Past, Present and Future
Friday night, March 19. Exactly seven years ago this hour the US government launched its 2003 war against Iraq. What the US had started in 1991 it now meant to finish a dozen years later.
Even now, the war continues. As I mark the passing of another anniversary my mind is crowded with countless memories of anguish and action from 1991 onward, including the campaigns some of us have been part of such as the Declaration of Peace and Christian Peace Witness.
But most of all I am thinking tonight of a harrowing news story published in a Scotish newspaper a few days ago. The Sunday Herald in Glasgow reported that “hundreds of powerful US ‘bunker-buster’ bombs (195 smart, guided, Blu-110 bombs and 192 massive 2000lb Blu-117 bombs) are being shipped from California to the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean in preparation for a possible attack on Iran.”
Can we turn the ship steaming to Diego Garcia around? Can we turn the ship of state around?
The story quotes Dan Plesch, director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at the University of London, co-author of a recent study on US preparations for an attack on Iran, who said, “They are gearing up totally for the destruction of Iran…US bombers are ready today to destroy 10,000 targets in Iran in a few hours.”
And where are they being shipped from? Concord, California.
Concord. Again.
In 1986 I was on the staff of the Pledge of Resistance in the San Francisco Bay Area when we decided to mount a campaign beginning the following June to resist and eventually stop shipments of armaments from Concord Naval Weapons Station to Central America. Shipments of 500-pound bombs, millions of rounds of ammunition, white phosphorous, and fuse-extenders (capable of turning conventional bombs into anti-personnel weapons) had recently been documented through a Freedom of information request.
Over a ten-day period in June about 2000 people trekked out to Concord (about 25 miles east of San Francisco) to join the protest, while 387 of us engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience and went to jail.
Then, on September 1, Nuremberg Actions began a 40-day fast and vigil at the tracks where munitions boxcars brought weapons from the weapons bunkers that honeycombed the hills of the 12000 acre facility to the docks on Suisun Bay, where they were loaded onto ships that made their way to San Francisco Bay and out under the Golden Gate Bridge to their destination.
Brian Willson was a US military veteran whose experience in Vietnam and, later, as a civilian walking the war zones of Nicaragua, convinced him that warmaking must be resisted. He joined a number of other vets sitting on the tracks. They had notified the Navy ahead of time that they would be doing this. They fully expected that they would be arrested and removed from the tracks.
Instead, the Navy decided to run the train.
I was standing a few feet away from Brian when the train plowed into him. Twenty-two years later the image is fresh, vivid, appalling: he is turning over and over again like a rag doll, being dragged by the train as it continues until it is behind a security fence some distance down the track. (Click here to see photo published in the San Francisco Chronicle.)
Brian survived – but just barely. The injuries he sustained were massive and nearly mortal. His then-wife Holly Rauen was on the scene. A trained nurse, she applied a tourniquet and kept him from bleeding to death. During 16 hours of surgery his two legs were amputated and the gash to his skull was closed. (You can read two accounts I wrote about this event shortly after it took place by clicking here.)
Miraculously, one month after this incident, he was back at the tracks to speak at a rally. And he’s still going strong today.
But what’s also going strong is a relentless commitment by the US government to approach complicated international conflicts by threatening or actually engaging in war. It is time, as Joanna Macy puts it, for The Great Turning. A turning away from violence of all kinds, including the monumental violence of modern warcraft.
My commitment to nonviolence was infinitely deepened on September 1, 1987. As never before, let us take one another’s hands and build a culture where a durable and more effective alternative to war is taught, designed, and lived – using the most powerful language and symbol we have: our own vulnerable, creaky, resilient bodies. This will mean Gandhi’s obstructive program (resistance campaigns at places like Concord – again) and his constructive program (building institutions and inculturating practices that will nurture the nonviolent option).
On the precipice of the first war against Iraq in January 1991, the great theologian Robert McAfee Brown addressed thousands who had gathered at St. Mary’s Cathedral in San Francisco to pray for peace. He invoked Kurt Vonnegut’s image in Slaughterhouse Five of the mechanisms of war being thrown in reverse: the bombs flying back up into the planes, the planes flying backwards to their home base, the bombs being dismantled and even the metal being put back in the earth in its original state.
Alas, magical thinking will not undo all the destruction of the past two decades. But this impulse of Vonnegut and Brown is a good one to guide us at this time of new peril. Can we turn the ships around steaming to Diego Garcia? Can we turn the ship of state around before it wreaks more damage and risks, by doing so, a calamitous shipwreck?
It is possible – but only if we mobilize our deepest passion, imagination, and what Gandhi called Soulforce.
As some of us were wont to say after September 1, 1987, it is up to each of us to find our own “ tracks” and take a stand there.
Background:
San Francisco Chronicle story 10 years after Concord incident
San Francisco Chronicle story 20 years after Concord incident
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