Years ago my teacher Marc Ellis came to Saint Louis
Another university, another talk on Palestine and Israel
The news is always changing
The oppression remains the same
No, worse
The politicos and their pundits cry, “peace process, peace process”
But there is no peace process,
Only a conquest process or, if you prefer,
A ghettoization process.
At Maryknoll School of Theology where I studied with Ellis, he said
“We Jews have a lot to answer for, given Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians,
But you Western Christians, the burdens you have would break anyone’s back”—
Colonialism, Hiroshima, Holocaust, Indochina incinerated.
Speaking at Webster University that night at the Winifred Moore Auditorium,
Not a full house, but he was the Jewish Muhammad Ali
He was not there to mess around:
“There is no moral future for the Jewish people outside of our solidarity with the Palestinian people.”
Naturally, there were dissenters to this dissenter:
You could hear the low grumbling,
The shocked ejaculations,
The moans of incredulity.
But then somebody broke:
A middle-aged man in the back of the auditorium left his seat
Bounded down the main aisle,
Stopped mid-way, pointed his finger at Ellis,
And screamed in a thick accent
YOU
SHOULD
BE
TAKEN
OUT
AND
SHOT!!!
The man then spun around, and fled the evidently unclean environs
Of the Jewish professor who taught Catholics and Baptists
About what their elders had never told them,
Who was trying to remind Jews of their patrimony.
You can always be assured
When someone starts to name idolatry
Blood begins to boil in the heart.

Suffering that is not prevented or relieved is an evil; damage that is not prevented or compensated for is an evil; when evil can be prevented but is not, can be relieved but isn’t, it is a superfluous evil.

What counts are the needs of others, always in the plural, without reifying the Other, and those others count only insofar as they (might) suffer superfluous evils. The superfluity of evils is Evil’s mode of being. It is the way in which an evil is suffered, experienced, assigned expression or compensation; the way it addresses a call, invites response, opens up a gap in someone’s existence, institutes duties, and creates obligations.

“The moral” is an attitude that subsists on the margins of any particular ethics and political discourse, nurtured from their sources but aspiring to transcend their limits and always maintaining a residual openness to that Evil which escapes articulation within these particular discourses. The moral is attentive to that Evil which ethics or a dominating political discourse has made one forget; it allows occurrences of Evil to come into presence and to appear as evils. The moral is care for the victims to whom a prevailing discourse is blind; it is a willingness to call into question the limit of that discourse and the means it employs in order to objectify evils.

– Adi Ophir

Note: November 2009 marks the 40th anniversary of the exposure of the Mỹ Lai massacre, which occurred on March 16, 1968. Over a hundred men of the Army’s Charlie Company of the Americal Division entered the village of Mỹ Lai and murdered over five hundred people, overwhelmingly women, children, and old men. A military cover-up of the mass murder ensued. Lieutenant William “Rusty” Calley was the only member of the company or of the higher command who received any punishment, initially, a sentence of life imprisonment with hard labor, which became three and a half years under house arrest, after which he was released. Some in the Army were relieved as the Mỹ Lai massacre was eventually termed a “tragedy,” later to be viewed as an “incident.”

1.

A Pentagon official wrote, “The way to eradicate the Viet Cong is to destroy all the village structures, defoliate all the jungles, and cover the entire surface of Vietnam with asphalt.”

An American soldier asked, “How can you tell the enemy? They all look the same.”

An officer said, “We are at war with ten year-old children. It may not be humanitarian, but that’s what it’s like.”

A private said to a journalist, “No one has any feeling for the Vietnamese. They’re lost. The trouble is, no one sees the Vietnamese as people. They’re not people. Therefore it doesn’t matter what you do to them.”

A soldier explained, “It was like going from one step to another, worse one. First, you’d stop the people, question them, and let them go. Second, you’d stop the people, beat up an old man, and let them go. Third, you’d stop the people, beat up an old man, and then shoot him. Fourth, you go in and wipe out a village.”

The Secretary of Defense said, “The picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one.”

A soldier said, “You didn’t trust anybody. Deep down inside, you had mixed emotions. You knew there was an enemy out there—but you couldn’t pinpoint who exactly was the enemy. And I would say that in the end, anybody that was still in that country was the enemy.”

The Marines circulated a joke in Quảng Ngãi: “The loyal Vietnamese should all be taken and put out to sea in a raft. Everybody left in the country should then be killed, and the nation paved over with concrete, like a parking lot. Then the raft should be sunk.”

An American doctor said, “Prisoners told me of being tortured by electricity with wires attached to ears, nipples, genitalia; by being forced to drink concoctions containing powdered lime; and by being tied up and suspended by ropes often upside down from the rafters for hours.”

A soldier in Charlie Company said, “I found myself doing the same things that had been going on all along. I found myself caught up in it. We cut his beard off him—this was an insult. A papa san with a beard is considered as the wise man, and to off their beard was a real sign of disrespect to them…. You found yourself punching them around, beating them up trying to get them to talk. I never did hit anyone with my rifle. I have taken a knife to them…. I never tortured anyone to death. I think I probably saw people tortured to death.”

A soldier in Charlie Company said, “Rape? Oh, that happened every day.”

A soldier said to a journalist newly arrived in Quảng Ngãi, “You wouldn’t believe the things that go on in this war…You wouldn’t believe it, so I’m not going to tell you. No one’s ever going to find out about some things, and after this war is over, and we’ve all gone home, no one is ever going to know.”

2.

The night before the mission in Mỹ Lai, a soldier asked after hearing the orders, “Do we kill women and children?”

A soldier said, “The men in my squad talked about this among ourselves that night because the order to ‘kill everything in the village’ was so unusual. We all agreed that Captain Medina meant for us to kill every man, woman, and child in the village.”

A soldier said, “Do you realize what it was like killing five hundred people in a matter of four or five hours. It’s just like the gas chambers—what Hitler did. You line up fifty people, women, old men, children, and just mow ‘em down. And that’s the way it was—from twenty-five to fifty to one hundreds. Just killed. We rounded ‘em up, me and a couple of guys, just put the M-16 on automatic, and just mowed ‘em down.”

An Army photographer said, “I didn’t notice a GI kneeling down beside me with his M-16 rifle pointed at the child. Then I suddenly heard the crack and through the viewfinder I saw this child flip over the top of the pile of bodies. The GI stood up and just walked away. No remorse. Nothing. The other soldiers had a cold reaction—they were staring off into space like it was an everyday thing, they felt they had to do it and they did it. That was their job. It was weird, just a shrug of the shoulder. No emotional reaction.”

A soldier in Charlie Company said, “The boys enjoyed it. When someone laughs and jokes about what they’re doing, they have to be enjoying it.”

Another member of Charlie Company said, “If I had been told to do so, like Meadlo was ordered by Lt. Calley, I would have refused because I know that it is a war crime. Even if General Westmoreland would have ordered me to shoot women and children I would have refused.”

The photographer said, “I feel sometimes that the camera did take over during the operation. I put it up to my eye, took a shot, put it down again. Nothing was composed. Nothing was prethought, just the normal reaction of a photographer. I was part of it, everyone who was there was part of it, and that includes the General and the Colonel flying above in their helicopters. They’re all part of it. We all were. Just one big group.”

A local Vietnamese man said about people in the vicinity of Mỹ Lai, “After the shooting, all the villagers became Communists.”

3.

An Army investigator said, “If the Pinkville [Mỹ Lai] incident was true, it was cold-blooded murder. I hoped to God it was false, but if it wasn’t I wanted the bastards exposed for what they’d done.”

The Army Chief of Staff said, “We cannot permit our ethical standards and humane principles to be reduced to those of the enemy for it is his very brutality and lack of respect for the dignity of the individual that we most abhor.”

A soldier who heard about the massacre said, “I wanted to get those people. I wanted to reveal what they did. My God, when I first came home, I would tell me friends about this and cry—literally cry. As far as I was concerned, it was a reflection on me, on every American, on the ideals that we supposedly represent. It completed castrated the whole picture of America.”

A girlfriend of Lt. Calley said, “I know deep down he wouldn’t hurt anyone. Just look at the way he takes care of his pets and how gentle he is.”

A soldier said, “The people back in the world don’t understand this war. We are here to kill dinks. How can they convict Calley for killing dinks? That’s our job.”

A Christian minister said about Lt. Calley, “There was a crucifixion 2,000 years ago of a man named Jesus Christ. I don’t think we need another crucifixion of a man named Rusty Calley.”

A fellow officer at Fort Benning said of Lt. Calley, “He’s a good soldier. He followed orders.”

A journalist said, “The massacre calls for self-examination and for action, but if we deny the call and try to go on as before, as though nothing had happened, our knowledge, which can never leave us once we have acquired it, will bring about an unnoticed but crucial alteration in us, numbing our most precious faculties and withering our souls. For if we learn to accept this, there is nothing we will not accept.”

An American mother said, “So what if a few Vietnamese got shot? They’ve killed 40,000 of our boys over there.”

Another American mother whose son was at Mỹ Lai said about the Army, “I gave them a good boy, and they made him a murderer.”

A medic from Charlie Company who was not present at Mỹ Lai said, “To me, it was just another day in Vietnam. Something like this is always happening. If you really wanted to find stories, you could find fifteen or twenty that could make this look like a nursery rhyme.”

Sources

Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim, Four Hours in My Lai (New York: Penguin Books, 1992).

Seymour Hersh, My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath (New York: Random House, 1970).

Adi Ophir, The Order of Evils: Toward an Ontology of Morals (New York: Zone Books, 2005).

I am happy to share the following excerpt from a paper by one of my students, Erin Almand, who took Social Justice in spring 2009. Herein, Erin refers to her “insertion” work at Kingdom House in Saint Louis and the several books she read in our class….

What Kingdom House has shown me is another example of how all of mankind is just alike. We might have different skin color, family traditions, religions, or cultures, but we are one. Chan Khong wrote about this idea. She traveled all over the world to bring a message of love and “oneness” to the globe. Her message of love is a lesson to all of us, as are the children who attend Kingdom House.  I think the insertion requirement and the course material go hand in hand.

