Category Archives: War & Peace

A Year of #45. My Year of Resistance.

Many other resisters were organizing to descend upon the public meetings of regime-supporting Congressmen & women, a great many of whom did not want to face or hear from their constituents. That was true  of many Members from Carolina, and still is of some. But one exception, in early May, was Republican Rep. Mark Walker from the Sixth district, has been drastically gerrymandered to make Walker’s reelection seemingly safe. So on a May morning he decided to hold a public meeting, and since I had business out that way, I decided to drop in on it — not to speak, since I’m not a resident, but to observe.
A staffer shoved a ticket into my hand when I entered. As I sat down, it was announced that tickets would be drawn from a box to choose questioners.
And the first ticket drawn was — mine?? 
What? It was true. So I stumbled up to the microphone, trying to think quickly of a question that might get past his well-practiced talking points.
Somehow I succeeded. Walker had previously been a preacher, and so I asked him if he believed in the Ninth of the Ten commandments, the one against “bearing false witness” (i.e., telling lies.) A bit puzzled, he said he did. 
So then I asked what he thought about the tally the Washington Post had been publishing each week since inauguration, tracking and documenting #45’s lies, which were running at about 5 per day. Was he okay with that?

Now Walker was really befuddled. As he stuttered, it appeared he might not be exactly sure what the Washington Post was, and he certainly didn’t know anything about this tally. But after much backing and filling, and under my prodding, he did finally manage to come out more or less foursquare against telling lies, without being more specific. Not his best performance.

Other questions were mostly about health care, aka Obamacare, which he was against. As an accidental resister, I felt afterward that I had done okay that morning.

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Resistance In Review-From Israel to Asheville

As Israeli author Larry Derfner powerfully puts it,

“the mindset here is very much like that in red-state America. I think of Israel as a small, Hebrew-speaking Texas, with Tel Aviv the country’s answer to Austin. Like Israel, Texas used to be split between its liberal and hardass wings, but in recent decades the hardasses have taken over completely there, too.”
This comparison was written before the 2016 U. S. election; it’s even more trenchant now. And it brings back the image of Clare Hanrahan having to struggle and negotiate to find a place to sit in a public park, packed full of those who are discarded and “disappeared” in plain sight by our own society. Could even Asheville, North Carolina’s Austin, be joining what seems to be emerging as an American version of Derfner’s Israel?
The haunting phrase is Derfner’s: “the country gets more paranoid, more racist, more aggressive.” He wrote it of his adopted country. But is it now true of this country too?
If so, these two memoirs may become more than gripping personal stories; they could turn into poignant memorials to the loss of something crucial  – and reminders of the haunting question that Derfner grapples with in his last few pages: in these increasingly parallel settings, how do you “keep hope alive”?

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Gone & Almost Forgotten: the “Peace Movement”

We thought early in 2007 was the chance to pressure the new Democratic Congress to rein in (or better, stop) the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and (secretly) elsewhere. Then maybe Congress could call to account some of the officials involved. I was thinking of who ordered the Iraq invasion under false pretenses, and those connected to war crimes, vast war profiteering & corruption, and the undermining of civil liberties here at home.
That was for starters; I had quite a list, and wasn’t alone in that.
So I was all for the march. I urged that we hold the rally shortly after the new year, to lay out our demands before Congress got seriously down to work.
“That way,” I said, “the Democrats won’t have sold us out yet, so the people will still be hopeful and energized.”
Was I cynical? Yep. But not wrong:
I had guessed right about the timing, in two ways: one, people were still hopeful in January, which boosted rally turnout.
And two, sure enough, once Congress got going, the Democrats swiftly sold out all the main things we had rallied for: accountability (“Impeachment is off the table,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi); there were no serious investigations of war crimes or corruption; impunity for torturers continued, and they voted for all the bloated war spending bills (“gotta support the troops”), etc.
Peace folks’ morale plummeted as quickly.

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For Women’s History Month: Lucretia Mott’s Secret Recipe for “Good-Trouble” & Hell-Raising

Nantucket is a fascinating pilgrimage spot for Quakers; it’s best to visit off-season, when it’s easier to look past the opulence, and see how thick the small town is with stirring Quaker history. Among its  numerous distinctive features,  the one we want to home in on here  was the fact that while the harbor was populated with Quaker ships, the town was populated by many Quaker women. And these women, even the most prosperous ones, were kept plenty busy; not just with children, but also with business.

I mean both Meeting business, and business business. Many Quaker men were away from the island for years on end (Lucretia’s father was gone for three years), sailing halfway around the world (or farther) on trips that were always dangerous, and not rarely fatal — and during which communication with home was rare or nonexistent.

Meantime, Quaker women, while still heavily encased in what we would now think of as stereotyped women’s roles, were more educated than many other females of their day; they also had official status in the Meetings; and they  — well, let’s hear how Lucretia describes it:

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