“We do not believe the flotilla is a necessary or useful effort to try to assist the people of Gaza,” [Hilary] Clinton told reporters at a news conference with the visiting foreign minister of the Philippines. “We think that it’s not helpful for there to be flotillas that try to provoke action by entering into Israeli waters and creating a situation in which the Israelis have the right to defend themselves.”

–reported by Matthew Lee, Associated Press, Thursday 23 June 2011

Increasingly, a political-moral link is being made between the soon to embark Gaza Flotilla and the 1961 Freedom Riders.

Imagine a local or national politician, Southern or Northern, for that matter, saying the following in 1961: “We do not believe that the so-called Freedom Ride is a necessary or useful effort to assist the Negroes in the South.” Back then, paternalistic politicians would object to direct action being taken by mere citizens, black or white. “Necessary” and “useful” action, by definition, would be that taken by elected officials, who know better, know more, and ought to be trusted by the people they represent.

Then, imagine the politician (governor, senator, administration official) claiming: “It’s not helpful for there to be Freedom Rides that try to provoke action by integrating those buses on Southern highways and creating a situation in which the whites have the right to defend themselves.”

Some whites did “defend” themselves, firebombing one of the buses at Anniston. They further defended themselves when the Freedom Riders arrived at the Birmingham bus station. Whites used baseball bats and iron pipes to teach a lesson to these provocateurs. An FBI informant contributed to the beating. White activists were singled out by the provoked Klansmen for special attention; for instance, Jim Peck required over fifty stitches to deal with wounds he suffered on his head.

In his study of the civil rights years, historian Taylor Branch noted that in a second State of the Union address in May 1961, President Kennedy spoke of his “freedom doctrine,” in words that will sound quite familiar to people today: “The great battleground for the defense and expansion of freedom today is the whole southern half of the globe—Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East, the lands of the rising peoples. Their revolution is the greatest in human history. They seek an end to injustice, tyranny, and exploitation.” Unmentioned by Kennedy in his address was either the injustice/tyranny toward blacks in the U.S. south, or the efforts of the Freedom Riders.

The Freedom Riders decided they were not going to be deterred by the violence in Alabama and, so, they continued on to Mississippi, the New York Times stated, “They are challenging not only long-held customs, but passionately held feelings. Non-violence that deliberately provokes violence is a logical contradiction.” According to a Gallup poll that summer, 63% of the American population did not approve of the Freedom Rides.

The Gaza Flotilla is likewise challenging long-held customs and passionately held feelings, such as those of Hilary Clinton and the Obama Administration that Israel can get away with injustice, tyranny, and exploitation against the Palestinians.

And as for the allegedly provocative non-violence of the Flotilla activists, they may be quite familiar with these words from a famous letter by Martin Luther King, Jr. a couple years after the sit-ins and Freedom Rides began to dismantle Jim Crow: “Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.”

For the governments of the United States and Israel, such exposure by the flotilla internationals in solidarity with the Palestinian people is unnecessary, not useful, and, obviously, harmful.

Alabama governor George Wallace said in 1962, “In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

In so many words and by so many actions, Hilary Clinton and the Obama Administration have likewise proclaimed, unity with Israel today, unity with Israel tomorrow, and unity with Israel forever. Translated: The Gaza Flotilla be damned.

Then, as now, there’s the agenda to maintain domination, pursued by such people as George Wallace, John F. Kennedy, Barack Obama, and Hilary Clinton.

Then, as now, there’s the agenda to struggle for freedom, pursued by such people as Dianne Nash, Jim Peck, Kathy Kelly, and Alice Walker.

Dianne and I drove Hedy Epstein to the Missouri Scholars Academy in Columbia at Mizzou on Sunday, where she spoke for the 17th straight year to 300+ gifted students from across the state.

She shared her experiences growing up in Nazi Germany, and then in Britain, where she went as a result of the Kindertransport before the beginning of World War II.

She read from her mother’s last two communications to her, a long letter, and a postcard indicating that she was “heading to the East.”  Both Hedy’s parents and several other family members died at Auschwitz.

The next day Hedy was to leave for Athens, Greece to begin the preparations for boarding the U.S. Boat to Gaza, as part of the Second International Freedom Flotilla.

During a period of silence in the car, late at night as I drove us back to St. Louis, I recalled the following journal entry from Mev shortly before the beginning of the Gulf War in January 1991.

Yesterday, I printed out Mev’s reflection, and walked it over to Hedy at her condo on Waterman.  I wrote on it, “You and Mev are two of the bravest people I’ve known.”

… and I think that our world, primarily at the instigation of “my” country, is on the brink of war – nuclear potential, no less – and I am in the process of conversion.  This is a significant moment.  The convergence of hearing daily the words, stories, laughter, challenges of people who have made an option and are paying the cost, are reaping the grace — I am called.  I am called forth to say no to injustice, war, the preparation for war.  I am called forth to yes to life, yes to diversity, yes to the stepped-on ones standing up and claiming what is theirs.

This is a turning point in my life.  I was an activist in college, engaged in various ways.  But the Middle East situation has told me that my life as usual can’t continue when such massive bloodshed is being planned, discussed, prepared for!  It makes me sick.  There is not a moral indignation, but a moral revulsion, nearly physical, that impels me to move, to do, to deepen my reflection, to put my body out there on the line. Enough.  Stop the bloodshed.

God, empower us to strive and struggle with integrity, love and humility for a better world, to strive and struggle courageously, willing to risk, willing to be inaccommodated, placing our freedom on behalf of others’ unfreedom — empower and inspire us to act creatively and justly and lovingly and disruptingly.  Life as usual cannot go on, as it grinds the poor into the dust and sand – sick, sick, sick.

God, heal this sick world and let us be your hands.  Condemning no one and afraid of no one.  Putting our bodies before the wheels of the great machine that crushes the bones of the poor, blacks, gays, PWAs, elderly, children, orphans, strangers, Jews, Palestinians, Latin Americans, Iraqis, U.S. soldiers – no more.  No more.  No more.

–last chapter, The Book of Mev

“Don’t give up, don’t give in, don’t give out.”

John Lewis, one of the 1961 Freedom Riders

My friend Hedy Epstein joined the “Move over AIPAC” protests in Washington in late May. While she was there, she paid a visit to the office of her Missouri senator, Claire McCaskill. The 86-year-old Holocaust survivor informed an aide of her upcoming participation in the second Gaza Freedom Flotilla to break through Israel’s vicious siege against the people of Gaza.