We are able to put our beliefs and what we have read about into practice, real life experience. It is one thing to read books and discuss topics in a classroom, and it is quite another to live out those ideas on a daily basis. The insertion falls hand-in-hand with the message of each book we have read—to an extent.

For Goldberg, you must do what you love. If you love serving people, great. Do it. if you love the idea of serving people (just like loving the idea of writing), that’s great. Go do it. if you hate the idea of serving people (like hating the idea of writing), try it. You might surprise yourself. Chan Khong is all about love. What better way to show your love for people than to serve them, to fight out against social injustice?

In Baghdad Burning, Riverbend’s main message is that we are all the same. We are all alike. As Mev would have written, “The struggle is one.” We, the human race, are One. Each person deserves certain rights, and if we have those rights, we must seek justice for those who have had their right stripped away.

Mev exemplified all of these ideas throughout her life. She used her love and passion to bring about awareness and call out social injustices. Mev is all about love and grace, and doing service is a way to show love and grace to others. Simply because of our skin color and nationality, we are privileged. Mev wanted to make it so that everyone was equal—men and women, blacks and whites, rich and poor.

In Unbowed, Wangari worked for women’s rights. She saw social injustices and spoke out about it—even though it cost her her reputation as a “good African woman” and eventually, her husband. All of the books we read in class dealt with social injustices in some way. I believe that any work on issues like the ones we read about in class should be considered “working for change.”  I am confident that all of these women would advocate the social issue I have decided to bear: the education of our children. This class has affected me so much, and my service at Kingdom House did, too.

I plan on returning to Kingdom House in the Fall—even though as an upperclassman Micah, I am not required to do any service. The books we read have also inspired me. Goldberg has had a particular influence on me. I re-started up my blog and have fallen in love with words again. I have always had a secret desire to be a poet. Who knows, maybe someday down the line I’ll owe my poetry success to this class! I know that I will continue giving back to the community around me. I love people so much, and have such a compassion and spirit to serve.

After college, I am toying with the idea of going to Graduate school, probably for my doctorate  or masters for Theatre for Young Audiences. I know that I want to work with children and if I could incorporate that with my passion for theatre, life would be grand. (Of course, life will probably be grand no matter what I end up doing). I do think that I will end up being a teacher, director, or actor for children’s theatre. We shall see.

What I am certain about is my love for the class and all the wisdom I have gathered from it. I have thoroughly enjoyed this class and wish it didn’t have to end.  I will never forget the lessons I learned, the stories and readings people shared, and the books we read about ordinary people doing extraordinary things. In my days at Kingdom House, I would often remind myself: “Just like me, the children at Kingdom House want to be happy. They don’t want to suffer.” Now I will say, “Just like me ___(insert name)____ wants to be happy. They don’t want to suffer.”

Nicaragua is on my mind, as several SLU students prepare to work there this summer. Recently, I’ve been reading a lot of the works of Brazilian bishop Pedro Casaldáliga, who visited Nicaragua in 1985 during the terrorist contra war. There, he engaged in what he called the ministries of the border and of consolation. His reflection on these ministries: “The visits and the contact are a comfort to all of us and make us like brothers and sisters. I’ve always thought informal visits, with a little faith and human affection, are the most effective kind of pastoral activity.” He kept a journal of his experiences, which included the following poem.

To Reagan

Pedro Casaldáliga

You are being excommunicated by me and the poets, the children, the poor of the land:
Pay attention!
We’ve got to see the world in human terms.
Don’t play Nero.
This isn’t a movie, you screen monkey:
You’re the leader of a great nation!
(I will tell your people to clean off forever
The shit your cowboy boot has tracked over your flag.
And I will tell them, when they vote,
To realize that they may be selling much blood and their own honor!)
You may have inebriated the world with Coca-Cola,
But there is still someone lucid enough to tell you “No!”
The profits and power of your weapons
Cannot be valued above
The feverish wail
Of a little black child.

Empires no longer suit the race of human beings.
Listen, Reagan: the sun
Rises as sun for everyone
And the same God rains
Over every life God has invited to the celebration.

No people is the greatest.
Stay in your own backyard.
Respect us.

Rachel has found you out, Herod,
And you will have to answer for her desolation.

Sandino’s star
Is waiting for you in the hills
And in the volcano a single heart awakes:
Like a sea of indignation little girl Nicaragua
Will smash your aggression.

The blood of the martyrs holds up our arms
And becomes song and fountains in our mouths.
You have never seen the hills, Reagan,
Nor have you heard in their birds the voice of the voiceless.
You know nothing of life,
And do not understand the song.

Don’t come to us with your hypocritical morality,
You mass murderer, you’re aborting a whole people and its revolution.
The lie you try to pass off to the world (and to the pope)
Is the worst drug.
You are showing Freedom (in an exclusive screening)
While you block the way to Liberation.

“The United States is powerful and mighty.”

All right! “We trust… in God.”

You may think you’re the owners, you may have everything,
Even god, your god
–the bloodstained idol of your dollars,
The mechanical Moloch—
But you don’t have the God of Jesus Christ,
The Humanity of God!
I swear by the blood of his Son,
Killed by another empire,
And I swear by the blood of Latin America
–now ready to give birth to new tomorrows—
That you
Will be the last
(grotesque)
emperor!

–from Prophets in Combat: The Nicaraguan Journal of Bishop Pedro Casaldáliga [1986]

Pedro’s comment: “In Nicaragua someone even doubted that this poem was mine. It’s mine, all right. The Bible has much harsher words for kings and lords who murdered the poor and sought to take over the world.”

For another perspective on Reagan, see former Nicaraguan foreign minister Miguel d’Escoto, “Reagan was the Butcher of My People,” at http://www.counterpunch.org/descoto06092004.html

For more on Pedro, see Mev Puleo’s interview with him in her book ,The Struggle is One: Voices and Visions of Liberation (1994).

The Jesuits clearly influenced me with their strict organization, their discipline, and their values. [p. 118]

I believe that Christ was a great revolutionary. That’s what I believe. His entire doctrine was devoted to the humble, the poor; his doctrine was devoted to fighting against abuse, injustice, and the degradation of human beings. I’d say there’s a lot in common between the spirit and essence of his teaching and socialism. [p. 17]

Well, Christ multiplied the fish and loaves to feed the people. That is precisely what we want to do with the revolution and socialism: multiply the fish and the loaves to feed the people: multiply the schools, teachers, hospitals, and doctors; multiply the factories, the fields under cultivation, and the jobs; multiply industrial and agricultural productivity; and multiply the research centers and the number of scientific research projects for the same purpose. [p.249]

–Fidel Castro, from Fidel and Religion: Conversations with Frei Betto on Marxism and Liberation Theology (2006 edition)

1.

pros·e·cute (pròs¹î-ky¡t´) verb pros·e·cut·ed, pros·e·cut·ing, pros·e·cutes verb, transitive 1. Law. a. To initiate civil or criminal court action against. b. To seek to obtain or enforce by legal action. 2.a. To pursue (an undertaking, for example) until completion; follow to the very end. b. To chase or pursue (a vessel): “He held a dispatch saying that [they] had prosecuted and probably killed an Echo-class missile submarine” (Tom Clancy). 3. To carry on, engage in, or practice.

–American Heritage Dictionary

2.

“This whole thing about punishing people in past administrations reminds me more of a banana republic than the United States of America.

We don’t criminally prosecute people we disagree with when we change office.

There are lots of questions that could have been asked of the Clinton administration failing to recognize the war on terror. They did not. The Bush administration went forward and that’s the way our country should.

The president said he was going to be forward looking.  Now he has opened up a stab in the back.

I am saying that those who want to have public hearings and show trials in the United States Congress, such as may be in the House, would be following tactics that are more appropriate for a banana republic.

I don’t think the Obama administration wants to say the next time the Republicans get in control they will have show hearings-trials and try to institute criminal prosecutions against people who carried out orders of the Obama administration.

So I don’t think that the president or anybody in the administration wants to be caught in that action, and I think there must be a number of leaders and former leaders of Congress who are pretty nervous about having their authorizations and appropriations questioned as violating the law.”

–Missouri Senator Kit Bond, in an interview with Andrea Mitchell, 4.23.2009

3.

The above response by Senator Bond is remarkable for its impromptu bluntness.

We don’t criminally prosecute people with whom we disagree; however, we have a responsibility to prosecute people who have committed crimes. For instance, torturing human beings.

Like any student of 20th century European history, Senator Bond surely must know that stating one was following orders constitutes no justification for committing crimes.

Bond’s rhetoric is a case study in defensiveness: “banana republic,” “stab in the back,” and “show trials.” Like “a number of leaders and former leaders of Congress,” Bond appears nervous about where all this could lead. This is worth noting.

4.

“I have to turn down your summons to duty. I won’t come along to squeeze the trigger on your behalf. Of course, I have no illusions. To you I am a buzzing gnat that you will swat and try to crush before striding on. You’ll find yourself another gunner, more obedient and gifted than me. There’s no shortage. Your tank will rumble on. One single gnat can’t halt a tank, certainly not a column of tanks, certainly not the entire march of folly. But the gnat can buzz, irritate, infuriate, occasionally even sting. Ultimately, more and more gunners, drivers and commanders, who will see more and more aimless killing, will also start thinking and buzzing. There are already many hundreds of us. Ultimately our buzzing will ascend into a deafening outcry that will echo in your years and the ears of your children, and on the pages of history for many generations.”

–Israeli Yigal Bronner, from his letter to an Israeli general on his refusal to serve in the occupied Palestinian territories

5.

President Obama said, “No one is above the law.” Those are easy words in the abstract. But one must apply those words to our particular context. Thus, to be specific, former president Bush is not above the law.

What does it say to our own youth as well as people around the world, that because a person is powerful, he or she need not be accountable when they violate the law?

For any American who believes in justice, Senator Bond has alerted us to the task ahead. We, the people, must push for prosecution of those high officials who instigated a policy of torture.

One or two gnats won’t bother Senator Bond and his past and present colleagues.

But it could be hard to ignore a hundred that “buzz, irritate, infuriate, occasionally even sting.”

A thousand could “ascend into a deafening outcry.”

A Reflection on Peretz Kidron, Refusenik! Israel’s Soldiers of Conscience (London and New York: Zed Books, 2004)

1.

