Words I. – Black and Blue Lives Matter
Introduction
Baton Rouge. Falcon Heights. Dallas. By now, we’ve read the posts, and probably watched the videos, perhaps most reluctantly, as I have. Our hearts have been broken, torn open, rent asunder, and we are in pain – of sorrow, despair, anger, rage. The images come before us in our mind’s eye, again and again, and perhaps we wonder what we would have done, what we could have done were we in such a horrific situation. We grieve for the dead, and their families and friends.
And we are weary. We add these names to the geography of despair: Ferguson. Baltimore. Minneapolis. Charleston. Cleveland. Cincinnati.[1] And in a larger context: Orlando. San Bernardino. Paris. Brussels. Istanbul. Dhaka.[2] We are weary of so much violence.
And in our confusion, and our grief, we struggle to make sense of the violation of what we know a civilized, peaceable world ought to be. We wonder if there is a way back to that world, or rather, a way forward to a future world, the beloved community that we dream about.
Making Sense
And so I begin to try to make sense of these acts, and the larger pattern they are a part of. It is my nature to not look for blame, to label individuals as good or evil, but to look for larger systems in play. I am not talking about vast secret conspiracies one hears about on late night radio, but about systems and structures that are like the air around us — so ever-present, so ubiquitous, that we do not see them unless we look carefully.
In an article in today’s New York Times[3], titled “How Police See Us, and How We See Them” journalist Greg Howard explored the parallels of modern policing to military action. He says,
In a vacuum, the United States of America is not a war zone. Falcon Heights, Minn., is not a war zone. Dallas is not a war zone. … In a vacuum, police officers shouldn’t kill the very citizens they swear to protect. But the police, especially officers who commute to patrol communities not their own, are — or can act very much like — an occupying force.
This militarization of our police has made true peace within our country harder to achieve. Black people live in fear for their very lives. Persons of color train themselves, and each other, in how to de-escalate the situation even in hostile contact with police. We saw this in the Facebook Live video from Falcon Heights, Minnesota, this week. Diamond Reynolds tries to de-escalate officer Jeronimo Yanez after he killed Philando Castile, her boyfriend, at a traffic stop. The dialog seems surreal, hard for many of us to grasp.
At the same time, our officers in blue carry their own fears. They find their work harder, less satisfying, and more dangerous. We see the danger most pointedly in the murder of five policemen in Dallas — by a man with military weapons training and skill. What is poignant about Dallas for me is that the chief of police in Dallas, David Brown, has been a leader in reforming the police department, improving relations with the community, and reducing the use of force in police encounters.
How Do We Heal?
How will we heal? How will we assure that black lives matter, and blue lives matter too? How will we create a world of safety and peace, for everyone? I will return to this larger theme later this morning.
At this moment, let me quote another NY Times writer, James Blow who wrote:
“I … fear that time is a requirement for remedy. We didn’t arrive at this place overnight and we won’t move on from it overnight.
Anger and vengeance and violence are exceedingly easy to access and almost effortlessly unleashed.
The higher calling — the harder trial — is the belief in the ultimate moral justice and the inevitable victory of righteousness over wrong.”[4]
That belief in an ultimate moral justice is expressed by Rev. Theodore Parker, one of our great Unitarian thinkers, when he said, “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; … And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.”[5]
And from what I can see, that justice points toward peace.
Reading – A speech by President Dwight Eisenhower, in April 1953 –
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
Words II. – Our Cross of Iron (1300)
Forensic Anthropology
Leaning over the blue cloth of the table, laid out with the skeletal remains of a young man, the researcher picked up the skull. He held it respectfully, turning it to point out a hole, telling us that this hole was clearly caused by a bullet – the man had been executed. He offered the skull to me, so I could take a closer look. Gingerly I took it, and examined the wound as he explained his reasoning.
These bones belonged to just one of approximately two hundred thousand people who disappeared in Guatemala during the ‘dirty war’ in the 1980s.