The aide to Senator McCaskill told Hedy that the Senator “wants you to be safe.” Yet, if the Senator was like her colleagues, when Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke before Congress in May, she gave him 29 standing ovations.

The U.S. government proudly upholds its relationship with Israel. As the U.S. believes itself to be above the law, Israel, as a loyal U.S. ally, enjoys a comparable privilege to consider itself beyond the reach of the law, whether that of the seas or of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Netanyahu is clear about Israel’s intention to maintain the blockade on Gaza and so to keep 1.5 million human beings in desperation. He has been quite explicit that Israel is well prepared to deal with the 15 or more boats and thousand people from 40 countries soon to head toward Gaza.

The women and men who will board the U.S. Boat to Gaza object to the cruel imprisonment and impoverishment of the Palestinians in Gaza. In fact, they are willing to embody that objection and risk their well-being on this mission.

They know full well the lethal means Israel employs consistently and with utter impunity against Palestinians. They also know that global citizens concerned about human rights can be treated similarly, as evidenced by the nine people murdered last year by Israel’s commandos who took over the Turkish boat, the Mavi Marmara.

By her words, actions, and ovations, Senator McCaskill has long demonstrated on whose side she stands. Ms. Epstein is likewise forthright and clear: She is standing with a growing number of those struggling for a decent life for the Palestinians, who have been dispossessed and demonized by Israel for over sixty years.

Fifty years ago, the Freedom Riders sought to hasten the end of segregation and, by doing so, they faced harassment, beatings, bombing, and defamation. As far as the white supremacists were concerned, the Freedom Riders were subversives.

In 1961 how many American senators expressed solidarity with such “subversive” citizens?

Likewise, those who are willing to defy Israel’s brutal policies and to defend the dignity of the Palestinian people are regarded by Israel and its supporters as subversive.

In 2011 how many American senators can utter one sentence of support for the people soon to board the U.S. boat, known as the “Audacity of Hope”?

I just finished reading the beautiful memoir of Sister Dang Nghiem, Healing: A Woman’s Journey from Doctor to Nun.   Here is one passage…

When we love someone, it’s not because we live next to the person that we love him or her. We love because we can see the beauty in that person, and we learn to love him in a way that he lives inside us. We can see the suffering and shortcomings not yet transformed in that person, and we practice wholeheartedly in order to transform those things for him. That is true love. We can continue that person. Whether that person is still alive and near us, or whether his body has already disintegrated, he is always in us–we are one, and not two separate entities anymore.

“Yes, our hearts are breaking, but the great grace of how God is with us in our pain is that the breaking need not be a breaking apart. It can be a breaking open: open to the poor whom Mev’s photographs allows us to see, open to the reality of injustice that creates and sustains such poverty, open to responding in relationship with those who are suffering […] We will honor Mev best by taking her life seriously and allowing her passion for justice and her commitment to the God who struggles with us to become our own” (357).

The first day of Senior Seminar, I remember being told that reading The Book of Mev would break my heart. This has proven to be true. Each page of the book brimmed with poignant truths: raw honesty, the beauty of life, and the overwhelming pain of poverty and suffering. I did not expect to be broken open anew to the poor, to injustices, to responding in relationship to such a strong degree. The journals, poems, interviews, photos, and accounts truly did break me open, and will continue to do so. It is an understatement to say that reading this book is an incredibly powerful journey for me. Even more powerful was the opportunity to read it in the community of the senior seminar class, where we could be insightful, honest, supportive, and even confused together.

Journeying through this book, I felt an overwhelming sense of accompaniment: with Mev, Mark, Ilza, Ann, Maria Goreth, with the entire communion of saints. I immediately felt that Mev could be my sister, confidant, mentor, even a best friend! I was both refreshed and relieved reading her thoughts on the Church and her prayers to God, thinking “someone else has felt this way too!” Nothing means as much to me as her honesty about her struggles with her society, family, church, and purpose in life. The questions she asks are ones that I can relate to in my life right now. I feel as if Mev has met me exactly where I am at, bringing the entire communion of saints to encourage me forward.

In particular, I identified deeply with her Prayer from Autumn 1989, especially: “And it doesn’t steal me away from the poor, it doesn’t compromise my alternative lifestyle, it doesn’t dilute my intimacy with you. Rather, it energizes my commitment to the poor, it challenges me to be more true to and discerning of the lifestyle I feel called to, enhances my intimacy with you—opening chambers of my heart I never knew existed! So, while I’m in the tomb and I don’t know who Jesus is and […] what the hell is going on with my faith—I am also in the womb and something new is being forged and revealed. It is as awesome and dumbfounding as new birth” (100).

I have read this prayer probably twenty times, recording it in my own journal as a rock to cling to in this season of my life. She wrote this prayer at a time where her faith was growing and changing in many ways. Her description of feeling “raw” and fragile after returning from Brazil and Mark’s realization that he could not fix her but only listen and accompany her on this “faith-crisis” spoke deeply to my heart. Mark writes that Mev eventually “came to describe this time of her life as a ‘faith-crisis’, by which she meant that she could no longer believe in the same God or have the same spirited, easy, even chatty relationship with Jesus that she had heretofore enjoyed. Her previously strong faith was dispirited in Brazil, even as she realized that she was not so well put together as she had thought” (74, 75). I am sure that re-reading this book several times in the future will lead me to several new points in her life that strike different chords, but right now these parts of her journey are continuously on my mind and heart.

These accounts from Mark brought me to silence, appreciation, and wonder that what I feel is my own faith-crisis is really a breaking open. Seeing the way Mev’s life unfolded was so beautiful. Reading of her relationship with Mark was encouraging dose of the reality and beautiful mystery of agapic love. From seeing the way her and Mark’s relationship developed, to her journeys to interview and be in solidarity, to her helplessness and humanness in living the deep mystery that was the suffering of cancer, I saw Christ in each page. Truly, even as Mark prays the Song of Songs to Mev on the day she died, their frustration, anguish, vulnerability, and pain gave me a deep glimpse into the mystery of suffering.

Truly, “In her last months Mev led us more and more deeply into poverty. It was, as Saint Francis de Sales called it, a destitution of love. She had wanted to give the poor a face, a voice. She always wanted to be identified with them. And so it came to pass[…] She became the poor she loved ” (326). Mev’s struggle and connectedness in her conviction that “the struggle is one” gave such a deep dimension to everything she did in her life. Her questioning was not “why me?” but “why not me?” shows that although she did not choose her sickness, she was willing to enter into the suffering of the poor, the suffering of Christ. The lessons this has taught to countless people who have been touched by Mev’s witness are a bold echo in the legacy of the communion of saints and a prophetic voice that speaks of the coming of the kingdom of God.