General, your tank is a powerful vehicle

It tramples the forest, it crushes a hundred men.

But it has one flaw:

It requires a driver.

General, your bomber is strong.

It flies faster than the storm, it loads more than an elephant.

But it has one flaw:

It requires a mechanic.

General, man is very useful.

He knows how to fly, he knows how to murder.

But he has one flaw:

He knows how to think.

–Bertolt Brecht, German poet and playwright who left Germany after Hitler came to power

2.

Refusenik = Israeli Army reservists who report for duty when summoned but refuse morally objectionable assignments (notably serving in the West Bank and Gaza)

In Refusenik!, Peretz Kidron has done a great service in collecting the testimonies of and giving the historical background for the Israeli refusenik movement. It is a slim volume, less than120 pages but it shines a powerful light on the Jewish humanism at work in Israeli society.

Born in Vienna in 1933, living in England during the Third Reich, and moving to Israel in the early 1950s, Kidron has been a refusenik himself. Although there were some instances of Israelis refusing military service in the 1970s, it was with the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon that galvanized Israelis to protest and say, Enough. In fact, these soldiers of conscience called their organization, Yesh Gvul, Hebrew which means “There is a limit.”

The refuseniks, it is important to know, are not pacifists. However, they would seem to agree in principle with a formulation of the twentieth-century’s best known pacifist, Mohandas Gandhi, who said, “Non-cooperation with evil is a sacred duty.” Theirs is a selective conscientious objection, that is, they are committed to the defense of Israel but not to Israel’s occupation and domination of the Palestinians.

Not surprisingly, many Israelis would see such questioners of authority as traitorous. Likewise, in recent years, even though more Americans have indicated that they want the U.S. troops brought back from Iraq, I suspect those soldiers who refuse to go to Iraq and Afghanistan would be seen in comparably critical terms by their fellow American citizens.

Consider the view of Mike Levine, who was jailed for his refusing to serve in Israel’s Lebanon campaign in the early 1980s: “First time I was called up, I reported for duty. The second time I refused and joined Yesh Gvul. I should stress that my activity in the movement is in no way directed against the state of Israel, I do it out of concern and dread over what is happening here. I believe my refusal is an act of personal protest stemming from unwillingness to take part in the brutal acts committed by the Israeli army. Furthermore, I consider my refusal to be a patriotic act.” [p. 17]

Stephen Langfur was born in the U.S. and was a Conscientious Objector during the American war of destruction in Vietnam. When he moved to Israel, he began to serve in the Israel Defense Force but later refused to serve in the West Bank during the first Palestinian intifada. He faced three weeks of detention for his objection. The following is part of his reckoning for why he did what he did: “The basic moral law here is the Torah, as stated by the Jewish sage of antiquity, Hillel: ‘What is hateful to you, do not do unto others.’ Its principle: another person’s life is as important to him as mine is to me. Insofar as I owe my own being to other persons, that law is basic to being human. We are stuck with it. When we violate it, we feel guilt. There is, however, a way to oppress others and not feel guilt. The moral law applies to persons, so one can avoid feeling guilt by persuading oneself that the oppressed are subhuman. The doctrine of the sub-humanity of the Arabs is in full swing among us (‘grasshoppers’, ‘cockroaches’, ‘one thousandth of a Jew’, ‘animals’, ‘the dirtiest people on earth’). But then, instead of guilt, one feels dread of their ultimate revenge. And because one has pushed their humanity into the unconscious, the oppressed seem not only like animals, but like animals with demoniacal properties. So one feels threatened and beats them harder, and then there is more guilt to avoid, so one de-humanises them more, and on and on: it is the spiral of evil. One cannot sit upon another people without de-humanising them. This is my green line. I refuse to de-humanise the Arabs.” [p. 32]

There have been controversial reports circulating in Israel from soldiers speaking frankly about what they did in the recent Operation Molten Lead in late 2008 and early 2009 in Gaza. Supporters of Israeli policy attribute the problem to individual soldiers. This reaction is reminiscent of the reaction to U.S. soldiers involved in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal in the early years of the U.S. occupation in Iraq. A few of those soldiers, like Lynddie England, became scapegoats to obscure the chain of command ultimately responsible for the nefarious treatment of Iraqis.

Doron Vilner is a social worker and a co-founder of Yesh Gvul. While imprisoned for his resistance, he had some contact with fellow soldiers who were the cogs in the machine of the Israeli occupation that is authorized by the Israeli power elite. He writes, “The surprise is the discovery of what it is the occupation does to those who enforce it on the ground. Ostensibly, they’re ordinary youngsters like you’d meet anywhere in the world, who talk about the girl-friend they have or haven’t got, or how many days they have left to serve in prison. But over and again, conversations in the tents revert to experiences they’ve had in fighting the intifada. They talk about the Palestinian they beat to a pulp; about the child they caught after a chase, and how his mother came along and made such a fuss trying to get him released; about the Ratz (Liberal) party member who handed over the Arab he’d caught to the Border Guards, begging them not to beat ‘his’ Arab, and how they just waited for him to clear off before giving the prisoner a thrashing. Whenever I enter the tent, the talk ceases or they change the subject to more general matters. Those silences cry out. I have often heard stories of such silences. I heard about them in another land [German] when an entire generation kept silent, never telling their children about an entire period of their lives. And here in prison, detached from my usual circles of acquaintances, I meet those who do the daily work of the occupation. An entire generation for whom authorized establishment violence is part of their daily round. In corners, when there aren’t many listeners around and you can talk discreetly, someone finds a moment to slip up to me and say he didn’t behave that way, that he was different. And anyway, they too, the Arabs, are human beings.” [p. 40]

There are many other such compelling voices in this collection.

3.

Yigal Bronner is a professor of literature at Tel Aviv University and has worked with Ta’ayush, an Arab-Jewish solidarity group. In his letter of refusal to a general, he stated, “I have to turn down your summons to duty. I won’t come along to squeeze the trigger on your behalf. Of course, I have no illusions. To you I am a buzzing gnat that you will swat and try to crush before striding on. You’ll find yourself another gunner, more obedient and gifted than me. There’s no shortage. Your tank will rumble on. One single gnat can’t halt a tank, certainly not a column of tanks, certainly not the entire march of folly. But the gnat can buzz, irritate, infuriate, occasionally even sting. Ultimately, more and more gunners, drivers and commanders, who will see more and more aimless killing, will also start thinking and buzzing. There are already many hundreds of us. Ultimately our buzzing will ascend into a deafening outcry that will echo in your years and the ears of your children, and on the pages of history for many generations.” [p. 117]

For more information, see

Yesh Gvul: http://www.yeshgvul.org/index_e.asp

The Shministim are Israeli high school students who have been imprisoned for refusing to serve in an army that occupies the Palestinian Territories: http://december18th.org/

Courage to Refuse: http://www.seruv.org.il/english/combatants_letter.asp

Breaking the Silence: http://www.shovrimshtika.org/index_e.asp

1.

“The Peace Corps left today and my heart sank low. The danger is extreme and they were right to leave… Now I must assess my own position, because I am not up for suicide. Several times I have decided to leave El Salvador. I almost could, except for the children, the poor, bruised victims of this insanity. Who would care for them? Whose heart could be so staunch as to favor the reasonable thing in a sea of their tears and loneliness? Not mine, dear friend, not mine.”

–Jean Donovan, US lay missionary in El Salvador, raped and murdered by US-backed Salvadoran troops, 2 December 1980

“I’m having a hard time right now.   Just feel sick to my stomach from being doted on very sweetly, by people who are facing doom.  I know that from the United States it all sounds like hyperbole.  A lot of the time the kindness of the people here, coupled with the willful destruction of their lives, makes it seem unreal to me.  I can’t believe that something like this can happen in the world without a bigger outcry.   It hurts me, again, like it has hurt me in the past, to witness how awful we can allow the world to be.”

–Rachel Corrie, US college student and activist in Rafah, Gaza, bulldozed to death by US-backed Israeli Army, 16 March 2003

2.

In the fall of 2003, I decided to take a sabbatical. Since I always encourage my Social Justice students to leave their comfort zone, I planned on doing the same: I worked with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. For six weeks, I lived and worked in Rafah, Gaza, which had been the scene of many killings of Palestinian civilians and the demolition of hundreds of homes by the Israeli Army. While I was in Rafah, I thought many times of one of my predecessors there, an American college student by the name of Rachel Corrie.

On 16 March 2003 Rachel was killed by an Israeli soldier who bulldozed her as she tried to prevent a physician’s home from being demolished. The Palestinians considered her a shaheedah, a martyr, one who had died in the struggle against the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. At our ISM office, we saw photographs and posters of Rachel Corrie in the full bloom of youth, with an exuberant smile, a bright future of promise in her eyes. When we met Palestinians on the street who wanted to know who we foreigners were, we would say, “ISM,” and they said back with effusive respect, “Yes, yes, Rachel Corrie, Rachel Corrie!”

One room of the ISM office in Rafah has a wall collage of shaheed posters, remembrances of those ordinary Palestinians (and a few internationals) who’ve been killed since the second intifada began in September 2000. These posters include young girls, teen-age boys, bookish-looking bespectacled young men, as well as confident resistance fighters posing with weapons that were unable to protect them from Israeli Apache helicopters or tanks. How many walls would be filled by all the martyr posters of this intifada? I could not imagine. And for each face there, I supposed that there were 10, or 30, or 60 family members and friends still reeling from the loss.

Early in my time in Rafah, our ISM team wanted to visit where Rachel Corrie was killed. Two white Mercedes taxis drove our group to the area where the doctor’s home still stood (it has since been demolished). When we got out and drew near to the site, our local Palestinian coordinator noticed an approaching Israeli jeep and a tank. He did not think it safe for us to stay and so he hurried us back in the taxis and said, “We will come another day.”

So instead we went to the nearby Al-Salaam neighborhood so we could inspect the damage caused by the recent Israeli Operation Root Canal. We got out our cameras and took video and digital photos of the massive home destruction. We also had a brief exchange with the family whose homes were blown up; they erected tents on their property and that’s where they were trying to live. One ISM volunteer, Kristi, age 26, and best friends with Rachel Corrie, began to weep at the misery before her eyes, the misery that also moved Rachel Corrie, day after day.

