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non violence
Gaza and the Language of the Unheard
As long as Israel postpones justice, it stands in the position of having these occurrences like October 7 over and over again.
Mar 17, 2024
In 1992, I spent several days in a jail in the city of Tiberias, in Israel. I was one of about 80 activists from various places on the globe who had been arrested when our “Walk for a Peaceful Future in the Middle East,” intended to go from Haifa to Jerusalem, was interrupted when we crossed the “green line” into the occupied West Bank.
Taken to various jails around Israel, I ended up in Tiberias with some 30 others from our group. Those of us from the peace walk, we discovered, were the only adults in that jail. The other prisoners were all children, boys that appeared to be as young as 12 years old.
I don’t know how many Palestinians were held in administrative detention in 1992, or how many of these were children, then. It is reported that just before Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7, the number of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons without charges, without trials, was more than 1,300, the highest number in three decades. The number has since increased dramatically to more than 7,000.
I hope that the children I shared a jail with for a few days in 1992 have found peaceful and constructive means to express their outrage, but I cannot blame them if they have not.
Children in Israeli jails are often denied parental visits, and there are reports of widespread abuse.
These past months I have been thinking about those kids often, about their parents, wondering what they are doing now. Are some still in jail? Are some of them dead? For those alive and at large, how has that trauma they suffered three decades ago and the traumas suffered since altered the course of their lives? Have some taken up arms?
When in 1967, speaking of the riots in American cities that summer in his “The Other America” speech, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “In the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard,” he was not justifying violence. He was explaining its inevitability. “And so,” he said, “in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.”
As long as Israel postpones justice, it stands in the position of having these occurrences like October 7 over and over again.
In 1967, Dr. King, like the prophet Hosea warned Israel centuries before, was telling America that if we sow wind, we will reap the whirlwind.
I hope that the children I shared a jail with for a few days in 1992 have found peaceful and constructive means to express their outrage, but I cannot blame them if they have not.
The call to free the hostages that Hamas took on October 7 should be taken seriously. The trauma that they are suffering, and the fear experienced cannot be minimized or dismissed. Nor can the suffering of thousands of Palestinian detainees, hostages themselves along with their families, be so dismissed.
In the logic of the cycle of violence that Gandhi defined, if Hamas’ violence on October 7 justifies the horrific razing of Gaza, the deaths of thousands, the starvation of a whole population by the Israeli military, then it follows that Israel’s generations of violence should justify the violence perpetrated by Hamas.
Who is worse? It would seem, by raw mathematics, that Israel is the primary aggressor, but human suffering can never be so quantified.
In his 1960 sci-fi novel, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr. speaks of a future time, much like ours, when multiple conflicts threaten to escalate into a nuclear conflagration that will leave the world devoid of life. He considers the question:
“What’s to be believed? Or does it matter at all? When mass murder’s been answered with mass murder, rape with rape, hate with hate, there’s no longer much meaning in asking whose ax is bloodier. Evil, on evil, piled on evil.”
In his 1962 essay “Christian Action in World Crisis,” the Trappist monk Thomas Merton warned of the Cold War between the United States and Russia: “We oversimplify. We seek the cause of evil and find it here or there in a particular nation, class, race, ideology, system. And we discharge upon this scapegoat all the virulent force of our hatred, compounded with fear and anguish, striving to rid ourselves of our fear by destroying the object we have arbitrarily singled out as the embodiment of all evil. Far from curing us this is only another paroxysm which aggravates our sickness.”
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Philadelphia Quakers Want You to Help Them Dent the Fossil Fuel Money Pipeline
Earth Quaker Action Team has used numerous nonviolent direct actions over the last two years to draw attention to Vanguard’s dangerous investment practices and its failure to incorporate into its business model the existential threat of the climate crisis.
Aug 26, 2023
It is easy to feel powerless and overwhelmed by horrifying climate catastrophes seemingly everywhere: Across the U. S. this summer, from Hawaii to Texas and Missouri, intense heat and wildfires are causing injury, illness, and death. Fear and sadness can make us “throw up our hands” and conclude that the problem is too big and that there is nothing we can do to stop the burning of fossil fuels on a scale needed to avert the worst effects of a warming world. However, a group of Quakers in Philadelphia have faith that nonviolent direct action has the potential to interrupt the “business as usual” funding of the fossil fuel industry.