Journeying through The Book of Mev truly did break me open, and I thank God that I can be continually broken open, yet strengthened by the hope in building the kingdom of God, the inspiration of the communion of saints, and trust that agapic love endures. It is a consolation to know that although I have felt my own breaking apart, it really is a breaking open to something new. The witness I have learned through The Book of Mev connects me more deeply to the communion of saints. To her I would say, Mev, you are among the mirrors you spoke of, “and it sometimes chills me and embarrasses me to look at myself in your light. I feel disgrace, a need for mercy, a need for your strength to pull forth to me […]Help me. Move me. Be with me. We are one. Yes, the struggle is one” (374).

–Savanna is a student at Creighton University. This reflection was for a Justice and Peace seminar.

1.

I have seen the victims.

And this sight of the mutilated dead has exerted such inward change upon me

That the words of corrupt diplomacy appear to me more and more in their true light.

That is to say—as words spoken in enmity against reality.

2.

Instructions upon return.

Develop for the students the meaning of Ho’s “useless years.”

The necessity of escaping once and for all the slavery of “being useful.”

On the other hand; prison, contemplation, life in solitude.

Do the things that even “movement people” tend to despise and misunderstand.

To be radical is habitually to do things which society at large despises.

3.

An adequate peace movement could not satisfy itself

With assuaging the sufferings of the victims

By medical help at the point of impact.

The radical work consisted rather in staying with conditions at home

Trying as best we might to work changes upon a society

In which military victims were the logical outcome

Of a ruinous, power-ridden national ethos in the world at large.

–In 1968 Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan and historian Howard Zinn traveled to North Vietnam to accompany back to the U.S. three U.S. pilots who had been captured by the Vietnamese.  Berrigan gives an account of their journey in his Night Flight to Hanoi, which contains the above passages.

The following is from Sheila Donnelly, a student in the School of Social Work at Saint Louis University….

So, as I read books, articles, or whatever else that hit me in a sort of way, put words to thoughts I couldn’t articulate, or provide me some insight to another’s experience or wisdom, I write on sticky notes passages, sentences, or phrases that most stick out. I do this for some class readings, but mostly for reading strictly for what others call pleasure and I call exploration. Anyways, I just finished The Book of Mev, and had 34 sticky notes.

After finishing, I have always wanted to explain to the author that she/he has impacted my world-sense as well as me as a person by writing what they wrote and have never really been able to do so so personally before. So I guess I just wanted to let you know that the personal AND global sides of your book were enlightening to me.

I feel like you included so many wonderful and horrific stories from both your own life and the world. It was so beautiful to see the parallels and the divergence between the two.

Rarely do I read books where the author is so honest and vulnerable about his experience, but at the same time the awareness of the larger struggle within humanity.

So, some of what I put on sticky-notes were quotes from interviews by Mev, one by Kathy Kelly and another by MLK, but I couldn’t fit the entire experience of this book onto sticky notes.

I just wanted to once again thank you for sharing your experience and I wanted you to know that it truly reached my soul.

With love for a common humanity,

Sheila

1.

In his 2007 book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, former U.S. president Jimmy Carter had this to say: “When we arrived there in January 1996, it was obvious that the Israelis had almost complete control over every aspect of political, military, and economic existence of the Palestinians within the West Bank and Gaza.” It’s good to say what you see. It’s even better to see what you see.

2.

Later, Jimmy Carter even went to Bil’in where the local Palestinians have protested weekly for years against the apartheid wall Israel has been building. They’ve been joined by internationals and Israeli dissidents. The people of Bil’in embody sumud—“steadfastness.” Critics smugly ask, “Where are the Palestinian Gandhis?” Those critics would see plenty of Gandhis in Bil’in and many other villages of the West Bank if they would go there, as Jimmy Carter did.

3.

When he was governor of Georgia in March 1971, Jimmy Carter celebrated an “American Fighting Men’s Day.” On that day he urged the state’s citizens to be in solidarity with one of Georgia’s own and so to drive with their headlights on “to honor the flag as ‘Rusty’ had done.” “Rusty” was Lieutenant William Calley then under house arrest at Fort Benning; he was facing charges for murdering over 100 “Orientals” in the Vietnamese village of My Lai on 16 March 1968.

4.

In 1977, the first year of his presidency, Jimmy Carter was asked at a press conference if the U.S. should pay reparations to the Vietnamese. He responded, “The destruction was mutual.  We went to Vietnam without any desire to capture territory or impose American will on other people.  I don’t feel that we ought to apologize or castigate ourselves or to assume the status of culpability.”

5.

When he was out of the Oval Office, Jimmy Carter stood side by side with the Palestinians, who are still seen as terrorists by the Israeli state that seeks their disempowerment and dispossession. In his mid-eighties now, Carter could conceivably take a flight to Southeast Asia. It could be arranged for him to meet people over age fifty who survived My Lai. They could tell him a thing or two about how Rusty Calley and Charlie Company honored the flag. Carter and his esteemed elders could make a pilgrimage to many villages throughout southern Vietnam, so many of which received similar treatment from the U.S. armed forces, albeit on a smaller scale. And the Vietnamese could tell Carter enough stories to give him nightmares for the rest of his life.

6.

On another trip to Vietnam, Jimmy Carter could spend some time with some of the young and aged Vietnamese victims of U.S. chemical warfare (Agent Orange, provided by Dow Chemical and Monsanto, among others). He could explain to them how the U.S. owes them no debt. He could tell them he has never castigated himself for what took place there as ordered by four of his predecessors in the Oval Office.

These days I am thinking of two Holocaust survivors.

I met with one today: 86 year-old Hedy Epstein and I had lunch at a local St. Louis café. The other is receiving an honorary doctorate tomorrow at Washington University: 82 year-old Elie Wiesel, who will also give the commencement address.

Mr. Wiesel and Ms. Epstein have in common the central experience of their lives: their families destroyed by the Nazi genocide. He survived the Auschwitz death camp, and she left Germany in 1939 on a Kindertransport to Great Britain.

After the war he moved to France, studied at the Sorbonne, and eventually became a journalist and novelist. After the war, she served as a research analyst for the U.S. government at the Nuremberg trial of Nazi doctors who conducted medical experiments; she then came to the United States.

In the 1990s I spent many hours reading Wiesel’s books and writing a study of his activism in light of his Holocaust experience. In the last decade I have spent many hours with Ms. Epstein: at peace vigils, meetings, demonstrations, and as part of the International Solidarity Movement in Israel’s occupied West Bank in 2003.

