Granny D - Politics of Nonviolence

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Tue, 11 Oct 2005 17:18:07 -0400

Granny D - Politics of Nonviolence

 

 

 

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/101105E.shtml

 

 

Politics of Nonviolence

 

By Doris " Granny D " Haddock

t r u t h o u t | Speech

 

Thursday 06 October 2005

 

The following speech was made at Orchard House, home of the

Alcotts, in Concord, Massachusetts.

 

On my walk across the nation several years ago I had the honor of

speaking from a pulpit where Dr. King once preached. How I felt the

power of his words and his love somehow still echoing in that great

room! More recently, on the anniversary of his death in Memphis, I had

the honor of speaking from the balcony where he took his last breath.

 

You, of course, understand how his politics of nonviolence was

informed by the sacrifices of Gandhi, and how Gandhi's nonviolence was

informed by Tolstoy and Ruskin, who, in turn, were inspired by the

American Quakers working for the abolition of slavery. The great

Quaker voice was William Lloyd Garrison, who spoke to this very group

so many years ago - as did Emerson and William James and Julia Ward

Howe and other voices for justice who spoke to you in dark times. And

so, in the long shadow of these people, I humbly raise my voice today.

 

We meet in a time when two great and growing divisions are

separating us as Americans: rich versus poor, and left versus right. I

would like to speak to the second of these, as its resolution would

help solve the other.

 

The political issues that divide the American people are great

issues, with severe consequences for the moral life of the nation and

the fate of the planet. These are issues equal to the issues that

divided us in 1860, and we should fear the historical similarities.

 

In some ways the conflict of the Civil War was not resolved, but

rather accommodated, in the same way that smoldering coals under ashes

are but a fire asked to bide its time. Do not the sparks now swirl up

fresh? Is the heat and danger we feel not the old conflict between

those who believe that authority comes from above: from an Old

Testament God, delivered through husbands, presidents, preachers,

ayatollahs and plantation overseers to people arranged in layers

according to their worth - is it not a conflict between those

authoritarians and those others who instead believe that all men are

created equal, and that the authority to govern issues forth from

them, upward to their government - their common vessel of community -

and not downward? Is this not the divide of 1860 and also of our own time?

 

We have an advantage that our countrymen did not have in 1860,

for, despite our tendency to assign colors to states, our differences

are not locked into the different economies of different regions. Our

differences are with our neighbors, our friends, our family members.

We can argue this out peaceably across fences and dinner tables

instead of across a bloodied continent as before.

 

But again it is the work of ending slavery. This time it is a

slavery of the mind, which the hardest kind to deal with, as it is

usually characterized by the unwillingness of the victims to be

emancipated. But it must happen if the suffering of this nation and of

the world is to end.

 

Let us consider the self-repression of the political right. And in

this argument, I am talking to some of my own friends and hoping they

will open their minds to a new thought from me, for I offer it in good

faith and friendship.

 

Where authority and power flow down from above, from heaven to the

White House to husbands and ayatollahs, the free and joyful living of

people can be quite the enemy. If you will remember the free spirit of

those flower children who grew up in the 1960s, for example, you will

also remember the harsh attitude that attended to their joys from the

more traditional, often more rural, elements of our society. Those

political leaders who rose from this time, who lived in this more open

and free way - less constrained by the rules of authority - were

especially vilified by the authority clan. You need only to think of

the special treatment given to the Clintons, who were of this

generation and climate, to know the truth of this. And it fits the

international pattern, of course, that the woman, Mrs. Clinton, would

be singled out for the cruelest stones.

 

What attracted such hatred? It was their freedom, their sense of

equality, and their joys.

 

Here it is: those in the clan of authority are not given the

privilege - the natural right - of living their own lives. They do as

they are told, say and think what they are told. Smothered is their

curiosity and their healthy skepticism, and also their imagination,

joy, freedom, and lust for life itself. When they see others actually

living lives, they react with anger, as if someone had cut to the

front of a line that, for them, never moves.

 

What is the proof of this theory? Those enthralled to authority,

cowering under it, lose sight of their own lives. They will venerate

above all else the symbol of the yet unruined potential of life: the

curled-up unborn. The authority clan will have the image of an unborn

baby as its flag, and they will claim to honor and defend innocent

life, but that will be a great lie to themselves. For they will not be

the ones to demand DNA testing of all prisoners on death row; they

will not be the ones to demand health insurance for all children, or

better nutrition in all schools, or peaceful alternatives to

international conflicts. They will be the ones to rail against these

things, for the authority clan parades itself as pro-life while it is

truly more like a cult of death. Having died themselves, strangled by

authority and fear, they cannot wish happy lives for others - they

cling only to that magic symbol of what might have been. They relate

to the unborn baby selfishly; it is themselves: unborn, unlived, stil

hoping for a life.