A few days later we made another attempt to see Dr. Sameer’s home. Many of our team were taking photos and video footage, but I didn’t have the heart to reach in my backpack to pull out my camera to document more devastation. Then we saw an Israeli tank in the distance coming toward us (they patrolled that area every 15 minutes, I was told). Our Palestinian guide insisted that we duck and run but some of us were not so quick in following his instructions. Live ammo came whizzing our way, ricocheting off the wall we had just passed.

In an email to her mother while she was in Rafah, Rachel wrote, “When I am with Palestinian friends I tend to be somewhat less horrified than when I am trying to act in a role of human rights observer, documenter, or direct-action resister. They are a good example of how to be in it for the long haul. I know that the situation gets to them - and may ultimately get them - on all kinds of levels, but I am nevertheless amazed at their strength in being able to defend such a large degree of their humanity - laughter, generosity, family-time - against the incredible horror occurring in their lives and against the constant presence of death.… I should at least mention that I am also discovering a degree of strength and of basic ability for humans to remain human in the direst of circumstances - which I also haven’t seen before. I think the word is dignity. I wish you could meet these people. Maybe, hopefully, someday you will.”

3.

Not surprisingly, some people have demonized Jean Donovan and Rachel Corrie: Jean was a “Communist” and Rachel was a “terrorist,” with the imputation that they “got” what they deserved.

Yet, all over the world others have been inspired by their commitment to justice. They are witnesses not only to the horrors of injustice, so smoothly explained away by U.S. leaders; they are also witnesses to our capacities for accompaniment, risk taking, and solidarity.

As a teacher, I am grateful to so many former students whose commitment also challenges and inspires me. Some of them have chosen to work overseas, and have become able to recognize in the people with whom they shared their days and nights what Rachel simply called “dignity.” I am thinking of such people as Mary (Mozambique), Wendy (Cameroon), Marybeth (Uganda), Magan (Palestine), Bridget (Chile), Danielle (El Salvador), Laura (Bolivia), James (Nicaragua), Randa (Mali), Ginny (Mexico), Laura (El Salvador), Becca (Haiti), Colette (El Salvador), Elizabeth (Colombia), Anna (Poland), Kristen (Belize), Zeina (Palestine), Layla (Afghanistan), Josh (Bolivia), Matt (Mozambique), Christine (Mexico), Lauren (Uganda), Jen (Guatemala), Megan (Colombia), and Lala (Indonesia).

4.

“I look forward to seeing more and more people willing to resist the direction the world is moving in, a direction where our personal experiences are irrelevant, that we are defective, that our communities are not important, that we are powerless, that our future is determined, and that the highest level of humanity is expressed through what we choose to buy at the mall.”

–Rachel Corrie, email from Gaza

When we were reading Chan Khong’s book, Learning True Love, I compiled the following for my young students who do not know much about the American War in Vietnam.

American Heritage Dictionary

Napalm, incendiary material used in bombs and flame throwers. Developed during World War II, napalm is a mixture of gasoline (sometimes mixed with other petroleum fuels) and a thickening agent. The thickener turns the mixture into a dense jelly that flows under pressure, as when shot from a flame thrower, and sticks to a target as it burns. Earlier Soap thickeners were replaced by polystyrene and similar polymers.

Philip Jones Griffiths, Vietnam, Inc.

NAPALM. The most effective “anti-personnel” weapon, it is euphemistically described as “unfamiliar cooking fluid” by those apologists for American military methods. They automatically attribute all napalm cases to domestic accidents caused by the people using gasoline instead of kerosene in their cooking stoves. Kerosene is far too expensive for the peasants, who normally use charcoal for cooking. The only “cooking fluid” they know is very “unfamiliar” – it is delivered through their roofs by U.S. planes.

Some of its finer selling points were explained to me by a pilot in 1966: “We sure are pleased with those backroom boys at Dow [Chemical Company]. The original product wasn’t so hot – if the gooks were quick they could scrape it off. So the boys started adding polystyrene – now it sticks like shit to a blanket. But then if the gooks jumped under water it stopped burning, so they started adding Willie Peter (WP – white phosphorous) so’s to make it burn better. It’ll even burn under water now. And just one drop is enough, it’ll keep on burning right down to the bone so they die anyway from phosphorous poisoning.”

Philip Jones Griffiths, in the book Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides by Christian Appy

There was a napalm ward in the provincial hospital of Quang Ngai where the people were so badly disfigured they could probably never go back into society. Many had been put in there to die. I was there once and saw this kid. He had his eyelids burned off, his nose burned off, and his lips burned off. He was halfway to becoming a skull, but he was still alive. I could hardly look at him—he was so ugly, so frightening, really, really frightening.

So I just glanced at him and turned around. I was photographing someone else and I felt somebody pulling at the back of my shirt. I turned around and it was the boy. He indicated with sign language that he wanted me to take his picture. As I took his picture, I remember thinking that it will never get published but it’s something we should have for the war crimes trial. Of course that never happened.

When I came out of that ward there was an American journalist. She said, “I can’t go in there, it’s too horrible. Can you take my camera and take some pictures for me?” I said, “No, you go in there. Those people were burned with your taxpayer’s money. Go and see what they did to those people with your money.”

Teachings from the Buddhist Order of Interbeing

Do not avoid contact with suffering or close your eyes before suffering. Do not lose awareness of the existence of suffering in the life of the world. Find ways to be with those who are suffering by all means, including personal contact and visits, images, sound. By such means, awaken yourself and others to the reality of suffering in the world.

Do not live with a vocation that is harmful to humans and nature. Do not invest in companies that deprive others of their chance to life. Select a vocation which helps realize your ideal compassion.

Do not kill. Do not let others kill. Find whatever means possible to protect life and to prevent war.

Respect the property of others but prevent others from enriching themselves from human suffering or the suffering of other beings.

Review of Jimmy Carter, We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land: A Plan That Will Work.

(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009), $27.00.

Now in his eighties, former U.S. president Jimmy Carter persistently continues his pursuit of peace in the Middle East. In the follow-up to his controversial book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid (2006), Carter covers familiar territory and comes up with a surprisingly optimistic perspective, revealed in the book’s title: We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land: A Plan That Will Work.

For his last book, Carter was denounced by some as an anti-Semite and the best friend of terrorists; nevertheless, he accomplished what he set out to do: namely, to provoke a lively debate on this central foreign policy question of how to foster peace in what he calls the Holy Land (i.e., Palestine and Israel).

I read Palestine Peace Not Apartheid with some appreciation and interest, because Carter used his immense cultural, symbolic, and political capital to draw attention to issues long downplayed or ignored in the U.S. mainstream. For example, in that book, he wrote, “Regardless of whether Palestinians had no formalized government, one headed by Yasir Arafat or Mahmoud Abbas, or one with Abbas as president and Hamas controlling the parliament and cabinet, Israel’s continued control and colonization of Palestinian land have been the primary obstacles to a comprehensive peace agreement in the Holy Land. In order to perpetuate the occupation, Israeli forces have deprived their unwilling subjects of basic human rights. No objective person could personally observe existing conditions in the West Bank and dispute these statements.” [208-209] I and several friends in Saint Louis have taken the opportunity to visit and work in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and can confirm Carter’s analysis.

Early in his this book, Carter asks, “What is the existing deadlock in promoting peace?” [xvii] In the latter part of the book, he makes the following observations:

For the past thirty years, there has been no doubt in both private and public discussions, within the Holy Land and globally, the confiscation of land and building of Israeli settlements in the West Bank are recognized as one of the primary obstacles to peace. There has been a recent outpouring of condemnations by political leaders. [151-152]

The chance for successful peace negotiations would be greatly enhanced if the threat of terrorist acts could be effectively addressed. There is little doubt that a peace agreement in the Holy Land with a contiguous and viable state for the Palestinians would remove a major cause of terrorism throughout the region. [155]

Palestinians, Israelis, and other observers recognize that during the past sixteen years, U.S. political leaders have acquiesced in Israel’s massive settlement building in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Intended to establish permanent “facts on the ground,” the result has been to diminish (or eliminate) the prospect of a sovereign, contiguous, and viable Palestinian state with the West Bank linked to Gaza and its capital in Jerusalem. [166]

These three observations, then, go a long way to illuminating that issue of deadlock: Both the U.S. and Israel have been unwilling to agree to Israel’s withdrawal from Palestinian territory. Under Carter’s presidential successors Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, the so-called “peace process” can more accurately be described as the “ghettoization process” of the Palestinians.

Carter achieved lasting fame for his role in bringing together Israel and Egypt in the Camp David Accords in 1979. During those negotiations, Carter noted that the Israeli leaders Menachem Begin and Moshe Dayan were not willing:

(1) to withdraw politically or militarily from any part of the West Bank; (2) to stop the construction of new settlements or the expansion of existing ones; (3) to withdraw Israeli settlers from Egypt’s Sinai or leave them under U.N. protection; (4) to acknowledge that U.N. resolution 242 applied to the West Bank-Gaza area; (5) to grant the Palestinians real authority or a voice in their own future; or (6) to discuss the issue of refugees. [35]

Many of the foregoing refusals characterize recent Israeli policy. Indeed, over the last thirty years, there has been a remarkable consistency in Israeli leadership. One expression used to describe their strategy is “movement without motion”—producing the illusion that diplomacy was focused on peace (while “facts on the ground” were being established that negate the possibility of a real peace settlement).