Wiesel is an internationally renowned icon, advisor to presidents (Carter, Reagan, and Clinton), guide to Oprah Winfrey at Auschwitz, and author of over forty books. Ms. Epstein has been known locally for decades as a speaker on the Holocaust and also as a grass-roots activist challenging U.S. militarism; more recently, she has become prominent nationally and internationally because of her work for Palestine.

Mr. Wiesel would agree with the working title of Ms. Epstein’s political memoir-in-progress, Remembering Is Not Enough. And I think that Ms. Epstein would agree with the following excerpt from his Nobel lecture in 1986: “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Whenever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion or political views, that place must — at that moment — become the center of the universe.”

Given what Martin Luther King, Jr. once called “the fierce urgency of now,” the crucial moral task is to refuse abstraction and embody such maxims in our specific political, economic, and cultural context.

For example, in the second volume of his 1999 memoirs, Mr. Wiesel admitted, “Indeed, I can say in good faith that I have not remained indifferent to any cause involving the defense of human rights. But, you may ask, what have I done to alleviate the plight of the Palestinians? And here I must confess: I have not done enough. Is an explanation in order? In spite of considerable pressure, I have refused to take a public stand in the Israeli-Arab conflict. I have said it before: since I do not live in Israel, it would be irresponsible for me to do so. But I have never concealed how much the human dimension of the Palestinian tragedy affects me.”

The fact that he did not live in the Soviet Union, Bosnia, or Iraq did not stop him from speaking out about those urgent situations (he was a strong supporter of Bush’s invasion/aggression in Iraq in 2003). There is also the fact that, for over four decades, Mr. Wiesel has made the strongest, most ardent “public stand” of support for Israel, from the 1967 war to Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to its response to the intifada in the late 1980s. He forbade himself to criticize in public the Jewish state, but he certainly sang its praises and justified its actions.

Unlike the Nobel Peace laureate, Ms. Epstein has taken a public stand to oppose, not the “plight” of the Palestinians, but their oppression by Israel, steadfastly backed by the United States.

Since 2003 she has made five trips to the West Bank to work with peace, women’s and solidarity groups opposed to the now almost 44year-old Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. In East Jerusalem, Mash’a, Al’ara, Hebron, Qalqilya, and Bil’in, she has joined the Palestinians, along with Israeli activists and other internationals, in nonviolent resistance to Israel’s intensive effort to ghettoize the Palestinians and to expropriate more of their land for Jewish settlers.

She has bore witness to Israel’s massive wall, declared illegal by the International Court of Justice in 2004. She has received a very small but unforgettable taste of what the Palestinians experience every day, from being strip searched, water cannoned, tear gassed and sound bombed, as well as being declared a terrorist and security risk.

She stood face to face with the women, men and children of the West Bank and listened to their stories, memories, anguish, and hope.

In the last three years, she made four unsuccessful attempts to be one on the boats to break Israel’s sadistic siege of Gaza. She is scheduled to join scores of other U.S. citizens on the U.S. boat to Gaza in late June as part of the International Freedom Flotilla II.

By her words, but much more powerfully by her actions, Ms. Epstein is saying to us, Palestine is the center of the universe.

Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.

Hedy in Cairo during the Gaza Freedom March, January 2010

1.

And that claim [to Oregon] is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.

–John O’ Sullivan, 1845

2.

…after we become a strong force, as the result of the creation of a state, we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine… The state will only be a stage in the realization of Zionism and its task is to prepare the ground for our expansion into the whole of Palestine by a Jewish-Arab agreement… The state will have to preserve order not only by preaching morality but by machine guns, if necessary.

–David Ben-Gurion, 1938

3.

Benny Morris:  Remember another thing: the Arab people gained a large slice of the planet. Not thanks to its skills or its great virtues, but because it conquered and murdered and forced those it conquered to convert during many generations. But in the end the Arabs have 22 states. The Jewish people did not have even one state. There was no reason in the world why it should not have one state. Therefore, from my point of view, the need to establish this state in this place overcame the injustice that was done to the Palestinians by uprooting them.

Interviewer: And morally speaking, you have no problem with that deed?

Benny Morris: That is correct. Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians. There are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history.

–Haaretz, 2004

She’s spent four years at SLU

And is moving on

I’ve spent fourteen years at SLU

And am moving on

We had class together fall 2008

Her tender sophomore year

We’ve met ten or twelve times since that class

Invariably in cafes and restaurants

(I never once used the “adjunct office”

For “office hours”)

And there was that spending binge downtown

At Left Bank Books right before Xmas break

I knew that she was a writer

From the student profile she turned in the first day

(Maybe I was too exuberant about it

She sometimes eyed me as if I had a screw loose)

She’d come to my mind when I’d read

What Brooklyn College teacher Allen Ginsberg said

“Older people gain vigor, refreshment, vitality, energy, hopefulness and cheerfulness

From the attentions of the young

And the younger people gain gossip, experience, advice, aid, comfort

Wisdom, knowledges and teachings from their relation with the old”

She wondered if Kerouac meant, “Accept loss forever”

Or “Accept loss forever”

During the 75 minute conversation amid Café Ventana sunshine

We drank champagne

I toasted her with a clink

She took a photo of me from her fancy phone

Sitting there she looked out in the distance as if in a trance

Watching for Ecstasy to come around the corner

I didn’t tell her

That Yeats’ “For Anne Gregory” didn’t apply to her

I said “good for you!” to refuse the Fulbright and instead

To embrace Teach for America and Casey in D.C.

(Love conquers all

Besides, prestige is so overrated)

The word “soteriology” was never mentioned

The word “diarrhea” was used once

Karl Rahner never came up

But Shawn Copeland did

We agreed “women’s ordination” doesn’t go far enough

If it only installs women in hierarchical power position

(Still, I ponder

How many kids & women & men

In Catholic churches may never hear HER

Illuminate Word & World & Wonder)

There’s Marx’s thesis on Feuerbach that the philosophers have interpreted the world

The point, however, is to change it

There’s Jesus’ vision of the brokerless Kingdom of God

A program of free healing & open commensality

Broken Spanish & homesickness

Barbed wire & acrobatic empowerment–all shared

I invited her repeatedly to be guest speaker in social justice classes

For her riveting, no bullshit Nicaragua testimony

In a parallel universe Mev at 25

And  she at 22 would be best pals

She’s soon to move to Washington DC

Accompanying the kiddos

She’s not got mind-reading power yet

But she knows how I am going to end this–

I can’t give her a big official prize for scholastic achievement, GPA, something quantifiable

I can only remind her of this

Alexis Mary Lassus:

“You’re a Genius all the time”

We had now made a clean break with the fazendas. We could no longer celebrate the Eucharist under the shelter of these lords of the earth. No more traveling in their cars or airplanes, no more sharing food or whiskey at their tables, no more being “assisted” at Mass by those who were systematically enslaving their lesser brothers [and sisters]. That was no longer the Lord’s Supper! We were losing the friendship of the great and facing up to them. No exploiter or profiteer from exploitation could be a godparent at a baptism, for example. We stopped accepting rides from them, we positively shunned their company and their smiles. We even ceased greeting the most barefaced offenders. (On the other hand, we were winning the trust and love of the poor and oppressed.)

