The History That Peace Made - Part 3

"It looks like poets will always have their work cut out for them."

Wislawa Szymborska, I Don't Know: The 1996 Noble Lecture.

How does one prepare the world for peace in a manner at least as effective as that with which nations and individuals prepare the world for war? The millions of people who announced to the world on February 15, 2003, that war was neither an adequate nor an acceptable solution to political dilemmas prepared for peace primarily by believing in it. Many of them had suffered personal loss on September 11, 2001. Some were veterans of previous wars, and some were veterans of previous movements for peace. All were convinced that mass destruction was and is an endeavor inappropriate for a modern industrialized civilization. They prepared for peace precisely in many of the ways that one might expect - by praying for it, sacrificing personal resources for it, communicating the idea of it in their words and actions, and living it with as much force of commitment as they could.

Mainstream media offered little or nothing at all by way of reports on the activities and agendas of such peace-driven organizations as United For Peace And Justice, Families Against the War, Veterans For Peace, and Act Now To Stop War And End Racism (ANSWER). The absence of such reports presented the world with a very lopsided view of responses within the United States to the then proposed war in Iraq. Likewise, it presented extremely limited definitions and representations of patriotism and democracy. Patriotism, it would seem, meant primarily urging one's country toward Armageddon. One was, apparently, not participating in the democratic process by practicing the time-honored tradition of dissent and lending one's voice to proposing alternatives to a military conflict that was not inevitable.

It may be that those wounds sustained in the attacks of September 11 were simply still too raw and charged with the trauma of unexpected agony for anyone to believe very much that a plea for peace was a realistic response to the attacks. The war in Afghanistan, given the very hard evidence and emotions in support of such a conflict, was as inevitable as the continued burial and mourning of the 3,030 who had been slain in New York City, Washington, D. C., and Pennsylvania. The stage for it had, after all, been set long before Osama Bin Laden hatched his master plot to shred so brutally the fabric of reality as the world knew it.

The road to Baghdad, as the successful campaign to remove Saddam Hussein from power has sometimes been called, was a wholly different matter from the near-slaughter in Afghanistan. Nevertheless, where both Afghanistan and Iraq were concerned, adherents to the philosophy that peace is best kept by living it stood little chance of winning over those in power to their side because, amidst reminders of the pain already suffered and discussions of tactics for, and justifications of, combat, peace was the one option never provided a full hearing.

Those who pledged their allegiance to peace did not have the clout of a communications industry prepared to cash in - without the least hesitation or pretense at shame - on the feast of ratings guaranteed by a live coverage of real-world death and destruction. What they had was the quiet certainty that a continued escalation of violence in response to violence could only end as described by Mohandas K. Gandhi: "If there is a victor left, the very victory will be a living death for the nation that emerges victorious."

With the United States' immersion in one conflict and rapid move toward another, believers in peace prepared themselves to demonstrate the same by first answering for themselves what was or was not at stake in a proposed war with Iraq: Was the issue deterring terrorism or was it increasing individual profits for U.S. investors in Iraqi oil? Was the question one of liberating the Iraqi people or fulfilling a pre-established agenda to rule the same, along with as much of the rest of the Middle East as possible, under a discreetly placed banner of stars and stripes? Would war actually heal the wounds of the past or only further aggravate them while clearing the path for a fresh flow of blood? And how seriously should any United States citizen take the claim that the United States was seeking to cure another country of its ills when our own ills resulted annually in enough deaths to decimate a small town? Was it not more a matter of blindly contaminating other countries with the dis-ease of violence blighting our own shores? Such questions were not easily confronted, but to paraphrase James Baldwin, none could be answered until all were openly and honestly faced.

With major offensives (not the war itself) in Afghanistan concluding less than two months after they began, Believers in Peace had until March 2003 to convince the Supporters of War that military violence constituted a misallocation of national resources and a potentially criminal waste of human life. Whereas the latter stepped up training to survive expected biochemical attacks, Believers in Peace spent their days painting signs with such slogans as, "Brains Not Bombs," "War Is Not The Answer," and "Heroes Make Peace." They raided their bank accounts - many of which had already been depleted by the demands of a costly war-readiness economy - to rent buses that would carry them by the hundreds and thousands to major centers of protest within various individual states. Late into the night, they sat up rehearsing old protest songs from the 1960s and 1970s, many singing them for the first time. Those with brothers or sisters or sons or daughters in the military let them know they were not preparing to march against them but against the war in which they were being ordered to fight. They let them know that they were loved but the peril in which they were being placed, quite possibly in no need whatsoever, was not.

Perhaps more than anything else, those who chose to attempt to command peace in the face of chaos communicated with each other and with the world: by email and slow-mail, via telephones and newsletters, through e-magazines and e-books, and sorrow-filled face to sorrow-filled face. In the trembling shadows of an uncertain future, they registered and confirmed a commitment to nonviolence.

On January 18, 2003, a kind of dress rehearsal took place just a month prior to the phenomenal revelation that would occur on February 15. Standing firmly upon the foundation of annual observances of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, more than half a million people swamped the national mall in Washington, D.C., to declare their opposition to the looming war in Iraq and to racism in the United States. Rallies around King's name having become somewhat commonplace in the United States, the fact that it helped draw together half a million people gained much less notice than its organizers, among them ANSWER, may have hoped for. What it did likely accomplish was to cast some doubt on the significance or reliability of the published polls indicating that a majority of people in the United States either supported the cry for war, or, that those who did not support it were so negligible in opposition as not to notice their dissent. Depending on mainstream media as represented by the major television networks, radio stations, and newspapers and magazines, one would have found it easy to argue with the aforementioned conclusion. There were no widespread broadcasts of buses taking off from college campuses or neighborhood recreation centers and small towns to travel to Washington and various state capitals where marchers flexed their patriotic muscles in very public displays of patriotic outrage. Likewise, there were none of youth in Harlem shouting that they refused to become glamorized security guards for an elite group of politicians' super-sized gas stations. In order to receive straightforward grass roots reportage on such events, one had to buffer out the noise of sanctioned propaganda and tune into such online public-supported radio stations as New York City's WBAI or San Francisco's KPFX.