For the last two years, I’ve joined this group of Quakers, Earth Quaker Action Team (EQAT), and an international coalition of activists, in interrupting the pipeline of money that props up the fossil fuel industry. One major source of this money comes from the investment giant, Vanguard Group. Vanguard markets itself as a “leader in low cost investing,” which has helped it become a leader in investment management. People from across the country entrust their savings to Vanguard with the hope of maximizing their return on investment so they can retire or send their children to college. What Vanguard doesn’t advertise is how customers’ money helps drive the fossil fuel industry.
Vanguard is the world’s biggest investor in fossil fuels and has invested $184 billion in fossil fuel infrastructure expansion. (Vanguard is the top investor in Hawaiian Electric, which is currently implicated as a major contributor to the wildfire disaster in Maui.) While Vanguard acknowledges that climate change will have a negative net impact on the global economy, it continues its investment practices, full steam ahead, on a course to climate catastrophe.
We remain hopeful that our message will break through to Vanguard, especially as the reality of climate-related disasters dominates the news, and as more and more investors like many of us refuse to go along with Vanguard’s toxic business practices.
EQAT has used numerous nonviolent direct actions over the last two years to draw attention to Vanguard’s dangerous investment practices and its failure to incorporate into its business model the existential threat of the climate crisis. Luckily, Vanguard’s global headquarters are in EQAT’s “backyard,” Malvern, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia, which has allowed us to bring our concerns to their doorstep. Our actions have involved, among other things, distributing fliers to Vanguard employees; co-hosting speakers, including an Indigenous group from Peru asking Vanguard to stop funding oil company Petroperú; and holding a mock news report from the year 2033 in which climate disasters are tied to Vanguard’s failed decision-making in 2023. (We have also prayed at the home of Vanguard CEO, Tim Buckley, in an adjacent suburb.) On the two occasions when we used civil disobedience to get our message across, Vanguard had many of us removed from the campus in handcuffs.
Given the urgency and scope of the crisis, EQAT and its like-minded partners have been urging Vanguard to use the power and influence that it has as a major shareholder in many climate-destroying companies; Vanguard can use its power to insist that fossil fuel companies, and other polluting industries, change their ways. If they refuse, we argue that Vanguard must withdraw its funding from these entities.
We remain hopeful that our message will break through to Vanguard, especially as the reality of climate-related disasters dominates the news, and as more and more investors like many of us refuse to go along with Vanguard’s toxic business practices. In June, a number of EQAT activists who had individual investment accounts with Vanguard decided it was time to remove their funds from “the pipeline.” We came to Vanguard headquarters, in sight of Vanguard employees enjoying their company picnic, and announced that many of us were moving our money elsewhere. Collectively, $17 million has been moved.
While $17 million may not put a big dent in the over $7 trillion that Vanguard manages, it reflects the idea that a caring community can be empowered to take a collective stand against planet-destroying profit taking. Plus, that $17 million is just the beginning. The amount of money being withdrawn from Vanguard is growing as more Quakers and their allies refuse to participate in Vanguard’s reckless way of doing business. One ally Elders Action Network, a national group of thousands, is now joining the effort to move assets out of Vanguard in order to invest with more responsible investment managers.
In addition to removing money from Vanguard, we will continue to challenge Vanguard’s brand. Marketing themselves as a low cost investment manager is misleading as it belies the fact that we all pay a very high price for climate-related disasters. Some of us suffer the health consequences of poor air quality and high heat, while others bear the cost of damaged or destroyed cars and homes in the aftermath of extreme weather and wildfires. As a local television ad targeting Vanguard proclaims, “If it’s bad for the environment, it’s bad for your retirement.”
Remaining hopeful in this work takes discipline and effort. EQAT operates with certain values and practices that help us “stay motivated for the long fights.” One value we embrace is being on our learning edge: We take on tasks and roles that are uncomfortably new, learning as we go. Another value encourages us to create meaningful, supportive connections with our fellow EQAT volunteers. Living these values can be difficult and exhausting, but, for me and others, it offers a much needed alternative to resignation and despair.
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Wargaming a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan: No one wins.
A Poetic Nonviolent Victory over War
Jan 14, 2023
War is a language of lies. Cold and callous, it emanates from dull, technocratic minds, draining life of color. It is an institutional offense to the human spirit.