I was visiting this forensic lab as part of a Unitarian Universalist Service Committee educational visit to Guatemala in 2006. You may have read about this kind of forensic anthropology in an article in last week’s New York Times[6]. Now a decade on, I was surprised how little had changed in the work that is being done, and the slow, stuttering steps toward justice in Guatemala.
I learned many things in that visit to Guatemala. Most poignantly, I became clear, awakened to our nation’s role in creating the conditions that allowed those 200,000 people to be murdered. How we supported the dictators. How we provided the armaments, including, likely, the bullet that ended that young man’s life.
Militaristic Nation
We live in a militaristic nation. As much as Americans talk of high ideals of freedom, justice, peace, liberty, our collective first response to just about any slight is to reach for the gun. I know this is not news to any of you.
This is our cross of iron: we spend more on our military than the next seven most militaristic countries — combined.[7] We have more than 1 million people in uniform ready to fight. We have more than 200 bombers ready to fly into action, and a dozen aircraft carriers plying the seas.[8] We have missiles, and anti-missile missiles, and lasers to shoot down enemy missiles.
And while we occasionally give lip service to the ideal of peace, peace is really out of fashion in our country. We give our uniformed military special precedence, offering them discounts in many stores, and allowing them to board early on many airlines. Even our Unitarian Universalist faith holds its military chaplains with special respect, with a Committee on Military Ministry offering them support.
It is not acceptable in our society to question military privilege. It’s hard to find examples where this privilege is even explored. Well there is one episode of BoJack Horseman, on Netflix, where BoJack gets into a tussle with a Navy Seal over a box of muffins: “… it’s not like giving a jerk a gun and telling him its okay to kill people suddenly turns that jerk into a hero.”[9] Let’s just say that such statements get the cartoon horse in hot water, and they’d probably get anyone into hot water in today’s climate, even if they just might on occasion be correct.
On the other hand, I respect that the experience of being in battle affects a person immensely. I have talked with many veterans of war who talk of the intensity of affection, loyalty, dare I say love, that they have for their fellow combatants, that sense of the ‘band of brothers’ cohesion that emerges within a battlefield unit. Heroes are made of this stuff.
I also know of many battlefield veterans who lose a piece of their humanity in the fog of war. Some struggle with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, or depression, or worse. Even those who return to normal life may silently carry the costs of war within them.
My father was a World War II veteran. He seldom talked of his time in Europe, in the Battle of the Bulge, but when the window of recollection opened up, what flew out was bloody and horrific. I am selfishly grateful that he kept the window closed most of the time.
Our Cross of Iron
So we as a culture lean toward war. We rationalize our warlike nature, our cross of iron. Yet our tendency toward war is based on some mistaken assumptions.
When President Obama accepted his Nobel Peace prize a few years ago, he claimed that the current wars are, to use the technical term, ‘just wars’. Obama concluded, “oppression will always be with us”, and consequently that “there will be war”.[10]
Indeed, like Obama, many of us implicitly accept the possibility that war can be necessary and morally just. There is a whole philosophy called Just War Theory, developed first by St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, later endorsed by the Catholic Church, that outlines situations in which military force is justified. So for example, Just War Theory claims that only political authorities can wage war, meaning that most wars for independence, for example, would be considered unjust.
Without dwelling on this, I’d like to note that we ought to consider alternative philosophies to Just War Theory, such as pacifism through nonviolent struggle, advocated by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, or a pragmatic pacifism that admits that any war represents a failure, with long term costs that may outweigh short term gains.
The second mistake we make is that we assume as a baseline that all wars can be fought and won like World War II, in which we utterly destroyed the opposing enemy governments and replaced them with governments of our own choosing.[11]
We failed to achieve that baseline with the war in Korea, which ended in a stalemate, and we failed again in Vietnam, which ended in a loss. We have staggered toward failure in our long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and now Syria. All of these wars have been fundamentally different in nature from the earlier World Wars.