 

I am not talking about political conservatives. People who follow

leaders like Goldwater, Forbes, and Buckley do believe, in the great

mainstream of American thought, that government is the council fire of

community. They just want it not to be all-consuming. The people we

are dealing with today, who are so far to the right of traditional

conservatives that it is unfair to call them that at all, do not

believe that our government is our campfire of community. They would

replace it with a church, a strict family, and, as they have shown us

so many times in history, even with a dictatorship that derives from

imagined divine powers, and with a reign of brutal authority that

sanctions criminal aggressions on other nations, torture, and the

suspension of civil liberties. How many times have we seen this happen

abroad, and how many times have we wondered if we would have the

courage and the character to act up if it happened here - if our own

army was turned into a police force against us?

 

I think every man and woman of us wants to be a patriot to this

great nation. How sad to miss our cue when the alarm bell rings for

us! How horrible to be enslaved to the wrong way of thinking at such a

time of national crisis! We owe it to our friends and neighbors to

free them if we can, so they might stand with us.

 

I will propose a mental experiment to see if we can find a string

or two that can help us lead our friends out of this dangerous maze.

 

Imagine that your friend is very much pro-life and pro-war and

doesn't see the illness of her mental conflict.

 

I think you might notice that this friend of yours lives a

slipcover-protected life and has not even allowed herself the freedoms

of a good fantasy life. Let's repair that.

 

Let me suggest that we take her to a good arts district, rent her

a studio apartment full of art supplies above a good sidewalk café,

find her a lover and come back in ninety days to see if her politics

have changed. As she lives a real life, as she explores her own

potential, she will learn to let others live and enjoy their lives,

too. She will want to help the young woman artist next door who gets

herself into trouble. She will even begin to be amused and impressed

instead of angered and depressed by the Clintons and other lively,

joyful, free-living people of this beautiful earth.

 

When people begin to really live their lives, the black and white

certainties do not turn to shades of gray, but to the million-jeweled

hews of a morning's dew. That sparkle is the reality of life revealed.

Life is about living, and about helping other real people get through

this world with a minimum of pain and a maximum of human dignity. We

simply can't do that with authoritarian politics and its deadly

abstractions. We can only do that with our love and our freedom to

think for ourselves and act individually and as a community.

 

And that was the example of Jesus, wasn't it? Did he not challenge

the organized church of his day, challenge its authority, and overturn

its rules that had hardened into cruelties and corruptions? Did he not

show us how we might act instead from the love and charity of our own

hearts, and, in this rebellion, did he not say, follow Me? Are we not

to think for ourselves? Was so grand a thing as the human mind meant

to be wasted?

 

Our founders were deeply spiritual and also deeply secular - a

well-balanced condition of the mature mind that eludes today's

political fundamentalists. Our founders respected human freedom and

the urge toward greater equality. Over the centuries, we have tried to

make this nation a better _expression of their intent, so that there

would be no second-class citizens, no arbitrary authority that limited

our life, liberty or pursuit of happiness. And the better angels of

that Revolution stand yet upon our shoulders as we oppose the clan of

authority, that cult of death, whose cloak of human oppression has

cast its shadow over our children's future.

 

What must we do? We must bring the light of consciousness to

people who are enslaved by the darkness. We must show them - make them

see - the clear links between the Taliban and the American

fundamentalists. It is about power, male power, and subservience. Why

can't a young girl in trouble get an abortion in the preferred world

of the fundamentalists? It isn't because of the sanctity of life, or

the fundamentalists would be acting to preserve life by getting

medicine to Africa instead of impeding it. They would be halting

executions and building up our institutions of peace.

 

The desperate attitude of the far right toward not only the unborn

baby but even brain-dead people on life support reveals something

about their true religion: they have little. There is nothing in their

actions that reveals a belief that life is eternal, that there is no

death except as a doorway to something better. Their brand of

Christianity simply does not relate to the teachings of Christ. The

worst of the hate-mongers who misuse the Bible to make million-dollar

church incomes and push a political agenda of male domination and hate

are easy to spot, for they cherry-pick Bible passages to suit their

purposes. They disregard any turning of cheeks, they disregard the

fact that Jesus never mentioned the homosexuality that they so fear.

They seem not to fear that, as very rich men, they themselves might

have a hard time driving their Hummers through the eye of the needle

into heaven. They claim that every word of the Bible must be followed,

but if they really believed that, they would have stoned themselve to

death years ago, as they are as sexually frisky and full of covetous

looks as anybody else. They forgive themselves freely, of course, even

when they promote the murder of foreign leaders.

 

They refuse a young girl an abortion for the same reason they

would refuse her birth control: because in either case she would be

exercising power and control over her own future - and such power and

control is reserved for the authorities - male authorities - below

whom she is to cower and serve and reproduce. It is all about that,

and we have to start saying so, so that the far right will no longer

have the women marching in its toxic ranks - at least the smarter women.

 

If I ran the Democratic Party, I would lay it all out in expensive

advertising campaigns. I would have the sociologists and the

psychologists talking about the tricks of mental slavery that are

being used to trick decent Christians and other people into following

un-Christian leaders and policies. As with any kind of mental

counseling, progress depends on the spread of consciousness - of

self-awareness. I would let more and more people, especially the

women, come to understand the nature of the lies that surround them

and defraud them. I believe they really are for life and for liberty,

but they must be given better information, better moral and emotional

support.