– Brazilian Bishop Pedro Casaldáliga

(who narrowly missed being assassinated by those disturbed by his choices)

From his book, I Believe in Justice and Hope

Recently, I’ve been reading a lot of French philosopher Pierre Hadot.  In several books, he focuses on spiritual exercises in ancient philosophy (Socrates, Seneca, Plotinus, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius). In a few of these works, he is fond of citing  the following passage from French Marxist Georges Friedmann’s 1970 book, La Puissance et la Sagesse.

“To take flight” every day! At least for a moment, which may be brief, so long as it is intense. A “spiritual exercise” every day—alone or in the company of a person who also wants to better himself.

Spiritual exercise. Leave duration behind. Try to strip yourself of your own passions, of the vanities and the rash of noise surrounding your name (which, from time to time, itches like a chronic affliction). Flee backbiting. Strip yourself of pity and of hatred. Love all free human beings. Become eternal by transcending yourself.

This effort upon yourself is necessary; this ambition is just. Many are those who become completely absorbed in militant politics and the preparation of the social revolution. Few, very few, are those who, to prepare for the revolution, are willing to make themselves worthy of it.

In What is Ancient Philosophy? Hadot offers the this comment on Friedmann: “The ‘engaged’ philosopher always runs the risk of letting himself be swept along by political passions and hatreds. This is why it was vital, in Friedmann’s view, that in order to improve the human situation we concentrate our strength ‘on limited groups, even on individuals,’ and ‘on the spiritual effort (the transformation of a few),’ which, he thought, would eventually be communicated and diffused.”

1.

The very definition of democracy is the right to innovation, invention, and imagination. Since nothing in the current social organization is sacred, democracy becomes subversive by nature. Subversion is the driving force of social transformation.

–Samir Amin

2.

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

–Thomas Jefferson

3.

Later, when I, as well as others, marched on Washington or Chicago, we carried with us the lessons that the local power structures had fought us tooth and nail—that racism was ingrained in the system. We also realized that the lessons came in spite of our formal education. (My critique of democracy begins and ends with this point. Kids must be educated to disrespect authority or else democracy is a farce.)

–Abbie Hoffman

Wednesday 2 February 2011

Dr. Chmiel,

And you opened your inbox to find an email from a former student you haven’t heard from in quite a while! Yes, how are you? I am currently sitting in a not so modest community JVC house here in El Paso, TX. I have found myself committed to a ‘year of service’ (whatever that means) at a Catholic Parish working in the pastoral center. These last few months have been incredibly life giving, especially being out from under the suffocation of required term papers! I have found a wonderful community, people that make me think and a real space for healing and laughter.

Anyway, this summer I found myself with my family in ‘comfortable’ suburbia and dealing with some not-so-fun life stuff. Needing an out, I picked up The Book of Mev (yet again) and too stumbled across your blog. Turned out to be exactly what I needed. And I wanted to express my gratitude (as many before me have and many after me surely will) for your openness and willingness to share so much of yourself. THANK YOU. Yes. This book and your other writings always seem to open me up to my own mystery. And they help to remind me of what I found in El Salvador and Nicaragua, and that sense of urgency I knew/know. And words of gratitude I could compose for a good while. However, I think instead I would like to share a piece I wrote last night. Take it as my thank you for sharing yourself and Mev with me and with the world.

la paz

laura mcdowell

social justice-fall 2008

(Just a bit of context, I go over to Juarez once a week to accompany in a small clinic. There is a group of mothers and their children that live in Juarez that come to do therapy and community building. The sisters who do this ministry are incredible. They started this ministry a few years back and continue to go, despite the violence. Their commitment is a crazy inspiration.)

Absurdity/1

“So what is it you do in Juarez”, a question commonly posed to me. “Well, I go with the Sisters of Charity who run a clinic for children with special needs”, is usually my rote response. This seems to be an acceptable answer that avoids raised eyebrows, and then allows for an approving nod or two, and a return to the previous conversation.

But what if I was to fiddle in more specifics? “Well, today, I crossed that border, you know, the one you always hear about on the news. The one that separates the ‘land of milk and honey’ and ‘the den of drug dealing thieves’. The one that keeps us safe from ‘those illegals’.  The one that, just on the other side is daily sprinkled with more murders, violence, red blood sacrificed. Yes, I crossed that border today…to color.”

What absurdity is this? I cross over this human erected border, separating first from third, and head towards this humble little clinic. And Tylee greets me with a box of crayons, half of which have been chewed, tasted or thrown at a sibling’s head. ‘Quieres colorear conmigo?’ Sure, I’d love to color with you!

‘Ey, ey, oye! Que color es este?’ It’s a color by numbers. Classic. Red, Green, Brown, Yellow, Blue and Tan. Neither Tracy nor I have the slightest idea how to translate, ‘tan’ into Spanish. ‘Es como cafe, pero mas clara’, seems to suffice for the moment at hand. ‘ORACION’! someone yells. Time to gather to pray in thanks giving for our daily bread and Virgin Mother’s protection. But the color by numbers has not yet been finished. Bien apurada he hurries to finish this task of the utmost importance.

‘Aqui viene Monce!’ She has made her way over in the rolling seat that allows her to move freely around the room. Her walk is more of a bounce than anything. “Quieres colorear con nosotros y nosotras’? I ask. She has no verbal cues to offer, nor many non verbal ones at that. But her little red-gloved hand seems to want to partake in this time honored child ritual. ‘Agarrelo bien Monce’. Grab onto it Monce. And she does. I hold out a coloring book for her and she draws a few lines as I move the book up and down, below her tan crayon. And her smile beams.