The “plan” referred to in the book’s subtitle refers to the long-standing two-state solution, which calls for Israel to return to its 1967 borders and terminating its settlements. (The two-state solution is based on the crucial U.N. resolutions, and embraced by the Arab League, and is the subject of several appendices in Carter’s book.) Yet, Carter plainly sees the continued, operative U.S. support for Israel’s “facts on the grounds,” as in these two passages: “As President Bush had not mentioned settlements in his Knesset speech, the Israelis not only ignored [Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice] but announced plans to build another thirteen hundred new homes in the West Bank and projected forty thousand more during the next decade.” [152] “On March 17 [Ehud Olmert] announced that Israel had the absolute right to continue expanding existing settlements and building new ones, especially around Jerusalem, despite objections from Washington or anywhere else.” [114]

Carter acknowledges the baleful significance of these settlements for the possibility of peace between Israel and Palestine. Further, he cites Palestinians and Israelis who believe that the settlements have rendered impossible a two-state solution, thus raising the issue of both peoples living together in one state. Carter notes: “The next stage within a single state would be a struggle before world opinion for equal political rights for millions of Palestinians voters similar to what took place in South Africa.” [162] Israel would then face the choice of losing its Jewishness as a state, or gaining full apartheidness as a state. Carter soberly concludes, “Perhaps the most important overarching decision for the Palestinians is whether to seek equal citizenship within a single nation instead of continuing their frustrated struggle for separate statehood. The Israelis will have to provide the ultimate response.” [170]

It is with that last sentence that I have to disagree. What is jarring in Carter’s book is his view, not of Israel or Palestine, but the United States. Consider these excerpts:

The United States will find all parties to the conflict—and leaders of other nations—eager to support strong, fair, and persistent leadership from Washington. [xx]

Yet for the past fifty years the United States has been widely recognized as the essential interlocutor that can provide guidance, encouragement, and support to those who want to find common ground. Unfortunately, most leaders in Washington have not been effective in helping parties find peace, while making it harder for other potential mediators in Europe, the Near East, and the United Nations to intercede. [xv]

I know from personal experience that the influence of our government is limited, but there is no prospect for regional harmony and stability unless the United States plays a leadership role … [179]

The historical record demonstrates that the U.S. government has overwhelmingly backed one side (Israel) with abundant military aid, steadfast diplomatic support in the U.N. and ardent Congressional backing as well, hardly a fair and balanced approach to the conflict. Accordingly, Washington has been relentlessly effective in enabling Israel to pursue its goals, not of peace and normalization, but of conquest of the choicest parts of Palestinian territory and of the elimination of any meaningful sense of Palestinian sovereignty. But even as Carter admits that U.S. influence is limited, surely, he must also realize the enormous agency the U.S. has long exerted in the region, agency that has been detrimental to the cause he champions. The U.S. has overwhelming power and has used that power as it sees fit, in this case, to empower Israel through dollars, votes, and deals. Regardless of official pronouncements, the U.S. government has been a full, bipartisan, and devoted partner to the demise of the two-state solution.

After the cover the United States provided Israel in its assault on Gaza in December and January, our claim to be interested in peace for Israel and Palestine is simply incredible to increasing numbers of people around the world. The U.S. has wanted it both ways: To be Israel’s staunch ally and to be seen in the international community as an honest and judicious broker. This is impossible. Either the Obama administration continues to unconditionally back Israel or else it must substantively change course and pursue an even-handed, balanced peace process.

For, as Palestinian Salam Fayyad put it simply to Carter, “Unless America stops the Israelis from expanding settlements there can be no peace. Not one more brick!” [124]

1.

Meditate that this came about:

I commend these words to you.

Carve them in your hearts

At home, in the street,

Going to bed, rising,

Repeat them to your children,

Or may your house fall apart,

May illness impede you,

May your children turn their faces from you.

Primo Levi

Auschwitz survivor

Recently, Senator Patrick Leahy, the Senate Judiciary Chairman, spoke of forming a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate the possible crimes of the out-going Bush Administration. When a reporter asked President Obama about this, he said, “My view is also that nobody’s above the law and, if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, that people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen.”

The famed Los Angeles prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi strongly agrees with the new president, “that nobody’s above the law.” In fact, last spring Bugliosi published a book that argues that there were clear instances of wrong doing in the U.S. going to war against Iraq. The title of this impassioned legal argument is The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder.

Like any good prosecutor, Bugliosi has an instinct for drama: “The book you are about to read deals with what I believe to be the most serious crime ever committed in American history—the president of this nation, George W. Bush, knowingly and deliberately taking this country to war in Iraq under false pretenses, a war that condemned over 100,000 human beings, including 4,000 young American soldiers, to horrible, violent deaths.” [3]

Bugliosi hopes that the U.S. Attorney General in Washington (now, Erich Holder) or any of the 93 U.S. Attorneys in the federal district courts or even a state attorney general from one of 50 states will take heed of his argument and seek to prosecute the former president for the now almost 5,000 dead U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

According to Bugliosi, the case against Bush would rely on U.S. Code 1117 (conspiracy) and U.S. Code 1111 (murder). “The overriding assumption here has to be that if, in fact, Bush lied to the nation in taking it to war, we all should want to find some lawful way to bring him to justice. That has to be the predisposition among all good [men and women]. It cannot be otherwise.” [91] Here, Bugliosi is quite specific; I wonder if President Obama would agree with the prosecutor.

The definition of murder is “the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought.” Given the months of build-up to the U.S. invasion in March 2003, Bugliosi asserts that premeditation is a given in this case. He believes that “at an absolute minimum, in the absence of a legal justification such as self-defense, Bush’s taking the nation to war would constitute implied malice, that is, an intent to do a highly dangerous act with reckless disregard and indifference to human life, and hence, at least second degree murder in every state, as well as under federal law.” [99]

The crux for Bugliosi is that Bush knowingly distorted the CIA’s 2002 National Intelligence Estimate which declared that Saddam Hussein was not an imminent threat to the United States. Yet, in a speech a week later in Cincinnati in October 2002, Bush stated the just the opposite, that the U.S. had to act now, in self-defense, before it was too late. By Bush falsifying the intelligence report, Bugliosi avers that Bush cannot argue that he was acting in self-defense. Indeed, Bush’s deceitful rhetoric was intended to mobilize the American public’s support for a war that was totally unnecessary.

Many Americans will seek to honor the fallen troops by asserting that they died for freedom or democracy or “our country.” Bugliosi will have none of this sentimentality: “As ugly and grotesque as it is, the fact is that [U.S. soldiers] gave up their lives to further the political interests of Bush, Rove, and Cheney. No political figures in American history ever so shamelessly exploited a war for political advantage as much as these three.” [44]

Professing that he is pained by the deaths of Iraqi civilians, Bugliosi still admits that “I take the reports in the paper of American soldiers being killed in Iraq harder.” [68] I think that many American citizens likewise instinctively take harder the deaths, injuries, impairment, and mental anguish suffered by the U.S. troops. Unlike so many of his fellow citizens, though, Bugliosi locates the root cause of this needless misery: George W. Bush.

Bugliosi dismisses as totally unrealistic the possibility that Bush could be tried for war crimes against the Iraqi people, though attorneys and judges outside the U.S. may have already taken careful note of the precedent involving former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who was tied up in investigation for several years before his death.

How appropriate it would be for Bush (and Rumsfeld and Rice) to ever be looking over their shoulders both inside the United States and beyond. Imagining the horrible nightmares veterans and their families are sure to endure in the years ahead, Bugliosi declares “the least I can do in return is to put the thought in Bush’s mind for the rest of his life that he may someday be held accountable in a criminal courtroom for all the murders he alone is responsible for.” [157]

While Bugliosi exudes righteous indignation at Bush, he also manages scorn for his fellow citizens, as in this passage: “It is terribly, terribly, terribly scary that this nation is so abysmally and profoundly stupid that it could easily be talked into going into a deadly war with a nation that wasn’t our enemy and as much of a threat to us as you or I.” [246] Last week, after a gathering of people to watch an Arabic film at a local college, a student from an Arab country asked a friend of mine why the American people didn’t rise up against Bush when what he was doing was so wrong.

2.

But for me, a German, it is not quite so simple. In the end, all who did not put up resistance were implicated, entangled in the belief systems of “these” Germans, lending them a hand and sharing in the profits. Among those who “went along,” in the broadest sense of the words, were all who practiced the art of looking away, turning a deaf ear, and keeping silent. There has been much quarreling about collective guilt and responsibility, but my basic feeling is, rather, one of ineradicable shame – the shame of belonging to this people, speaking the language of the concentration camp guards, singing the songs that were also sung in the Hitler Youth and the Company of German Girls. That shame does not become superannuated; it must stay alive.

Dorothee Sölle

German theologian

The following are excerpts from Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1938-45 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955).

“What no one seemed to notice was the ever widening gap between the government and the people. And it became always wider…. the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting, it provided an excuse not to think…. for people who did not want to think anyway gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about…..and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated…..by the machinations of the ‘national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us…..

“Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’…..must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing…..Each act is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next.

“You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone….you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes.

“That’s the difficulty. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves, when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed.

“You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things your father….could never have imagined.”

3.

This would be, first and foremost, a war waged within myself, one where my fears and doubts would come face to face with my conscience, a war to reclaim my humanity and my spiritual freedom. It would also be a war against the system I had come from, a battle against the military machine, the imperial dragon that devours its own soldiers and Iraqi civilians alike for the sake of profits. I had to turn my words into weapons, that speaking out was now my own way to fight.

Camilo Mejia

Iraq war veteran and war resister

Who is going to say the unsayable?

Who is going to press for the prosecution of George W. Bush and Company for murder?

Who is going to stand for law and order?

Who is going to dignify the truth by acting on it?

Who is going to pay practical tribute to Lady Justice?

Who is going to remember what we’ve done in Iraq?

Who is going to patiently recite the facts?

Who is going to tell the tales from the Iraq inferno?

Who is going to repeat these tales to their children?

Who is going to meditate on the photographs?

Who is going to keep alive the shame?

Who is going to bring up issues from Morality 101? Legality 101?

Who is going to count the tears?

Who is going to groan lamentations in the streets?

Who is going to hurl imprecations up at the stately buildings?

Who is going to imagine for even 30 seconds a day George Bush eating chow in a maximum security prison?

Who is going to resist the temptation of silence?

Who is going to risk a little derision, a few guffaws, some insults?

Who is going to haunt the criminals?

Who is going to monitor their comings and goings?

Who is going to envision a ten-year strategy?

Who is going to develop the contingency plans?

Who is going to remove one brick amid the billions of bricks that keep the system together?

Who is going to train citizens in going out of their way to make trouble?

Who is going to insist on follow-up?

Who is going to spend even one minute a day imagining one simple step to take?

Who is going to cultivate optimism of the will?

Who is going to be the courage they wish to see in the world?

Who is going to abandon the sidelines?

