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SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER:
PREPARING FOR THE ACTION AT THE ELF SITE IN WISCONSIN

May 15, 2004
Liz McAlister

I sometimes feel appalled at the thought of the sum total
of human misery all over the world at the present moment:
The millions parted, fretting, wasting in unprofitable days -
quite apart from torture, pain, death, bereavement, injustice.
If anguish were visible,
almost the whole of this benighted planet would be enveloped in a dense dark vapor,
shrouded from the amazed vision of the heavens!
And the products of it all will be mainly evil - historically considered.
But the historic version is, of course, not the only one.
All things and all deeds have a value in themselves,
apart from their 'causes' and 'effects'.
No one can estimate what is really happening in the view of God.
All we do know, and that to a large extent by direct experience,
is that evil labors with vast power and perpetual success - in vain :
preparing always the soil for unexpected good to sprout in.

(JRR Tolkien to his son Christopher, April 1944)

What does it all mean? What does it mean to you and to me?   What difference might we try to make in so shattered a world? I sense that our times, apart from more or less deliberately created crises, are a permanent crisis. A sense of these times requires that we imagine a mad secular apocalypse. For if our future is nothing more than the extrapolation of present methods, politics, war budgets, and then the future is wipeout, annihilation. And that is being planned soberly on a daily basis. It is also being acceded to by multitudes of citizens. So we stand in face of something utterly new - a cosmic suicide drift - and our task to both face it and turn it around.

It is clear to me, maybe it can become clearer among us that we cannot long survive in American without something better than America for resource - a tradition, a discipline of prayer, whatever name you wish - something that will save our sanity, if not our lives - a contemplative spring that might be a source of our humanity? That is the first and the never-ending task.

The contemplative spring is also a source of our hope. Where does hope (my hope, your hope) come from? My beloved would answer simply: "Your hope is where your ass is!" Strangely true: hope dwells in the posterior, or in the hands and feet. When we speak about hope, we can offer nothing more or less, than our lives - our conscientious awareness and conviction and action on that conviction.

(HERE SHARE THE NUNS' STORY…THE HOPE THEY LIVE AND GENERATE…THEIR DREAM OF A DISARMED WORLD MADE FLESH AT GREAT COST, MADE REAL, IF ONLY FOR A MOMENT. BUT HOW THAT MOMENT LEADS US, LIKE A DREAM REALIZED THAT CAN BE REALIZED AGAIN AND AGAIN.)

The question I want to explore with you today is how we survive it. It is clear to me, and maybe it can become clearer among us, that we cannot long survive in America without something better than America for resource - a tradition, a discipline of prayer, whatever name you wish - something that will save our sanity, if not our lives - a contemplative spring that might be a source of our humanity? That is the first and never-ending task.

How do we speak truth to power? How do we keep on speaking it? What is the wisdom we inherit? We can't sustain resistance to this filthy rotten system without some or all of the following pieces of wisdom that come out of our stories. (I'll return to this anon.) I offer 10 points:

•  Love one another . Make of enemies friend; make of friends better friends. Howard Zinn in private, in public talks, and in his People's History talked about the gift that the Catholic left brought to the anti-war movement - the gift of friendship and how he treasured it. But as I watch younger people, I realize that I am only beginning to learn about the value they place on and the work they put in to friendships. They are the teachers in this and I hope they don't let anyone take this value from them. More, they seem to know there is a price on the friendship especially when the friendship is not according to the values of this world. What better than to taste friendship, sisterhood, brotherhood, community, marriage, the love of children; it fills our hearts, it makes us human, it keeps us going. More, as a friends remarked, “friendship are stronger than battleships!”

•  Remember : Can we forget whatever we name God and still remember each other, our place in the web of life? Yet we are a nation without memory. When has there been any remembrance of our theft of this land from native peoples, our enslavement of people of color, our internment of Japanese? When has there been any recollection of the war crimes committed by our government in Hiroshima, N. Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Chile, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia, Iraq, Afghanistan...Such remembrance would include repentance of the infamies and acts of reconciliation and restoration. No such will exists. Deprived of it we cannot conceive of or imagine ourselves as moral individuals. We lack responsibility; we lack dignity. Thus we engage in these frenetic spasms, each more despairing, more irresponsible and more violent than the last. In our darkest nightmares, who of could have imagined a year of war as Bush announced this year to be? – or, worse, the implication that we are in for continuous war? Can memory be healed? To remember in America is an act of resistance. To remember past wrong is to renounce it; to remember past goodness is to embody it anew. Remember and remind. One of Jesus' instructions: “When you do these things, remember me!” i.e. bring back into unity and oneness the scattered members of the body of creation.

•  Live simply that others may simply live: Dorothy Day put it this way in her work to build the Catholic Worker. She understood our obsession to make of earth a huge warehouse for consumer appetite, with, of course, ourselves in charge of doling out the goods of the earth to the "deserving?" She understood that Americans wallow at the trough while 3rd world peoples (including 3rd world peoples in America ) starve at the gates. She understood that there is a use-non-use rhythm that, in the long haul of history has proven sound. It is at once a rule of humanness, of sound economics, and sane ecology. That all may have enough some must surrender exorbitant claims. And more and more it becomes apparent that is not just the good order of relationships among people that are at stake, but it is the future of our earth itself.