Her smile beams, as does Brian’s. Though Brian’s is less of a beam and more of a shocking flood of stadium lights used to light a football field. His face is nothing but pure joy and laughter. Brian too joins us to color, ready to wow us with his knowledge of colors in English. ‘Rojo significa red’. Ay pos si, es cierto. Que listo eres! I affirm him.

And then I stop. And I look around. And I am surrounded by seven children, all coloring. Some content with their purple penguins. Some looking for verbal affirmation of their ability to color outside the lines.

‘Pati, what color should this cat be’?, I inquire. ‘Em…’ Her little finger taps her bottom lip three times as she contemplates such a pivotal question. ‘Verde’. Green. Color the cat green. Green? What absurdity is this? This little girl, who can barely color inside the lines herself, requests a green cat. And yet I know that if I attempt any other conventional color, the world will quickly come to a crashing halt, per three year old ‘no…NOOOO’!

As I begin to color the cat green, Pati is eager to help me. And the cat begins to take on her new shade of life. She becomes green, as does her ball, and the basket, and the night sky. The lines tell Pati that there is a cat, and a ball and a basket. There are in fact separate identifiable objects. And when I point out the lines, and remind her that only the cat was supposed to be green, her big eyes smile at me with mischief flooding them, and she speedily scribbles over the entirety of the picture, even beyond the borders that encapsulate the cat.

What absurdity is this, to cross this border to color? To affirm coloring outside the lines? To color the cat green? Perhaps an absurdity of the utpmost importance. As adults, we seem to color by number. We want to know exactly what ‘rojo’, ‘amarillo’ and ‘azul’ mean. Then we know which crayon to grab, and can carefully trace each section so as to produce a picture pleasing in the eyes of superior beholders. This is safe. Comfortable. Secure. And who would not want to strive for this? I do my piece, color my section, and respect the lines placed by those who have come before me. After all, they must understand something I don’t.

But Pati understands something they don’t. She has not yet learned the convention of coloring inside the lines. She is a ball of sass and prophetic pigtails. Just as her teasing eyes eradicate the cat, so too do my eyes split this line between Juarez and the “land of promise”. We walk, so concerned with protecting our borders. Keeping languages, cultural norms, traditions and colors within their respective lines. God forbid these lines, these borders, be challenged.

Pati’s green cat reminds me of the absurdity of convention. What if we considered making the penguins purple? What if we considered the scandal of particularity. Christ becoming human, changing water into wine, and social boundaries to dust. What does this boundary, engulfed in desert dust harm/hinder/help/hold? What are we so afraid of? How can we forget the innocence in and of Juarez in Tylee, Pati and Brian? How can we ignore our call towards solidarity and the common good?

I go to Juarez, and color outside the lines. And by this very act beg those around me to at the very least consider the absurdity of this fence separating beaming smiles. The absurdity of not putting my personal safety before and above accompanying my sisters and tias. The absurdity of a green cat.

What absurdity it is to risk my life for crayons.

Yet, what a scandal it would be if I did not.

Many years ago, I wrote a critical study of acclaimed moralist Elie Wiesel in which I tried to account for his trajectory from being on the margins of Western culture (a young, unknown Holocaust survivor living in France in the 1950s) to reaching the heights of cultural, social, and moral power by the late 1990s (Nobel Laureate, advisor to U.S. presidents). To analyze Wiesel’s human rights advocacy, I drew on the collaborative research of U.S. dissident intellectuals Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky. In their 1979 two-volume work, The Political Economy of Human Rights, Chomsky and Herman differentiate three kinds of contemporary bloodbaths– constructive, nefarious, and benign—based on how they are presented in U.S. culture. Almost a decade later in their Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, the authors examine the distinction in the U.S. ideological system between “worthy” and “unworthy victims.”

Recently, Herman joined with David Peterson to update and apply this critical analysis to events over the last couple of decades. This is their summary of “the politics of genocide”: “When we ourselves commit mass-atrocity crimes, the atrocities are Constructive, our victims are unworthy of our attention and indignation, and never suffer ‘genocide’ at our hands—like the Iraqi untermenschen who have died in such grotesque numbers over the past two decades. But when the perpetrator of mass-atrocity crimes is our enemy or a state targeted by us for destabilization and attack, the converse is true. Then the atrocities are Nefarious and their victims worthy of our focus, sympathy, public displays of solidarity, and calls for inquiry and punishment.” [103]

Herman and Peterson categorize such well-known cases as Darfur, Bosnia, and Rwanda (“nefarious”) and Guatemala and El Salvador (“benign”). For example, the authors point out that Sudan is “a predictably well-qualified candidate for a focus on villainy: That its government is dominated by Muslim Arabs, that the Sudan possesses oil, but that it is China rather than the United States or the West which has developed a strong relationship with Khartoum; and that the United States and Israel need distractions from their own human rights atrocities and those of the allies plundering the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo.” [39]

What U.S. citizens need to attend to are the “unworthy victims” of the U.S., for example, in Iraq. The authors address the mass death caused by the U.N./U.S.-backed sanctions since 1990: “This thirteen-year-long mass killing was Constructive; Iraq’s hundreds of thousands of victims were unworthy of official notice and therefore of no interest to the establishment media and intellectuals. The deaths inflicted by the ‘sanctions of mass destruction’ are thus not mentioned in establishment accounts as a U.S. ‘failure’ to respond to the crime of genocide in this ‘age of genocide.’ Nor, with the United States a perpetrator rather than a bystander, is the question of accountability ever raised.” [32]

Herman and Peterson then turn to the U.S. invasion in 2003: “When serious studies estimated Iraqi deaths since the start of the war in March 2003 at 98,000, then climbed to 655,000, and then again to more than a million, with the overwhelming majority of these deaths attributed to violent causes, the media and intellectuals rarely treated Iraqi deaths as a consequence—direct or indirect—of the invasion-occupation, let alone as a deliberately imposed bloodbath, crime against humanity, or ‘genocide.’ Readers may be sure that in the context of Iraq coverage, the media never quoted Nuremberg’s Judgment or alluded to the U.S. war as a ‘supreme international crime’ and to its statement that the ‘accumulated evil of the whole’—hence, responsibility as well—flows from the central act of aggression.” [34]

American architects and policy-makers have not been held accountable for wreaking such devastation on the Iraqi people: They walk freely, serve as consultants, write their memoirs, give speeches, and receive hefty paychecks.

Though Herman and Peterson don’t specify so, I think their analysis calls for three long-term civic responses to U.S. policy that produces and distributes such unworthy victims: remembrance of what actually happened, resistance to continued U.S. military and corporate presence in Iraq, and responsibility for holding U.S. officials accountable and articulating the case for reparations.