Who is going to disturb the cozy peace?

Who is going to stop waiting for someone else to say something first?

Who is going to do something inconsequential about it today and then tomorrow?

Who is going to talk to the guys at the firehouse?

Who is going to bring it up at the neighborhood bar?

Who is going to query the hair stylist?

Who is going to take inspiration from the little mosquito?

Who is going to dare make a scene, raise a ruckus?

Who is going to perform an act greater than Camilo Mejía?

Who is going to remove every single thread from the Emperor’s trembling limbs?

If past behavior is any guide, Elie Wiesel must be having a fit. I’m not thinking here of the great loss to his Foundation from the audacious and criminal pilfering of Bernie Madoff. No, I am guessing he is outraged by the growing frequency, since late December 2008, of comparisons made between Israel’s Operation Molten Lead in Gaza and the Nazi period, specifically the Warsaw Ghetto.

Both intellectual commentators and protesting activists have made linkages between the human horrors of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Gaza Ghetto, as well as between the ghettos’ resistance to their tormenters. On the web and via email a photographic juxtaposition is circulating that documents Nazi oppression of Jews and Israeli oppression of Palestinians. A Vatican official, Cardinal Renato Martino, said that increasingly Gaza resembles a “big concentration camp,” while Israeli officials expressed shock at such an offensive comparison.

Back in 1982 Israel carried out Operation Peace for Galilee, a massive bombing and invasion of Lebanon, resulting in an estimated death toll of 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinians. During that summer and early fall, Wiesel was interviewed frequently about Israel’s Lebanon attack. Since the June 1967 war Wiesel had been an enthusiastic apologist for Israeli power; what he found so disturbing that summer was not the excessive militarism of the Israeli state but the excessive analogies of Israel’s critics.

Wiesel’s own outrage was directed at those political and intellectual detractors whom he said “profaned the memory of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust by comparing Beirut with the Warsaw Ghetto … Israel’s soldiers with the Nazis; the military operation in Lebanon with the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis — obscene comparisons, twisted analogies, vile and base and rooted in hate.” For Wiesel, the Holocaust was so singular and unparalleled that it shouldn’t be debased by such scurrilous associations. The Holocaust, he believed, is above politics, existing in a sacred realm that ought to be respected.

Nevertheless, critics of Israel’s assault simultaneously undermined Israel’s assumed monopoly of victim status by pointing to its thousands of Arab victims as well as relativized the Holocaust’s incomparability, a double scandal for Wiesel.

And yet the future Nobel Peace laureate should have known how frequently the Holocaust had been invoked in fierce political struggles in Israel from the beginning. David Ben-Gurion juxtaposed the Nazis and Arab leaders such as Nasser. From the right-wing, Menachem Begin used Nazi analogies to attack Ben-Gurion. Israeli leaders even retroactively “Zionized” the Warsaw Ghetto resistance fighters, seeing in them their own willingness to fight, rather than be passive like so many Diaspora sheep to the slaughter.

So, if Israelis from different camps have passionately invoked a whole range of Holocaust/Nazi images, references, and stories to pursue their political aims, others, not surprisingly, will also use some of those same references and images for their own symbolic and political ends. As Joseph Massad pointed out in his recent article, “The Gaza Ghetto Uprising,” the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising “was always inspirational to the Palestinians. In the heyday of the PLO as a symbol of Palestinian liberation, the organization would lay flower wreathes at the Warsaw Ghetto monument to honor these fallen Jewish heroes.”

There have been Israeli establishment figures who have deplored the use of the Holocaust to validate Israeli violence. One is the longtime Zionist leader Nahum Goldman who, in 1981, asserted that “[t]o use the Holocaust as an excuse for the bombing of Lebanon, as Menachem Begin does, is a kind of ‘Hillul Hashem’ [sacrilege], a banalization of the sacred tragedy of the Shoah [Holocaust], which must not be misused to justify politically doubtful and morally indefensible policies.” Thus, Wiesel opposed banal Holocaust discourse if it was used to criticize Israel’s policies, while Goldman contested that same rhetoric if it was to mobilize support for Israel violence.

More recently, former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg has addressed what he sees as the overwhelming presence of the Holocaust in Israel life. In his book, The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise from Its Ashes, he writes, “We have pulled the Shoah out of its historical context and turned it into a plea and a generator for every deed. All is compared to the Shoah, dwarfed by the Shoah, and therefore all is allowed—be it fences, sieges, crowns, curfews, food and water deprivation, or unexplained killings. All is permitted because we have been through the Shoah and you will not tell us how to behave.” For the Israeli Jewish people to heal, Burg contends, this Shoah-fixation must come to an end.

In his book, Burg quotes the famous teaching from Rabbi Hillel: “What is hateful to thee, do not do unto thy fellow.”

Who doesn’t hate hearing the relentless barrage of dehumanizing propaganda and stereotypes against oneself and one’s co-religionists … or being forced to become a collaborator against one’s own miserable people?

Who doesn’t hate being systematically deprived of normal life—school, work, leisure—by an occupying power with its arbitrary dictates… or trying to fathom the labyrinthine legalities of the bureaucracy that is methodically chipping away at your dignity and resources?

Who doesn’t hate being publicly humiliated by the arrogant troops of the invading conqueror … or seeing one’s children being terrorized by the enemy’s unpredictable raids and incursions?

Who doesn’t hate having no way to protect oneself and one’s family from the oppressors … or having one’s property and land expropriated by those who never let you forget that you are weak, and they are mighty?

Who doesn’t hate witnessing one’s family, friends and neighbors brutally massacred … or concluding in despair that no one in the world either knows or cares about the abyss one’s whole people is falling into?

There are many vital actions people are taking to respond to the intensifying crisis in Gaza. Inspired by the work and teachings of the Vietnamese Buddhists Thich Nhat Hanh and Chân Không, we offer the following simple practice for your consideration.

Pick a particular day (of the week or month) and decide to fast from breakfast to dinner.

By skipping lunch, one may feel some mild discomfort toward the later afternoon. Use that discomfort (1) to remember the people in Gaza who are struggling for life and (2) to resolve to find ways of responding to their suffering with efficacy.

The money one would have spent on lunch, say, $5.00, send to a project or an organization in or for Gaza that is trying to alleviate the suffering caused by the blockade since 2005 and Israel’s bombing and invasion since late December 2008.

Possibilities include: Red Crescent, UNRWA, and the Ahli Arab Hospital. People can post worthwhile projects and organizations on this Wall.

If this makes sense to you, please join us. If not, good luck in your own efforts.

Nima Sheth, Saint Louis University Medical School

Matt Miller, Washington University in Saint Louis

Mark Chmiel, Center for Theology and Social Analysis

Because of the extensive, though sanitized, U.S. news coverage of Israel’s bombing and invasion of Gaza, many Americans are paying closer attention to the Israel-Palestine conflict (those with access to Arabic news programming and Youtube clips are not spared the gruesomeness and enormous destruction of Israel’s effort to deal Hamas a death-blow.)

Many people are shocked, if not disgusted, by the mounting death and injury tolls, the David and Goliath asymmetry, and the “collateral damage” and war crimes inflicted on the Palestinian people.

Given this latest escalating round of brutality, and events in recent years such as the publications of Jimmy Carter’s controversial book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid and Walt and Mearsheimer’s The Israel Lobby, more people may be ready to critically question the U.S.-Israel relationship. Further, those horrified by the mass death in what has been called the world’s largest prison may ask, “What can be done to stop this?”

Americans may pride ourselves on being problem-solvers and pragmatists. Yet, these dispositions can sometimes lead to knee-jerk quests for quick-fixes.

Over twenty years ago, MIT professor Noam Chomsky concluded his grim study of the U.S. support for bloodbaths in Central America with these sobering words: “There are no magic answers, no miraculous methods to overcome the problems we face, just the familiar ones: honest search for understanding, education, organization, action that raises the cost of state violence for its perpetrators or that lays the basis for institutional change — and the kind of commitment that will persist despite the temptations of disillusionment, despite many failures and only limited successes, inspired by the hope of a brighter future.”

As far as the search for understanding and education, allow me to mention a few resources that provide alternatives perspectives to those often found in the mainstream media or voiced by the U.S. Congress. That search for understanding and education requires a willingness to question all kinds of authority, exposure to various viewpoints, thoughtful consideration of evidence, and on-going dialogue. I offer the following not as “the last word,” but for those wanting to begin to invest more attention to this part of the world.

One website: www.electronicintifada.net offers a stimulating range of news, analysis, and commentary, including diary entries from internationals working in the Palestinian territories.

One book: The Question of Palestine, by the late Edward Said, the foremost Palestinian voice in the U.S. for decades. Part of his work is to show what Zionism has looked like, not from the standpoint of Jews fleeing anti-Semitic Europe, but from the standpoint of Zionism’s victims, the Palestinians.

One documentary: Occupation 101: The Voices of the Silenced Majority deals the current and historical root causes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The group If Americans Knew is distributing this documentary for free; contact them at http://www.ifamericansknew.org/about_us/freeocc101.html. The group’s hope is that people will take the initiative to screen the film in homes and gathering places for friends, family, neighbors, and community members.

For those who want to deepen their understanding by acting in concert with others, whether that means material aid, lobbying Congress, political protest, boycott campaigns, and/or travel to Palestine, one can begin by investigating the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation: http://endtheoccupation.org/index.php.

Chomsky’s “hope of a brighter future” is undoubtedly tested by the accumulated misery of the Gazans in the last few years up to this very hour. More of us need to reach out to others who have begun to question the predictable pieties of American political discourse. Further, as activist Kathy Kelly has said, we need to “catch courage from one another” as we seek ways to encourage moves toward justice and peace. Last, we ought to ponder these famous words of Dr. Martin Luther King: “Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly….”

Laura Weis and I went to see “Beautiful Resistance” and I am pleased to share her reflection on that evening…

I saw a play on Saturday, July 12, 2008. It was called Beautiful Resistance, and the performance captivated me from start to finish. It prompted recollection of events and emotions in my own life, while at the same time shook me with its portrayal of a situation I’ve not experienced and can barely imagine. It educated and it exposed. It acknowledged and challenged assumptions; admitted and confronted fears; and agonized over and embraced not knowing all the answers. It was a multi-sensory experience, visual and voice, movement and music, and it both communicated to and invited response from the audience. It resonated.

