A Light in the Tempest

Peace is no longer a safe theological subject or an interesting intellectual debate. The country has had "victory without blood" and "heroes without cost." To talk about the peace movement now is to talk about the real thing. And it is dangerous.

Temper tantrums are now in store on every level. The United States stalled in Korea, lost in Vietnam, and smarted with frustration when it missed Gadhafi's Bedouin tent with an F-14 fighter plane. The United States became a laughingstock of the world when it launched an invasion of Grenada, one of its smallest islands, and looked powerless in Panama when it tore up the country but couldn't catch the one man we said we'd sent an entire army to capture.

The United States had become a weeping giant in the midst of Lilliputians. A vision of doughboys and liberators had faded. In its place had come the signs "Yankee, go home" and hostages and demonstrations at U.S. embassies, even in the countries of our allies. The people on the street wanted to feel good again. In a country where children are brought up on Rambo movies and Nintendo games, there is only one way to do that: "Win one for the Gipper; Remember the Alamo; Bash the Japs; Destroy the Huns."

The day after the Gulf war started, all moral critique of it came to a screeching halt in this country. The prestige of the president became more important than the sanctity of the human soul and the core values of the country. Patriotism became the new piety of the land. A Third World country that never stood to fight went down to the mightiest technological power on earth.

And in its dust went the peace movement. No cost to the United States but its integrity. The country that warred for freedom gave up a central one of its own -- freedom of the press -- and the country that inveighed against the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein made the world safe for the feudalism of the Sabahs.

The madness that led to the invasion of Kuwait was superseded only by the madness of the response it prompted. There were principles aplenty on both sides that were ground to pulp. Arab brothers cheated one another and U.S. democracy turned into technological terror. "Those who use force," the adage says, "simply prove that they have run out of ideas."

Into the midst of that melee waded one peace movement, and out of the debris of that must emerge another.

During the Vietnam debacle, the peace movement had to teach the country the immorality of wasting a generation on the rabid dogs of war. And, thanks to body bag after body bag, we had the time to do it. Finally, finally, the country sickened of a war that had no winners and nothing to be won. The satiation, unfortunately, was mistaken for the conception of a peaceful heart when all we really had was a stomach filled to sickness with the refuse of war.

Now, 20 years later, the peace movement must teach the country integrity. Where was the U.S. sense of the values of freedom of press and democracy in Iraq? Where was either consciousness or care for the dead of the other side? To this day, the government has never released the figures of Iraqi dead -- either the number of military slaughtered or the number of civilians who fell victim to "precision" bombing and "collateral damage." Greenpeace, though, estimates an Iraqi death toll of at least 200,000 people. Where were the morals of war itself as a nation was ground to dust far out of proportion to its own sin? Where was the U.S. spirit of "fair play" in a president who said, "The time for talk is over. We demand unconditional surrender"?

No, the peace movement is not a matter of academic discussion anymore. It must become a way of living and a way of thinking and a way of being human. What the government will not do we must do. We must begin to look anew at what it means to be a U.S. citizen in the midst of globalism.

THE TASK performed by Sojourners in the last 20 years has been an enormous one. In the first place, the very existence of Sojourners was proof in the midst of militarism that there was, in fact, a sprouting peace movement to be dealt with. Sojourners became an obscene little light in the middle of a tempest, intent on showing that there was a way out of the violence beyond more violence and refusing to go away simply because the war did.

Sojourners raised the questions of war and peace to the level of contemporary theology and political science. Sojourners did a great deal more than moralize about U.S. foreign policy or domestic discontent. Sojourners critiqued it and produced the materials that enabled others to critique it as well.

At the same time, the Sojourners Community went beyond intellectual disputation. Sojourners lived in the world as it counseled the world to live -- welcoming the stranger, sheltering the poor, living down to the expectations of the gospel -- and Sojourners became a sign to many.

Now Sojourners must begin again.

We need to begin to educate the public to the violence that we are bringing on ourselves by virtue of the violence we condone against others. This country teaches its children well that force is the answer to everything, and we see the results in our streets and our homes. Sojourners must teach otherwise. According to The Washington Post, Washington, DC spent $12 million to celebrate a 43-day war with a four-hour parade. Washington will not spend an additional $12 million, though, to provide jobs for DC teenagers who see drugs as a substitute for street-corner basketball.

We must begin to teach globalism rather than simply to assume it. Isolationism is not a U.S. foreign policy but it is, indeed, a U.S. attitude of mind. Someone must bend extra effort to teach the average U.S. citizen, in ways that are simple and clear and concrete, exactly what it means to both the United States and the Third World that we depend on other nations for the resources that fuel our own.

It is tragic, for instance, that the nation as a whole seems not to note at all that the freedom rhetoric we use to justify our war on Iraq, a country with oil, is rhetoric we ignore on Tiananmen Square in our desire for trade relations with China. We must begin to trace the inconsistencies in U.S. policy when U.S. economics are at stake. And we must do it in formats that engage more than the converted literati.

We must begin to teach the effects of U.S. militarism on U.S. life. And we must do it simply. Because the peace movement talks so often only to itself, there is little peace movement at all when we really need one.

We must make the effects of war a mainstream conversation. We must begin to engage the churches with yellow ribbons on their pillars to use alternative symbols: red ribbons to signify all the blood shed, theirs and ours; blue ribbons to signify the sadness of war; grey ribbons to signify the tragedy of pitting people against people for the sake of politicians.

We must begin to teach a spirituality of peace that is built out of basic Christian communities. The fact is that governments and businesses profit too much from wars to give them up. And churches have theologized more about war than they have taught peace, so how can we possibly expect them suddenly to teach otherwise? We must begin once again to teach peace, talk peace, preach peace, and build peace. A spirituality of peace is a first-order task.

The point, of course, is that Sojourners must go on doing what it has always done -- and more of it and more loudly.

The Talmud says: "You are not required to complete your work, but you are not at liberty to quit it." Sojourners is not called "sojourners" for nothing.

Joan Chittister, O.S.B., a Sojourners contributing editor, was the executive director of the Alliance for International Monasticism when this article appeared.