Yet at our core, we carry assumptions about military strategy based on our successes in those World Wars. Those assumptions no longer fit. We can’t assume that just because we have orders of magnitude more weaponry than our opposition that we are sure to win. Modern warfare is increasingly asymmetrical. It has become so asymmetrical that one of our current opponents — Daesh, or Islamic State — is able to wage war in part at almost no cost. Daesh’s novel tactic is to use social media to persuade other combatants throughout the world to join the fight, to purchase arms with their own money, and make bombs on their own, and attack Daesh’s opposition from within.
We rail that such tactics are unjust forms of terrorism, and yet we blithely use forms of warfare that our enemies consider equally unjust, such as our use of drones to kill from a distance of half a world away.
Finally, we often go to war on the mistaken assumption that we can obtain a lasting peace by aiding oppressive countries in police action against their own people.
As an example, let me return to Guatemala. The United States involvement began years ago. Quoting the New York Times article,
“The C.I.A. staged a coup in 1954 to overthrow President Jacobo Árbenz of Guatemala after his land-reform policies ran afoul of the powerful American-owned United Fruit Company. The United States then installed the first in a long line of military dictators and, on and off for the next four decades, provided regimes with money, weapons, intelligence support and counterinsurgency training.”[12]
After all these years, and so much death, Guatemala remains a violent, unstable place.
I will not list off the other countries in which we have militarily supported oppression — that list is long. In so many of these places, the consequences of our engagement has been increased violence, and we have been drawn into that gyre, sucked in by our relationships with power and profit, and we find ourselves in morally questionable positions, seeding future hostility and oppression. Our nation, our humanity, is hung on this cross of iron.
Reading – from “Living Buddha, Living Christ” by Thich Nhat Hanh
“We often think of peace as the absence of war, that if the powerful countries would reduce their weapons arsenals, we could have peace. But if we look deeply into the weapons, we see our own minds — our prejudices, fears, and ignorance. Even if we transport all the bombs to the moon, the roots of war and the roots of the bombs are still here, in our hearts and minds, and sooner or later we will make new bombs. To work for peace is to uproot war from ourselves and from the hearts of men and women…. Looking deeply together is the main task of a [religious] community…”
Words III. – Peace in our Hearts and Minds (1000)
What We Can Do
What can we do to shift this culture of militarism and violence in America? The problem is a hard one. Perhaps we can pray for peace.
There’s a story of an old Orthodox man in Jerusalem who had been going to the Western Wall twice a day every day to pray for very long time. A CNN reporter found him standing at the wall praying, and after he was done, she introduced herself and asked, “How long have you been coming here to pray?” The man answered, “About 60 years.”
“That’s amazing!” said the journalist. “What do you pray for?”
“Peace,” replied the old man. “I pray for peace between the Christians, Jews and the Muslims. I pray for all the hatred to stop and I pray for all our children to grow up in safety and friendship.”
“And how do you feel after doing this for 60 years?” ask the woman.
“Like I’m talking to a damn wall!” said the man.[13]
And yet. And yet. In our responsive reading today [602], the ancient Taoist writer Lao-Tse tells us that if we want peace in the world, we must have peace in our hearts. I do not want to belittle prayer or other personal practice as a first step in creating a peaceable world.
I’m often hesitant to talk of my own personal experience. However I must proclaim this: a large part of my own spiritual work has been around cultivating peace in my own heart. I depend on my regular spiritual practices — meditation, journaling, reading the mystics — to help me with this kind of spiritual growth.
I do not know how successful I’ve been, for it’s possible that just aging and maturity might have brought me to the same place, but I do find myself more able to weather the trials of the world, the horrors of the nightly news, the bile and invective of the political circuit, than many around me. I do find myself with an attitude of calm, without fear, without rage, day by day, week by week. I like to think this allows me to act thoughtfully and rationally in the larger causes of peace and justice.