The experience began the moment you walked in the door and joined a slow-moving line to wait to obtain your passport (ticket) and get past the checkpoint (into the theatre). Watched from above and intimidated along the way, we playgoers were not in control of our fates. How to react? I saw bewilderment, solemn recognition, a few giggles (promptly silenced), willing compliance, and a bit of attitude. Real or imagined, I couldn’t help but feel a creeping tension as people glanced over their shoulders, unsure of the rules, and whispered acknowledgement of shared uncertainty about what came next. It was effective. A mere glimpse of an unfathomable, unknown reality thousands of miles away.

Once settled in our seats (not without some forced, arbitrary reassigning by aggressive Israeli soldiers), members of the audience were invited to offer instances from their lives when they felt certain emotions – intense anger, absolute joy, total helplessness – to be interpreted through improvised movement and music by members of the cast. The technique, known as “playback theatre,” was woven into the beginning and ending of the performance, as a means to honor the experiences of the audience in tandem with the experiences of those portrayed in the play.

At this point, we met Magan, who stepped onstage to offer a time when she felt totally helpless. As she swirled away from life’s familiarities and comforts, mind racing, we were transported with her to the West Bank, where, upon arrival, her eyes were pulled open. It struck me that she did not minimize her fears or deny that she held certain assumptions before, and at times during, her travels. And she did not appear to manipulate her response to her new circumstances in light of what she’d read, been taught, or been told in preparation for the trip. As someone who has noticed a tendency in herself to sometimes stifle initial reactions to unfamiliar surroundings – intellectualizing, perhaps, or concentrating almost exclusively on what others have said they felt – rather than simply experiencing the full feeling, no matter what it is, I appreciated this candid portrayal. It gave audience members space, I think, to reflect on any preconceptions we too might have, while offering an honest depiction of one woman’s actual experiences and encounters that might confirm, confuse, or contradict our own ideas.

Throughout the play, we saw Magan as an observer, documenting with her camera; as a friend, laughing and conversing with Fayrouz in Balata refugee camp; as an activist, confronting Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint. We encountered creative coping and cautious optimism, and we saw the tragic impact on individuals of ongoing violence and humiliation. We met a moonwalking Hamas soldier, who, we learned, was later killed, but left behind a poignant message of hope for the future of Palestine. We witnessed a birthday celebration and girl talk interrupted by the sounds of gunfire and a momentary admission, “I hate this life.” And near the end of the play, we watched as Magan and her companions worked with a young girl traumatized by memories of Israeli soldiers forcing their way into her house at night. They tried, valiantly, to act out a different ending, a better ending, to her real life nightmare. Then we in the audience had a chance to suggest alternate endings. A two-state solution? Predictable. What if the soldiers never come? A happy thought…

It was easy to feel discouraged after the performance, with its unanswered questions and uncertain ending. It’s unlikely all parties involved will be happy or satisfied. Some people will say they have everyone’s best interests at heart, and that their plan, their solution, is best. Others will know better, but may not be listened to or even asked. And maybe most of this audience was familiar with the particulars of the U.S. government’s unwavering financial and military support for Israel’s policies of economic marginalization and violent suppression, its complicity in relegating Palestinians to live as prisoners in their own land. But what about the great majority of the U.S. public? How to even begin to generate enough awareness and outcry to bring any meaningful pressure to bear on policymakers for a new direction in such entrenched U.S. foreign policy?

So what is to be done? How will this story end? For the people of Palestine and Israel? For the audience? For me? As the use of playback theatre so wonderfully illustrated, we all have experiences to draw upon and a role to play in figuring it out.

The following is a chapter from The Book of Mev.

After the exhilarating World Youth Day experience, Mev jumped right into her doctoral program at the GTU in Religion and the Arts. Early on, she became acquainted with Maria Bower, a doctoral student in spirituality, with whom she increasingly spent time. She also continued her Haiti solidarity work with local activists Pierre LaBoussiere and Nancy Laleau. But even as she began her study, her experience earlier in the year in El Salvador was raising all kinds of questions to her about higher education. She dashed off the following letter to St. Louis University President Father Lawrence Biondi.

6 September 1993

Lawrence Biondi, S.J.
St. Louis University
221 North Grand Boulevard
St. Louis, MO 63103

Dear Father Biondi,

Greetings from a SLU alumna living in California. I hear good words about you from both my father, Peter Puleo, and from some SLU faculty with whom I keep in touch, such as Sr. Dolores Greeley. Congratulations on your good work.

I am writing in response to the “Campaign for St. Louis University” materials. You and those who worked on this produced a beautiful publication with an attractive layout — which I appreciate as a professional photographer. A while back, when I was heading to El Salvador for a meeting, Fr. McGannon gave me some literature on both the SLU Campaign and for the UCA-El Salvador Campaign. (I imagine you are familiar with that publication as well, put out by the AJCU in D.C.).

As a graduate and great fan of SLU, and as a person who has been active in solidarity work with Central America for more than a decade (which I began during my student years at SLU), I was jarred by looking at the two campaign booklets side by side. I am very impressed with the UCA’s attention to “Social Outreach,” their ongoing analysis of the “national reality,” their attention to institutional violence, defense of human rights, and to bringing together people from across the political spectrum to try to encourage a more just, humane society. They are explicit in their aims to educate the privileged (the literate and college-bound) to lead and serve the needs of the majority of the country. While the SLU booklet mentions community service and scholarship funds, these themes of immersion, analysis and engagement in the local social reality are absent.

Clearly these positions have been shaped by the national reality of El Salvador: wealthy elites and impoverished masses, civil war, corruption, brutal disregard for human rights. The philosophy of education developed by Ignacio Ellacuría, Ignacio Martín-Baró, and, since their deaths, by Jon Sobrino and Dean Brackley, was and is in response to that reality. Specifically, they sought and seek to be a Christian university and to make the option-for-the-poor universitariamente (as a university). Because of this vision, the six Jesuits and two women were killed in 1989, but their successors still struggle to keep the vision alive at the UCA and in post-war El Salvador. In fact, there may never have been peace negotiations without the leadership, vision and moral courage of Ellacuría and others.

Well, this brings me to the question: What would it mean for St. Louis University, as an institution, to more fully embody the social dimension of the faith and make an option-for-the-poor universitariamente? There have been good efforts throughout SLU’s history — community service, scholarships, shaping the public debates. My own moral consciousness was shaped at SLU — through the example of professors and campus ministers — in a way that inspired me to devote my energies towards building a more compassionate and just world community. And yet, I suspect this is not the case for most SLU students. During my four years at SLU, it was a small group of a lot of the same faces who joined Pax Christi, SLUCAP (volunteering in the inner-city), Amnesty International, etc. I wonder, institutionally and in our own local St. Louis community, what more is being done? I believe we have so much to learn from the UCA experience! One place to begin might be the writings of the Jesuit martyrs on the social role of a Christian university.

Might it be possible for SLU to generate its own such vision — rooted in a context of St. Louis and the United States — a vision that analyzes the national and local reality, that seeks to understand the institutional violence in the U.S., that promotes social outreach and defends human dignity in the St. Louis community. While our national reality is far from that in El Salvador, the levels of drug dealing, the conditions of prisons, the numbers of murders, unemployment, poor public education and other afflictions in urban St. Louis, especially on the Northside, are really tragic. This is our national/local reality. This is where we are called to be Christian as individuals and as a university.

Dolores Greeley told me of several projects where St. Louis U is trying to be of service to the local community. I am writing both to ask what is happening in this area, and to ask that the University (administrators, staff, faculty, students, alum) really listen to the example of the UCA and join in more dialogue with our local community to try to be a truly Christian university, a sign of God’s reign of justice, peace, dignity and compassion in the world.

By way of concrete suggestions:
1. Perhaps select members of the SLU community could invite Dean Brackley and/or Jon Sobrino to help them shape a vision for a university in the U.S. to adopt a similar, though indigenous, vision.
2. Perhaps the University could establish regular dialogue with SLU alumni who are truly immersed in the life of St. Louisans who struggle with poverty, unemployment, homelessness and neighborhood violence. (The Catholic Worker Karen House on Hogan Street comes to mind as it is staffed by several SLU alum. I also think of urban churches — in particular St. Matthews and the neighborhood center they participate in, since it is a Jesuit parish!)
3. Perhaps the University could begin “listening sessions” with the actual disenfranchised who live within a certain radius of the University — again, the unemployed, young people, the homeless, struggling families who have to cope with neighborhood violence and drugs.

I would love to take part in something like this or at least be kept abreast of such developments, and I could recommend other wonderful alumnae and faculty for this kind of project. There must be other similar initiatives happening somewhere in this country. Any such initiatives would have to include women and men, religious leaders and African-Americans and community members from Midtown and from North St. Louis. Given the location of Parks College, more dialogue might begin with East St. Louisans.

Again, I write this imagining that many efforts similar to this are already underway, but the very difference in the campaign booklets reminds me how far we at SLU (and overall, we in the U.S.) need to grow in our vision. A bold project in this direction at SLU would not result in Jesuits and their friends being shot in the middle of the night. Rather, a bolder vision and a more courageous response to the “signs of our times” would build up the St. Louis urban community and the University.

Father Biondi, I thank you for your time in reading this letter and for your dedication to shaping the future of SLU. I have studied some of the writings of the Salvadoran Jesuits and was very inspired by my visit there in January. As a theology student and photojournalist, I have also been inspired by the academicians I have met in Brazil — Catholic theologians who teach 6 months in the university and spend 6 months in the Amazon building up Christian communities, or working with labor unions in urban areas. So, I have been shaped by this vision of socially-engaged-academics and the socially-committed Christian university.
These campaign booklets have been on my desk for 10 months now, and I am finally getting around to actually writing these thoughts to you. Perhaps, oddly, my delay in writing reflects how crucial I believe these issues to be for the future of SLU and our community. I wanted to wait a good while to see if I still felt as strongly as when I first saw them, and I do. In fact, I just spent three days working with and visiting with Fr. Gustavo Gutiérrez, the Peruvian theologian, and in hearing about the direction of theology and pastoral practice in Peru, it stirs me to want to do more to foster truly Christian social commitment in our U.S. practice and institutions as well.