1.

It was Ash Wednesday 1983.  In a darkened sanctuary with some lighted candles, an unfamiliar Catholic priest and several other people entered the sanctuary and sat in the front row.  The people wearing bandanas were refugees from El Salvador who had fled from the death squads and chaos of their country.  In his sermon, the priest planted the seed of an idea: Our community could offer public Sanctuary to such people as our guests.  We eventually did offer such shelter and protection to a Salvadoran family, in defiance of the INS ruling that they had no right to be in the U.S.

In my middle twenties in Louisville, I and many other people became a very small part of a movement of solidarity with the peoples of Central America. A few people I know gave their lives over to it, as they relocated for long stretches in Nicaragua; others made frequent visits to and maintained strong connections with grass-roots movements in Guatemala. Many of us participated in peace delegations, put pressure on Congress, wrote scores of op-eds and letters to the editor, and joined in civil disobedience against aid to the contra terrorists attacking Nicaragua.

In Like Grains of Wheat: A Spirituality of Solidarity, Margaret Swedish and Marie Dennis draw on both their long experience in this movement as well as that of scores of participants whom they interviewed. The book is an account of how largely middle-class people of privilege became connected and devoted to the people of Central America, who were struggling for a dignified life in the midst of excruciating oppression.

As I read the book, I thought of many people I’ve gotten to know over the last several years, secular, Muslim, Jewish, Christian, American, Israeli who have worked in the growing solidarity movement with the Palestinian people. I’d like to share a few passages from Like Grains of Wheat that may be relevant to those of us doing work here, or planning to do work in Palestine…

2.

Many U.S. Americans were not prepared to deal with the scale of the evil they discovered—an evil expressed in the violent deaths of the poor, in the often brutal deaths of those who took their side in the struggle for liberation. It was needless, preventable death. [92]

[The path of solidarity] began often with a small gesture of accompaniment. A decision to walk, for however short a time, with a people, a community, whether in a  war zone, a refugee camp, a town under siege, or a village of displaced persons or refugees seeking safety in the United States…. A journey far different from anything that had been anticipated, a journey into themselves within that world, a journey into faith that for many had become cut off and isolated, detached from the conditions of real human beings. [21]

The praxis of solidarity was not a scheme or project thought up all at once. There was no preconceived plan or method of operation. There were few models from which to draw. The movement grew out of the actions that shaped it. It was imbued with creative energy and charged with a sense of urgency about the need to alter a violent, unjust reality and a fervent, palpable hope that this work would constitute a vital contribution to social transformation in the region. [105]

Knowing people who had lived with the effects of injustice and oppression on a scale previously unimaginable—and who were struggling day after day for liberation and life—changed people in profound ways. [24]

Many people were invited into relationships as equals with some of the most courageous and amazing people they had ever met. Rather than “being for” and “doing for,” they become one with their partners, moving beyond “us” and “them.”  [35]

As people of privilege in a hungry world, they struggled with their own complicity in the suffering of that world—the knowledge that they were a part of a system that was perpetuating injustice, benefiting from that system even as they tried to change it. [xxiii]

They lived under military dictatorships, in war zones, and in refugee camps. They accompanied refugees and displaced communities on their journeys home. They joined delegations to learn about the local reality and to be “witnesses of peace.”  [xx]

The reaction of people was energizing because people who were our age or younger would say, “Wow, you did that? And if you were able to do something like that—and you know, you’re sort of normal suburban people—if you could do that, maybe I might have the courage to do that too.” [10-11]

It’s not just learning Spanish, because in the process of learning a language, you learn the people, you learn their way of seeing the world.  [206]

The work has gone on, re-creating itself over and over again. It finds expression in concrete projects of protest, witness, and accompaniment. [129]

The poor of Central America had taught them: Be a healing presence in this world. Counter all the death and hatred, demonization and greed, intolerance, and rage with solidarity—across races, cultures, languages, and histories riddled with injustice. Live as if each person really were created in God’s image. [xxvi]

Rather than avoiding pain, those in the solidarity community go right to the pain, right into the pain at the heart of the world, in the heart of this human being, the wounded one on the side of the road. Like the Good Samaritan, they don’t walk around the wounded, they don’t anesthetize or excuse themselves, they don’t fail to identify with them, they don’t pretend that it has nothing to do with them, they don’t distract themselves. [147]

They cared for the wounded, fed the hungry, comforted those in sorrow, buried the dead—in Central America and for Central Americans in the United States. They lost friends and loved ones, met the tortured and imprisoned, knew the disappeared and the massacred. Some survived torture themselves. Some gave their lives. [xx]

3.

The real victims of “America’s agony” are millions of suffering and tormented people throughout much of the Third World.  Our highly refined ideological institutions protect us from seeing their plight and our role in maintaining it, except sporadically.  If we had the honesty and moral courage, we would not let a day pass without hearing the cries of the victims. We would turn on the radio in the morning and listen to the voices of the people who escaped the massacres in Quiché province and the Guazapa mountains, and the daily press would carry front-page pictures of children dying of malnutrition and disease in the countries where order reigns and crops and beef are exported to the American market, with an explanation of why this is so.  We would listen to the extensive and detailed record of terror and torture in our dependencies compiled by Amnesty International, Americas Watch, Survival International, and other human rights organizations.  But we successfully insulate ourselves from this grim reality.  By so doing, we sink to a level of moral depravity that has few counterparts in the modern world….

–Noam Chomsky, 1985

Ellacuría  used [the term “crucified people”] to give a name to great majorities. Thus the language of “people” and “peoples” is laced with death, not natural but historical death, which takes the form of crucifixion, assassination, the active historical deprivation of life, whether slowly or quickly. That death, caused by injustice, is accompanied by cruelty, contempt and concealment. I usually add that the crucified people are also denied a chance to speak, and even to be called by name, which means they are denied their own existence. The crucified people “are not,” and the affluent world prohibits or inhibits then from “becoming.” The affluent word can thus ignore what happens to them, without any pangs of conscience.

–Job Sobrino, 2005



In her 1938 essay, Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf cautioned women to think critically about joining the professions men have created. She writes, “Those opinions cause us to doubt and criticize and question the value of professional life – not its cash value; that is great; but its spiritual, its moral, its intellectual value. They make us of the opinion that if people are highly successful in their professions they lose their senses. Sight goes. They have no time to look at pictures. Sound goes. They have no time to listen to music. Speech goes. They have no time for conversation. They lose their sense of proportion – the relations between one thing and another. Humanity goes. Moneymaking becomes so important that they must work by night as well as by day. Health goes. And so competitive do they become that they will not share their work with others though they have more than they can do themselves. What then remains of a human being who has lost sight, sound, and sense of proportion? Only a cripple in a cave.”

