in fact, that they began literally to supplant the police in protecting corporations profiting by the carnage against suffering such retaliatory 'violence' as having their windows broken by persons less 'enlightened'—or perhaps more outraged—than the self-anointed 'peacekeepers.'"

So the challenge he poses is an interesting one. Can Quaker Christians and other peace advocates effectively impede the "patently exterminatory pursuit of Pax Americana" without miring ourselves in mere sign-waving gesturing, without at the same time joining the dark elements which Churchill himself gives voice to?

Giving Iraq the dribble glass of democracy. I want so badly for the Iraqi people to have a country in which their humanity as individuals can be expressed in such a way that God is glorified and the reforming love of his son Jesus is known personally throughout that historic expanse. I am sad that the Bush administration is making that an impossible task, first by positioning American Christians as killers, torturers, destroyers of homes and livelihoods, and as careless, gun-toting voyeurs who can watch as treasures are looted and basic needs are ignored; next by rewriting the political lexicon, so that "freedom" and "liberty" are totally emptied of sense and "democracy" really means nothing more than a kind of play acting. It never occurred to me that democracy could be equated at all with the simple act of voting, let alone doing the deed after hiding the polling places, hiding the candidates' identities, spreading around 150,000 soldiers in full battle gear, and then herding the citizens toward an act they know so little about performing.

We have taken so much from these people. Are we really going to leave them with nothing but a pantomime, a movement that could never be a surrogate for that for which our patriots watered the tree of liberty? Should we not leave the Iraqi people instead with basic services—clean water, sewerage disposal, electricity, undamaged housing, productive employment—and then let them ask of us, who have so much to give, what we can do to repair their expectations, to nourish their yearning to be free, and to keep them from tyranny of all sorts, including the American brand? The alternative, surely, is that we do not leave, but linger instead and continue fomenting the killing of innocents, the destruction of homes and prospects, so much vacant rhetoric—to oversee the slaughter of a civilization, replacing what we have destroyed with only that which will benefit our national/corporate interests. That would be a greater moral wrong.