If these thoughts provoke reflections or reactions in you, please contact me at the address on the first page. I would be glad to hear from you. In any case, I continue to wish you well in your ministry of administration at SLU.

Peace be with you and may God continue to bless you!

Most sincerely,

Mev Puleo

Mev. . . now what kind of name was that? I’d heard the name Maeve, which is an Irish name, but Mev was Sicilian on her father’s side and German on her mother’s. Plus, she spelled and pronounced hers differently. Where did “Mev” come from? She informed me early on that it was a nickname a grade school friend had given her, short for Mary Evelyn — Mary for her aunt and Evelyn for her mother. It had stuck ever since seventh grade. Even after being around her only a few times, it was clear she acted more like a “Mev” than a “Mary” or even “Mary Evelyn,” as “Mev” was original, short, and brisk. She later informed me that the scientific abbreviation mev stood for a million electron volts.

One morning, I observed Mev and Gustavo Gutiérrez walking together through the outdoor dining area at Maryknoll. She had first studied with him in 1985 at a summer course at Boston College. Suzanne mentioned to me that Mev had secured an interview with Gustavo. It wasn’t such an unusual experience for Gustavo to be interviewed that summer, since there was so much hoopla surrounding him, including a press conference and write-up in the New York Times. But for Mev, it was a major opportunity to ask her most pressing questions to someone whose theology had been nurtured amid poverty and suffering, as opposed to academic conferences, air-conditioned seminar rooms, fax machines and ever-expanding libraries.

The 1988 Maryknoll Summer Program was intended to celebrate several anniversaries. First, we honored Gustavo’s work on the occasion of his 60th birthday. Second, we took note of the 20th anniversary of the Latin American Bishops Conference at Medellín, at which they gave voice to the need for a preferential option for the poor. And third, we marked the 15th anniversary of the English publication of A Theology of Liberation, Gustavo’s most famous book and one updated for publication that summer.

Gustavo lived in Lima, worked at the Bartolome de Las Casas Institute, and served as a pastor to the poor in the slum of Rimac. Although he had become one of the world’s most well-known theologians, he was quite humble, taking all the festivities and testimonies in stride, appreciating people’s affections but also remembering that his work made no sense apart from his struggling people back in Peru. To those folks, he was simply Padre Gustavo. He didn’t appear prey to the kind of self-important individualism of our usual American celebrities.

Later that summer and into the fall as I got to know Mev better, I learned that she — peripatetic photographer, devotee of the poor, interviewer of liberation theologians — had been born into an affluent family, the fourth child of a middle-class mother and a father who had lived the rags-to-riches ascent of some Sicilian immigrants. She had grown up in a fashionable suburb of St. Louis, gone to preppy Catholic schools, and traveled to China, Africa, Europe and Latin America on vacations. Yet after university studies, she moved into a poor neighborhood in North Saint Louis and tried to bridge these distant worlds of the rich and the poor. For someone with all of her advantages and privileges, Mev had been more committed to experimenting with downward mobility and voluntary simplicity than being ensconced in an upper-middle-class enclave. In her interview, Mev’s questions to Gustavo were those of a passionate young woman concerned, anxious even, to find her place in this world of gut-wrenching poverty and soul-numbing wealth.

Interview

Mev: In recent years people are talking more about the spirituality of liberation theology. How would you describe this spirituality?

Gustavo: First, we have to say that spirituality is a “way” to be Christian. Spirituality is more important than reflection. Or, to be more exact, all reflection on faith (theology) is inside of something more important: the way to be Christian (spirituality).

What I just said is true for all theology. It seems to me that behind liberation theology there is a spiritual experience of a liberating God, the experience of innocent suffering, the experience of the hope of the poor.

Mev: Why do you describe the suffering of the poor as “innocent” suffering?

Gustavo: I believe that here “innocent” doesn’t mean “not a sinner.” Every person in some way is a sinner; that is, at some time he or she rejects the love of God and neighbor. Innocent in this case means someone who suffers a situation that she doesn’t deserve. I think of children in my neighborhood, for example, who are malnourished and spend their days in the street. They don’t deserve this kind of life. They don’t deserve to live in such small houses and sleep with the whole family of six or seven people in only one room. This is what we call the suffering of the innocents.

And it’s not only the children: This is true for adults as well. There are people who can never eat what is necessary to live humanly or have a house with enough room to live with dignity. These are great sufferings — sufferings of innocent people because they don’t deserve this suffering.

Mev: You speak from time to time about humor. What is the role of a sense of humor in theology and in ministry with the poor?

Gustavo: I talk about not taking ourselves too seriously. I believe that humor is something that allows us to take a certain distance from things so we don’t feel too much in the center of everything. I often fear that living in the midst of such severe problems we understandably tend to think that ours are the greatest problems of humanity. We even tend to take theology and people doing theology too seriously. I also consider humor important in life because it helps us not to be closed to other things and persons. I believe that one of the greatest victories of those who oppress the poor is if they can make the poor bitter. Bitterness makes us closed to other people. One thing I see and admire in poor persons is that they know how to keep up a certain capacity of happiness, and humor is an expression of happiness. The joy of the poor is not superficial.
The poor have a sense of humor, though not intellectual or refined humor. The children in my neighborhood have a great sense of humor. The intellectuals, on the other hand, tend to think they are the center of the world. Also, people who are worried, tense and busy tend to think that the whole world revolves around them. For people like this, humor is great therapy.

Humor lets us laugh at ourselves and the events in our lives. I don’t mean we should laugh at other people. Humor doesn’t mean making fun of others. I’m impressed by the Bible with its many expressions of humor. Taking ourselves too seriously is an obstacle to the Gospel.

Mev: Are there different kinds of “poverty”?

Gustavo: For me, the poor is the insignificant person, the non-relevant person. No one pays attention to the poor person in society or even in the church. A great majority of these “insignificant” people are poor, in the economic sense. To be discriminated against as a woman, for example, is to be poor, insignificant. But, you know, the great majority of insignificant women are poor, economically speaking as well.

Now there are human problems besides poverty — old age, loneliness and alienation. Not all suffering is from poverty. But real poverty is characterized by death. Real poverty is people with no means to live with human dignity.

Mev: We are sometimes criticized for our consumeristic lifestyles and the influence of our culture abroad. Do you notice this in our context as well?

Gustavo: I believe that this is the nature of a rich country. Consumerism is to consume for mere pleasure more than is necessary. This is exactly the contrary when you come from a poor country. The things I notice the most seem like a joke. That is, here in the United States the most sought-after foods are low-calories. The most valued food in poor countries is food with calories. It’s understandable, but it’s an incredible contradiction. Here, the people want to eat food with as few calories as possible to not gain more weight and people in poor countries try to eat food with many calories to gain at least a little bit of weight. We come from very different contexts. Consumerism is certainly a very great human deformation. Furthermore, it brings a permanent search for money and buying, encouraging us to forget the needs of other persons. Consumerism truly blinds people. This is very strong in this country, as in all rich countries. It’s also strong in Europe, Canada and Japan.

The United States does have a very big influence. I believe that through the means of communication, such as the TV, the North American way of life is very present among other peoples. Some of the positive values are present here, but also many limits, such as when people from our cultures want only to imitate the North American way of life.

Mev: What are your own hopes, then, for people who are born rich?

Gustavo: I love to answer this remembering a sentence of Dom Helder Camara. He was in Switzerland many years ago criticizing the Swiss banking laws. You know, there is more Latin American money in Switzerland than in Latin America. Dom Helder was very critical of this. He finished his speech affirming in a very simple way, “It is more important to be Christian than to be Swiss.” The next day a daily Swiss newspaper asked for the expulsion of Dom Helder Camara for insulting the country.
Very frankly, I think that for Christians in this country it is more important to be Christian than to be North American, just as it’s more important for me to be Christian than to be Peruvian. Thus, I’d desire that the rich people of a country such as yours have a big consciousness of their responsibility as human beings and as Christians before the poverty of this world. Also, it seems to me that there are things that will not change in Latin America if things don’t change in other parts of the world — in Europe, the United States or Asia. I believe that our problems today are more universal and planetary. I come here to teach because it’s good for persons in your world to know more directly the voice and reflection of the poor of Latin America. Also, we need the solidarity of people in this country. Solidarity from other Christians is really important for the poor of Latin America.

Eventually, Mev shared her musings with me. “The poor of the Third World are often said to be voiceless. But that’s not true. They’ve got a voice, but we’ve just got to hear it. I’m going back to Latin America next summer.”

I asked, “To Brazil?”

“Yeah, I’ve got friends in Brazil, and I’m going to interview them and their friends and see what they have to say about faith and hope and love. Who knows,” she chirped, “maybe I’ll go to Peru and see Gustavo.”

This is changing my life! It is — as I read these words of commitment, Sylvia – “It is a time to take our option for the poor to the ultimate consequences, that is what we’re trying to do in this community, to go to the ultimate consequences of the option we’ve made.”
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. Repent. God have mercy. 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.

Some things are profound enough to interrupt our lives. And, as I watch the war machine grow more deadly, the world more precarious each day – I listen to the voices of prophets and saints and “good persons doing good things locally,” yet stretching their voices globally through my ears, eyes, and hands – they are calling more forth. The communion of saints. Toinha, Goreth, Sylvia, Dom Pedro, Clodovis, Carlos Mesters – all. You are a mirror, 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. You who have lived through death threats and dictatorships, monstrous bishops and abuse from Mother Church, you who walk daily attending Lazarus’s wounds. Help me. Move me. Be with me. We are one. Yes, the struggle is one. The struggle is one.

I knew it was coming, but I just kept putting it off.

When I was an undergraduate in the early 1980s, I suffered from the debilitating condition of not being able to get far on an assigned composition unless I really liked my opening sentence and first paragraph. In the era before PCs and laptops were commonplace in homes and at universities, I ripped up innumerable sheets of looseleaf paper until I could get the right beginning.

A few years later, when working as a lay minister in two Catholic parishes in Louisville, Kentucky, I was given a copy of Natalie Goldberg’s book, (more…)