•  Don't be afraid: This mandate is a contrary to all we've been told. Fear guarantees our survival. But for our fears - of an almost endless list of persons, places, and things we would long since have fallen prey to one or another enemy. But what lives we lead in consequence and what deaths we endure - plural in number and prior to the main event. Exorcising fear is a prelude to human activity in the world. But we never exorcise it completely. Every time I face arrest, well there just aren't enough bathrooms between here and there. You walk with fear, determined that it will not drown you. The clue is to disallow fear the word that wins.

•  Practice mercy, compassion - even to the point of sharing risk with the outcasts of this culture. Standing with outcasts we place ourselves in their circle. Advocates and defendants become one - surrounded. Those who would destroy mercy in the world are the real disrupters - they would stop both human and divine activity in its tracks and seal up the sources of vision; they would push human justice as an evil and tawdry substitute for the mercy of God.

•  Practice resurrection : This is the last line of Wendel Berry 's “ Manifesto of the Mad Farmer Liberation Front .” We are surrounded by death - by violence, malice, misadventure. The area now ceded to death is the round of the earth itself and its creatures. Earth is in danger of being plowed into a cosmic grave. Everything in our history points to the eventual or prompt discharge of nuclear weapons. And that history is nothing if not consistent. No weapon conceived ever rusted unused. No weapon, once created, failed to create an enemy. No enemy so created failed to duplicate and improve on the weapon. No weapons system failed to be used in actual war. And no war, so provoked ever produced peace. How do we practice resurrection? Hope turns our eyes in the direction of modest possibilities which - if we are willing to faithfully pursue and cling to - make death bearable and grant courage to the living. Thus we deny the politicians, the researches, and the generals their way in the world. They will not prevail. My faith - including my faith in you - allows me to say this. So for the sake of the children - our most endangered species, I will (with grace) keep the faith, nurture life, practice resurrection.

•  Flee the consensus; flee the crime; flee the abominations . There are refugees, hostages, prisoners of conscience everywhere in the world, their numbers beyond counting. Refugees fleeing war, famines, droughts, disruption of lives. These are the ones to attend to. And they are the ones to emulate: people who scream out against injustice become exiles themselves - a despised minority? I want to hold up Exile as an image that might enlighten us concerning the truth of our status - anywhere, at any time - aliens, wanderers. If we stand opposed to the world's main pursuit, death, in all its guises, that is our status. There is no hope in government; the hope is in exiles that recognize their geography together; the hope is in one another and whatever spirituality we can create to sustain a struggle that will last the rest of our lives and beyond - if we are given that kind of time. What indeed are we to do with our lives in such mad times? We know it as a truism: the future will be different if we make the present different, which is to say, if we live for the coming generation; which is to say if we are creating here and now a sane and peaceable present - in the very jaws of the beast.

•  "Go and speak the truth!" or "Go and vindicate life!" or "Go and resist death !"
We long to offer a coherent body of truth, not only to bespeak our predicament, but to heal it. We stutter before the burden we live under; all we can utter is something like: "Thou shalt not kill." But we could do a lot worse than conjure up a vision of our own, and, with friends and step by step, and without a whole lot of encouragement and guidance, go on repeating, in many words and deeds, that simple and central command: "Thou shall not kill!" This is the truth to which I've committed my life.

•  Beware of the demon of success: because we haven't a clue about what it means; because it isn't ours to own; because it is mostly - if not totally - illusion. During his travel to Britain , Gandhi was asked this question: "Mr. Gandhi. What do you think of Western Civilization?" And it isn't hard to imagine the tone in which it was asked. And he answered: "I think it would be a good idea!" Let us think for a moment of the "civilized" Society to which we belong. We have mastered many of the forces of nature; we are masters of world. Our lives are technologized beyond the wildest primitive dreams. Have we come of age? Have we been successful?

•  Treasure, tells, share our stories. Together, in action and reflection, you/we have lived and created by living, stories that are life-giving. There is nothing more powerful than remembering together that story. Today we remember and celebrate the story of the ELF resistance. This weekend, we not only tell it to each other in story and art and music, but we add to it, we write another chapter, we re-createit. And maybe there is nothing more important that we could be doing. I cam across this poem about our stories that I rejoice in sharing with you: It was written by Leslie Marmon Silko - a native American,:

I will tell you something about stories
They aren't just entertainment.
Don't be fooled.
They are all we have, you see,
All we have to fight off disaster, dis-ease, and devastation
We don't have anything
if we don't have stories.
THEIR EVIL is mighty
But it can't stand up to our stories,
So they try to destroy the stories or
Let the stories be confused or forgotten.
They would like that
They would be happy
Because then we would be defenseless...

Don't ever let them (The Powers that Be) take or make us minimize our stories.

         We get this all the time: "What have you accomplished?" "Was it worth it?" "Nonviolence doesn't work!" I like to point out that there has never been a war that achieved its objective; there has never been a war that was "successful!" Maybe it is time to turn the question on the questioners: "Do they have any answers beyond economic security? Certain elements of the idol success are lacking. There is a malaise in the air; things are going ill for too many afflicted with war, poverty, disease, early death, lifelong misery. And there exists, even among the fortunate, a kind of free-floating anxiety, an outlook that has its own peculiar "in-look," a lack of breadth, generosity, a sense of life damaged. Modesty, humanity, a sense of meaning. These are the things I hold up - and a life worth living and a vision worth giving that life for - in addition to all of the above.