The Pentagon speaks the language of war. The President and Congress speak the language of war. Corporations speak the language of war. They sap us of outrage and courage and the appreciation of beauty. They commit carnage of the soul.
Take for example, the recent report issued by the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) entitled “The First Battle of the Next War: Wargaming a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan.” This think tank conducted 24 iterations of wargames whereby China invades Taiwan. The U.S. and its allies respond. The result each time: No one wins. Not really.
The report states,
“The United States and Japan lose dozens of ships, hundreds of aircraft, and thousands of servicemembers. Such losses would damage the U.S. global position for many years. While Taiwan’s military is unbroken, it is severely degraded and left to defend a damaged economy on an island without electricity and basic services. China also suffers heavily. Its navy is in shambles, the core of its amphibious forces is broken, and tens of thousands of soldiers are prisoners of war.”
Degraded. A damaged economy. Losses. The report is referring to enormous numbers of men, women, and children slaughtered by bombs and bullets, of economies and livelihoods catastrophically ruined, countries devastated for years. It does not even address the likelihood of a nuclear exchange. Its words are void of the sharp pain and grief of such reality, lifeless, soulless. These zombie-technocrats do not just make war on people, but on reason, on human emotion.
A poet is needed to tell the truth. Poetry recognizes not the ideal but the real. It cuts to the bone. It doesn’t flinch. It doesn’t look away.
They died and were buried in mud but their hands protruded.
So their friends used the hands to hang helmets on.
And the fields? Aren’t the fields changed by what happened?
The dead aren’t like us.
How can the fields continue as simple fields?
Language can free our minds or imprison them. What we say matters. The hard, bare, truthful words of reckoning. Utter the words of truth about war and the military can no longer continue its somnambulant recital of death.
A boy soldier in the bone-hot sun works his knife
to peel the face from a dead man
and hang it from the branch of a tree
flowering with such faces.
War utilizes a philology emptied of humanity. It speaks in an intentionally mind-numbing manner to glaze over the horrid, murderous acts contemplated. The omnicidal wargames report by CSIS continues, “There is no rigorous, open-source analysis of the operational dynamics and outcomes of an invasion despite its critical nature.” It sounds antiseptic, boring, but in reality, it is, well, . . .
It is worse than memory, the open country of death.
We were meant to think and speak poetically. To lay bare the lie. Poetry detests the banal, combs through the detritus to give uncommon testimony. It is to think and speak realistically and transcendentally, to illuminate the works of the world, whether those works be baleful or beautiful. Poetry sees things as they are, looks at life not as an object to be exploited but contemplated, revered.
Why lie? Why not life, as you intended?
If we take our humanity seriously, our response to the warmakers must be rebellion. Peaceful and poetic, forceful and unrelenting. We need to raise the human condition as they seek to degrade it. The Merchants of Death cannot defeat a movement that speaks the language of poetry.
The Corporate State knows what they are doing. They seek to anesthetize our minds first so they can kill our bodies without resistance. They are good at it. They know how to divert us, deplete us. And should we muster enough violent rage, they know how to respond to our violence. But not poetic protest. Their neural pathways do not lead to poetry, to nonviolent potential, to visions of lovingkindness. Their language, their words, and their power, wither before the truthful expression of their deeds.
That is why we feel
it is enough to listen
to the wind jostling lemons,
to dogs ticking across the terraces,
knowing that while birds and warmer weather are forever moving north,
the cries of those who vanish
might take years to get here.
Non-violent revolutionaries speaking the language of poetry can win. It is estimated that it only takes 3.5 percent of a population to bring down the most repressive totalitarian state. And despite our rights, we live in a repressive Corporate-Totalitarian State which imprisons truth-tellers and kills widely and indiscriminately across the globe. Are there 11 million among us in these here United States willing to speak and hear the honest language of poetry?
And so, don’t look away. Speak with unflinching courage and honesty. Words matter. Give witness to life, and to the dirty lie of war. Be a Poet Revolutionary. The truth will kill the Beast.
You tell me you are a poet. If so, our destination is the same.
I find myself now the boatman, driving a taxi at the end of the world.
I will see that you arrive safely, my friend, I will get you there.
(Poetry by Carolyn Forche)
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