Action toward peace is personal. It must be personal. Perhaps we can act as Albert Einstein did. He said,
“I am not only a pacifist but a militant pacifist. I am willing to fight for peace. Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war.”[14]
We ourselves must make choices, and do what we can. In this respect we might follow the teachings of the Dalai Lama, who is rather well known for remaining calm and peaceful. UU Rev. Josh Snyder shared this story:
… someone asked [the Dalai Lama] why he is so optimistic, always in such a happy mood despite all of the suffering that he and the Tibetan people have undergone. And he replied with a story.
Shortly after he was installed as the head of the Tibetan state at age fifteen, the Chinese were preparing to invade the country. They felt that Tibet was part of China and, with their overpopulation problem, needed land for people to settle. This was a difficult time for such a young man, who at the time had known very little of the world outside his monastery. How does one stop the invasion? How do you preserve peace, when war is immanent?
He said there are really only two choices one has. The first is to figure out what it is you can do about the negative situation and apply yourself fully to working toward the solution. The second thing is to figure out the things that are completely and utterly out of your control. Since you can’t do anything about these things, don’t worry about them. They will be what they will be, provided you have done all you can to solve the problems that are within your power. Therefore there is never any need to worry if one follows these two choices.[15]
The Work of Peace
With such inner clarity, we can begin the outward work of peacemaking. We can realize what we can do and what we cannot. We can live peaceably, as individuals, finding the calm, and being free of fear. Recalling the words of the Hebrew prophet Micah, which we heard in the hymn earlier:
[We can] beat [our] swords into plowshares
and [our] spears into pruning hooks.
Nation will not lift up sword against nation,
nor shall [we] learn war any more.
but [we] shall all sit under [our] own vine
and under [our] own fig tree,
and no one will make [us] afraid.[Micah 4:3-4]
For that last line is key, really: To be unafraid. We should realize by now that possessing all the external things — a massive military, troops, bases, police, fences, walls — are not enough to keep us unafraid. Even eliminating all this, beating our swords into farm implements, or sending our bombs to the moon, will not, alone free us from fear. Safety, security, freedom from fear comes only from within. We can do our part to learn to live without fear.
Conclusion
To create peace in the world, we certainly must be willing to address the underlying things that breed war and violence: poverty and hunger, hopelessness and insecurity, racism and xenophobia, inequality and corruption.[16] To the extent we have any influence or control of these things, we can act to change them.
In such a way, we can be strong advocates for nonviolent action, using peaceful tools for social change.
And if we are unable to control any of these things, then we, like the Dalai Lama, accept our situation, and find calm and inner peace. We work together as a spiritual community, to cultivate and share this calm, this inner peace, so that it becomes a part of us all. Together we do the work of making peace in our time.
And in this way, we come to realize that peace is more than merely the absence of violence. Peace becomes an attitude, an approach to living. Peacemaking becomes a way of life.
Notes:
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/recent-police-shootings-involving-black-men-40399003
2 http://www.pri.org/stories/2016-03-22/paris-there-have-been-hundreds-terrorist-attacks-many-have-gone-unnoticed
3 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/08/magazine/how-police-see-us-and-how-they-train-us-to-see-them.html
4 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/11/opinion/a-week-from-hell.html
5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Parker
6 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/magazine/the-secrets-in-guatemalas-bones.html
7 https://www.nationalpriorities.org/campaigns/us-military-spending-vs-world/
8 https://aeon.co/essays/why-americans-believe-the-us-can-win-wars
9 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3982374/quotes
10 NY Times, The Label Factor: Is Obama a Wimp or a Warrior? http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/weekinreview/10cooper.html
11 https://aeon.co/essays/why-americans-believe-the-us-can-win-wars
12 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/magazine/the-secrets-in-guatemalas-bones.html
13 as quoted by Rev. Anne Felton Hines, http://www.emersonuuc.org/worship/sermons/06_08_20.htm
14 Albert Einstein, Interview with George Sylvester Viereck (January 1931), https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein_and_politics
15 Rev. Dr. Joshua Snyder, February 12, 2006 – http://www.secondunitarianomaha.org/sermons.cgi?id=194
16 from http://thesunmagazine.org/issues/424/fighting_with_another_purpose