A peace-loving person can get to feeling pretty abject about the election choices these days. We’ve got a president who has declared, “I’m a war president. I make decisions here in the Oval Office in foreign policy matters with war on my mind,” and who describes the war in Iraq in bewilderingly Orwellian terms as a “catastrophic success.” Or, there’s John Kerry, “reporting for duty” and lamely pledging a “more sensitive war on terror.” When the Vice President is threatening us with violence if we don’t vote for the Right team, it’s time for regular citizens to insist that we change the discourse. If war talk begets only more war talk, let’s speak another language.
I am no dreamer. Like most of us, I’m a bundle of prickly contradictions: a vegetarian with a taste for leather shoes, a stringent opponent of spanking who has just barely stopped my own frustration-stiffened hand. How do each of us walk this line between peace and violence? How do we connect our small battles with those in Iraq? Afghanistan? Darfur? Beslan, Russia?
In light of this, I sometimes agonize about the decision I made a few years ago to take up martial arts, about the hours I devote each week to kicking sand bags and shadow-sparring with young men the age of soldiers, about being a woman with an anti-war bumper sticker who takes real joy in feeling my body develop into a defensive weapon. But the deepest lesson I’ve learned is that martial arts masters seek not to use their skill – there is no pre-emptive strike in the martial arts ethic. The more you understand power and the risks of violence, the more fervently you seek alternatives to conflict.
I have been reading a wonderful little book by war correspondent Chris Hedges, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, recommended by IU South Bend for campus and community discussions, leading up to Hedges’ visit to South Bend next spring. The book examines the addictive way war invents a sense of collective purpose – a “collective psychosis,” Hedges calls it – that can pervert logic, values, and empathy. But the book also leaks promise at its seams, finding an “ocean of hope” in small acts of human bravery and empathy in every war situation: a Muslim farmer defies his neighbors to offer his cow’s milk to a dying Serbian baby. A family shelters children of the enemy until they can be reunited with their fleeing parents. Everywhere, we can hear people choosing to speak a different language.
I think of the first time I was startled by the re-imagined slogan: Wage Peace. What does this look like – waging creation, rather than destruction, as a means to bring about change? Well, I saw it at work last week in the peaceful and joyfully packed streets of the second annual Art Beat in downtown South Bend – a late-summer evening in which thousands of citizens cast a vote for Eros over Thanatos. That evening, belly dancers shimmied just a few blocks away from the rhythmic racket of Irish step dancers, who were around the corner from drumming Catholic grade-schoolers, who were across the street from glittering, statuesque female impersonators. So much goodwill hung in the air, so many families of so many colors and backgrounds calling greetings to one another, sharing a language of invention.
This language was made manifest in the crazy paper-bag hat-making station dreamed up by the Health Works museum. While volunteers fitted passers by with rolled-edged poufs made of upside-down grocery bags, kids and grown-ups hovered around a table exploding with a kaleidoscope of tissue paper and ribbons to decorate the hats. As my daughters labored over their creations, I glanced up to see a tall gentleman in a turban chatting with friends. A few minutes later, I saw that he’d balanced his friend’s fedora goofily on top of his turban. And soon after that, I watched him mischievously perch a wild and crazy paper-bag hat on the top of it all – a crown of flying polka-dot tissue paper and crimped streamers. Laughter and applause rang around him, and I thought, yes, wearing as many hats as we can – this is hope. I saw paper bag hats by the hundreds that night, worn by every incarnation of person – Mad Hatters, all of us, speaking a new language.
Across town, I knew there was a peace vigil unfolding to mark the 1000th dead American soldier in Iraq and many thousand Iraqi dead, and while part of me wanted to be there, it was a relief, frankly, to be somewhere where I wasn’t yet again saying “no” – no to this war, no to violence as the pre-emptive fall-back position. Downtown, as a college glee club sang spirituals in the background, I glanced up to see the bank building’s billowing American flag backlit by the setting sun, and was surprised by the tears in my eyes, surprised to feel, for the first time in a long time, that we might, as Americans, invent a language in which I can say: Yes. Yes. Yes.