Friends,
I want to share one point of view, mine, on what was happening yesterday
at The Soldiers & Sailors Monument Nonviolent Direct Action. If anyone
isn’t familiar with its content I ask you to read the next email which
describes the action’s message and content. I offer my experience of
the action to all of you to help begin telling the story. Add your own
to the mix as you feel inspired, inclined:
The war with Iraq, (or actually the massacre of the Iraqi people if we
get to the point), began on March 19 as one of the darker days of our
country in my memory, though I know how relative is such perceived
darkness. For me, it was overwhelming, a gathering gloom as I
experienced the emotional distress that came with the beginning of the
additional war on Iraq (the sanctions had already been no less a war); I
had been fearing and avoiding the likelihood of war for awhile.
So, in the midst of waves of grief, despair, and chaos that happened
when the bombs started falling, an action occurred in Cleveland, in
Cleveland no less, that had connections to a larger nationwide response
that said ‘we aren’t going to stop saying no to war; we are not going to
accept business as usual; we are not going to accept this new
devastation and violence.”
And what happened in Cleveland, the thing I was part of, the thing that
I can speak of, from being there, stood out and was a radically
transformative moment for us in Cleveland. The Nonviolent Direct
Action, envisioned and nurtured by Diane and many others, worked on for
several months, by what became, really, a nonviolent peaceforce,
dispelled the darkness and kindled a moment of light for nonviolence as
an alternative vision and alternative practice.
The value of direct nonviolent action, the vision that inspires it, was
given concrete expression, was worked out in detail; and it happened at
the Soldiers and Sailors monument, such that the man who is the chairman
of the monument commission and who feared it initially said later, ‘it’s
the right place for an antiwar demonstration.’ (PD article) The
Soldiers and Sailors Monument really became the Peace Monument in
expression and through the civil disobedience action as it unfolded.
The police, the county, the people who have the power to make decisions,
who originally opposed us vigorously, who prepared to haul us all away,
who experienced us as ‘against them’ and ‘dangerous’ before they met us
and when they first encountered us, slowly, through talk, negotiation,
experience, as tensions eased and gave way to what was, in fact,
happening – a peaceful organized nonviolent civil disobedience. It
became a transformation of the System which so often oppresses; the
potentially oppressive system accommodated and then, in their own way,
on terms they could understand, joined us.
And this nonviolent civil disobedience action was not an individual
acting alone, or individuals acting on the spur of the moment. This was
an organized nonviolent peaceforce, a community, prepared so well by
Randy, Tony and many other trainers. Such that what needed attention
received it when the day of action came. Each step seemed to require a
movement towards nonviolence on the part of someone, a grace, to help
the next step to occur. And it happened.
I am grateful to have been part of this historic event in Cleveland; a
moment when nonviolence took a symbolic and concrete expression, and
stepped over the boundaries of the safe into confrontation with the
Powers that be, the system that so often oppresses human beings and
their needs. We hope in a different world that lives, teaches and
envisions nonviolence as a method and practical reality for our world;
and we reached out in this action to our world locked in a devastating
violent response and one part of that system, the one in Cleveland,
responded ultimately with accommodation and acceptance.
On such a dark day, a glimmer of light, of belief, that we can
participate in the transforming of our society, the one we mostly live
in, in Cleveland, a backwater no less, into a nonviolent community that
recognizes dissent, respects and appreciates the need for it, that civil
disobedience is an important and legitimate form by which to act when
persuasion by legal means have been unsuccessful. With the small part
that I had in it, my heart is joyful and encouraged to have been part of
a momentous day in cleveland history.
It is then with sadness and deflation that I realize our action did not
directly relieve the Iraqis of any harm or violence. And in that sense,
we failed miserably; a hard fact that needs be said. Still, I am
inspired to continue to participate in transforming our violent world
beyond our local community, building on the transformation that occurred
at the Soldiers and Sailors monument, on a beautiful spring day, when
darkness had come over our country.
Thanks
mike
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