 

It would be important to have well-known voices of authority

deliver that message - the Walter Cronkites and Oprah Winfrey's of

America - if they would ever be brave enough to do so. And here is why

the message must be delivered by such voices.

 

Imagine walking down a street in my Peterborough. You run across a

retired couple and start talking politics. You get on the subject of

abortion. Listen, you say, the Europeans have a very small percentage

of the abortions we do in the United States. They have cut the number

of abortions by providing better sex education, providing more

contraception, and accepting a more open and honest attitude about the

sexual lives of their young people. If your concern is to reduce

abortions, surely you must become an advocate of these programs that

actually do the trick!

 

But the couple disagrees. They tell you " it isn't about doing what

works in Europe and what might work here, it is about doing the right

thing for the right reason, and following the word of God. "

 

Well, that was a real conversation in Peterborough, though I'm

sure they must have been visitors.

 

If you wonder why the other side of the political aisle seems so

resistant to the facts, it is because they are not interested in what

works, what is pragmatic; they are interested in obedience to

authority. It is nothing less than mental bondage to the cult of

authority. This is of course unworkable in the civic arena, where

pragmatism is the belief system we must share as our common ground.

The only way to break through that problem is if our few national

voices of authority will please give these authority-dependent people

permission to think freshly about our important issues.

 

There is another string leading out of this dark maze. Better

leaders can make great differences in the life of a society, but we

cannot elect them if we do not change from electoral organizing to

social organizing.

 

When I went on a 23,000-mile voter registration journey before the

last election, I walked through many housing projects and low-income

neighborhoods where no one from the outside had dropped by to talk

politics since the last election. The Democrats only come around, I

was told, every few years to ask for their votes, but they weren't

there to listen to their problems, to help them craft political

solutions, and to stand behind them and amplify their voices. These

people were of the opinion that, if the Democrats won or lost, their

own lives wouldn't really change much. It is simply exploitive

politics to come around begging for votes without giving so much as a

crouton in return. We have to be involved all year long, every year,

and in every neighborhood that needs political help. That is movement

building - not just stumping for candidates.

 

The residents of Cabrini Green in Chicago, and the people of the

slums of Ft. Myers, Miami, St. Louis and New Orleans told me they

needed our organizing help and our voices added to theirs - for they

love their children too and want decent lives. Many of the streets I

walked in New Orleans were later strewn with the drowned poor, as if

America had progressed no further than the days of the Titanic, when

those traveling life in steerage are never offered the lifeboats. So

much criticism has fallen on the president for the flooding disaster

in New Orleans, but the Democrats have had a long century to make life

better and they have not done so. The New Deal and other programs,

offered at a distance, are helpful but no match for a party

meetinghouse in every neighborhood to raise the political competency

and expectations of the area.

 

Politics is not just about raising money for candidates. Politics

is about creatively serving the needs of your people, and the election

is just the report card on how you are doing and how many people you

have helped and how many people are following your leadership because

you were there for them. We do get the government we deserve, you see,

and the crowd standing behind us in critical times is the crowd we

have served through the years. People will not speak up about global

warming, I assure you, until they first have a warm house for their

own children.

 

So here are my two thoughts. We must help people see the mental

traps that they are victim to, and we must do this by telling it like

we see it, by asking them to see that the pro-life, pro-war movement

is really a cult of death, that fundamental Christianity represents

the opposite of Christ's teachings, that authoritarian control and

elite profiteering are the strings of the far right's puppet show.

 

Let us indeed believe that all people are equal, but let us not

assume that all political opinions are equal, for some are toxic and

sociopathic and require our loving intervention. Let us intervene. Let

us stand up in church gatherings, let us confront our friends. Let us

use the tools of mass communication to awaken people to the lies that

bind them.

 

And let us return to real politics in the neighborhoods -

especially those neighborhoods where we are most needed. As it stands

now, people who do not receive the support they need from an

ever-receding community are turning to the very churches that have

been politically killing those needed government services. This is a

dangerous tailspin that we can only arrest with a political return to

the neighborhoods. Let us demand of our party leaders that we move

from electoral to social organizing, so that there is more rock and

less hot air under our candidates as we move into the future.

 

These are big projects. Do we have enough energy remaining for

this sort of thing?

 

What is it to our souls when we have to just keep slugging through

dark places? Why, after all that has happened in America, from stolen

elections to the destruction of our necessary institutions of mutual

help, are you, personally, still at it? Why, after seeing our country

become the international symbol of irresponsible conduct, of torture,

of political imprisonment, of destruction to the global ecosystem, are

your spirits not smeared across the plaza under the treads of these tanks?

 

Are your hearts perhaps stronger and your souls deeper than you

imagined? Yes, this is what you came here to do. There is no greater

gift than to be given a life of meaning. There is no greater heroism

than to bravely represent love in a dark time of fear and danger.

 

We are resolved to help each other. We are resolved to represent

love in the world and to follow our national dream.

 

So look at the situation wisely and know that a happy ending is

not to be found under the paper moon of child's brief play. Accept and

celebrate the fact that we are deeply engaged in a long, hard drama of

global meaning. We welcome the fight. We welcome it, and, by George,

we are up to it.

 

Thank you.