June, 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–last chapter, The Book of Mev

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

John Lewis, one of the 1961 Freedom Riders

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1.

I have seen the victims.

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

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

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

2.

Instructions upon return.

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

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

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

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

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

3.

An adequate peace movement could not satisfy itself

With assuaging the sufferings of the victims

By medical help at the point of impact.

The radical work consisted rather in staying with conditions at home

Trying as best we might to work changes upon a society

In which military victims were the logical outcome

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With love for a common humanity,

Sheila

1.

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

2.

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

3.

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

4.

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

5.

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

6.

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