Grassroots Groundswell

The weather these last few days has been sunny, blue-skied warmth, and it’s been great to see so many people out enjoying it - riding bikes, taking walks, playing in the yards, mucking around in their gardens. There’s a rumor that the Washington Park Historic District may revive the annual block party this spring, and another friend told me she’s wanted to put together an outdoor movie screening to project silent films onto the outside wall of the Holy Cross Episcopal Church building. Good things happening.

In response to the letters on my Smile Train post, I want to say a few things. One is that I’m glad anytime controversial topics of huge importance to everyone can be discussed in public forums. I also value free speech a great deal: it’s an important human right, one that should be used vigorously and often in societies aspiring to freedom for all people, and I think America is still only aspiring to be a free country - we haven’t got there yet.

I don’t believe freedom is bought by the blood of soldiers. I ascribe to Utah Phillips’ views, quoted at Free Radio Berkeley: “The state can’t give you free speech, and the state can’t take it away. You’re born with it, like your eyes, like your ears. Freedom is something you assume, then you wait for someone to try to take it away. The degree to which you resist is the degree to which you are free…”

Second, I too have relatives who are military veterans of past conflicts and the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. My pacifist views are well-known through letters in the Courier-News the past few years, but nonetheless undergo changes over time, as all people’s views do. I currently think that war may have been the best way to solve certain types of conflicts in the past, but in the present world of interwoven cultures and the overwhelming destructive power of weapons of mass destruction, war is no longer the lesser of two or more evils: it has too much potential to destroy everyone and everything.

I came to this view upon reading a speech by Martin Luther King Jr., - who was also honored during the Smile Train show with displays of his quotes, including: “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’ “

During his acceptance speech for the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, King said: “…man’s proneness to engage in war is still a fact. But wisdom born of experience should tell us that war is obsolete. There may have been a time when war served as a negative good by preventing the spread and growth of an evil force, but the destructive power of modern weapons eliminated even the possibility that war may serve as a negative good…”

King was firmly non-violent in all of his work, and put his views especially strongly in his April 4, 1967 speech Beyond Vietnam: a Time to Break the Silence. It’s his moral leadership, and that of Jesus, that I attempt to follow in my work.