In his recent book, Happiness, Vietnamese Zen Master Thích Nhất Hạnh offers practices and teachings to regain this sense of proportion and to return us to our senses. The foundation of happiness, Nhất Hạnh suggests, is nothing other than the ancient Buddhist practice of mindfulness, adapted to the exigencies and opportunities of modern life.

In his classic book, The Miracle of Mindfulness, Nhất Hạnh wrote about his youthful monastic days and how he was instructed by his teachers to use gathas, or mindfulness verses, to stay rooted in the present moment. In Happiness, he offers many gathas to enable us to live in the here and now.

For example, as you hear your cell phone ring, you can use this gatha in sync with breathing calmly in and out: “Words can travel thousands of miles. May my words create mutual understanding and love. May they be as beautiful as gems, as lovely as flowers.”

Or, when walking on a beautiful autumn day, you can remember to look up and recite this gatha: “Breathing in, I recognize the blue sky. Breathing out, I smile to the blue sky.”

And when someone ignores us or talks down to us, we can call to mind this gatha: “Breathing in, I see anger in me. Breathing out, I smile at my anger.” He also mentions this Vietnamese proverb, which emphasizes the need to let go of such negative states of mind: “Be angry, sad, or annoyed for five minutes.”

Gathas are indispensable but so is a Sangha, or community that offers support for this practice. Sometimes, we think in grandiose terms of all we want to accomplish—at work, in school, or in social change movements. Evoking the spirit of the Dao De Jing, about the journey of a thousand miles beginning with one simple step, Nhất Hạnh writes, “If even just two people create a Sangha and an atmosphere of mindfulness, the peace and harmony around you will grow and soon your Sangha will grow too.”

The Second Body System is a method he encourages people to use at home, work, school, and community groups: Your own body is your first Body, and someone in your class is your Second Body, that is you look after someone, and that someone looks after someone, and someone will stay in touch with you, too.

I’ve cited several specific practices here, but in the book there are scores of trainings and exercises developed over some sixty years of experience. One can experiment with a couple and gradually integreate these, and more, into daily life.

Like many of his works, Nhất Hạnh’sHappiness seems simple (some might say simplistic), but the emphasis throughout is on practice. Yesterday, Sandra sent me a challenge by a Palestinian, Jawad Siyan, who said, “[International solidarity activists are] very weak. These people who want change, they are weak. Palestine is not for them a subject that they take to the heart. It’s volunteer work. They do it when they have time. If you want to solve this problem, you have to take it on as a job, not as a hobby.”

Likewise, the practice of mindfulness is not something we do when we have time, or as a hobby we take up here and there. Like solidarity with people facing oppression, it is a subject we need to take to the depths of our hearts. And it begins with the breath and this moment.

City Lights Open Media Series has done the U.S. public a service in publishing historian Howard Zinn’s The Bomb, a two-part pamphlet that is a contribution to critical thinking about war, and about one of its modern manifestations, that of high-altitude bombing.

Part 1 is Zinn’s essay on the atomic bombings of Japan and part 2 is about his own wartime participation in and later retrieval of the history of the Allied napalm-bombing   of a French town, Royan. Both essays could be read in less than a couple of hours but it will take a lifetime to integrate their implications in our personal and collective lives.

In his first essay, Zinn reminds fellow citizens of the enormity of unnecessary damage and destruction done by the two U.S. atomic bombings of Japanese civilians.  Statistics point to some 200,000 killed immediately by the two bombs. But Zinn stresses that “we need personal testimonies, not statistics to free us from our numbness: Only with those scenes in our minds can we judge the distressingly cold arguments that go on now, sixty-five years later, about whether it was right to send those planes out those two mornings in August of 1945. That this is arguable is a devastating commentary on our moral culture” (26).

For example, in the immediate aftermath of the bombing, a Japanese man said to a filmmaker:  “I ordered the driver to stop, with the funeral pyres still burning in the city, and turned to the American soldiers: ‘Look there. That blue light is women burning. It is babies burning. Is it wonderful to see the babies burning?’”  (52).

Zinn’s second essay is based on research he did in the mid-1960s about the French town of Royan, which he had helped bomb in the spring of 1945. The official line was that it was a military necessity to bomb the German soldiers garrisoned in the vicinity of Royan, even though the end of the war was clearly in sight.  The task for Zinn and his fellow pilots:  “…to bomb pockets of German troops remaining in and around Royan, and that in our bomb bays were thirty 100-pound bombs containing “jellied gasoline,” a new substance (now known as napalm)” (66).

After the town was bombed for three days, the German soldiers surrendered.   Practically all the buildings of the town had been destroyed.  Zinn notes that “[t]he evidence seems overwhelming that factors of pride, military ambition, glory,  and honor were powerful motives in producing an unnecessary military operation” (80).

After his participation in the European theater of the war, Zinn had a leave for some weeks before he was to join the effort in the Pacific.  Reunited with his wife, he noted that one day in August they read the headlines about Hiroshima:  “I remember our reaction: we were happy.  We didn’t know what an atom bomb was, but clearly it was huge and important and it foretold an end to the war against Japan and if so I wouldn’t be going to the Pacific, and might soon be coming home for good” (19). Thus, he was like countless Americans who were jubilant or relieved that the bombs ended the war.

About the bombing of Royan, Zinn recalls, “From our great height, I remember distinctly seeing the bombs explode in the town, flaring like matches struck in fog. I was completely unaware of the human chaos below” (67).  Earlier in the book, he writes more specifically that being such a pilot means “seeing no human beings, hearing no screams, seeing no blood, totally unaware that down below there might be children dying, rendered blind, with arms or legs severed”(18).

Over the decades, Zinn went from being this thoughtless and just-war bombardier to a critical citizen and historian:  By the period of U.S. B-52 carpet bombing in Indochina in the 1960s-1970s, Zinn had become experienced in questioning authority, refusing obedience to the war machine, and facing the victims of U.S. violence.

Able to break through the nationalist propaganda that conditions us to avert our gaze from or minimize U.S. belligerence, Zinn offers us a simple, though demanding, task: “We can reject the belief that the lives of others are worth less than the lives of Americans, that a Japanese child, or an Iraqi child, or an Afghani child is worth less than an American child” (63).