Photo: Anna Graves

Laura Slattery, former Pace e Bene program coordinator, was a keynote speaker at the Campus Anti-War Network national conference held February 27-28 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  Below is the text of her address.

You Are Being Called to Make a Difference

I am honored to have some time to speak with you this evening. I attended the 2005 CAN Conference at UC Berkeley, so it feels good to come full circle.  I’ve learned a great deal today in listening to your presentations.  Thank you.  And I am especially grateful to Paul, Dwayne, and Jake for sharing their military experiences.  

I am here today as both a nonviolent activist and a member of the organization called Knights Out, a group of West Point graduates who are advocating the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. 

As you heard in my introduction, I came to my peace work, like Paul, Dwayne, and Jake, by route of the military.  Wanting to be of service, but mostly wanting a college education and to play basketball, a sport for which they recruited me, I went to the United States Military Academy at West Point.  I graduated and served 3 ¼ years in the Army and then, after volunteering for the First Gulf War, but not being sent, I got out of the Army, preferring to work on something that more engaged my heart.

And I suppose that would have been the end of all things military, had I not gone immediately, upon getting out of the Service, to live in Ciudad Juarez as a volunteer.  There I met some amazing folks, people like yourselves that I would have met had I gone to any other college besides the Academy, who showed me that perhaps I hadn’t learned everything I needed to learn about US military involvement in the affairs of other countries.  I went down to El Salvador and saw for myself the devastation that 12 years of civil war can cause.   Having studied war and violence for 7 years, up close and personal, I came back to the States and decided it was time to learn more about this thing called nonviolence.  And I spent the next 10 years learning about and experimenting with nonviolent methods and social change.  

It matters what you think.  It matters what you say.  It matters what you do.  I am going to answer, Here I am, send me.  How about you? These past three years, I’ve done less (well, almost none) of the anti-war work that consumed large portions of my daily life, somewhat disappointed and dispirited by the movement.  The past couple of years I’ve done more of what Gandhi would call the “Constructive Program” and what Christians would call the Corporal works of mercy (visiting the sick, housing the homeless, feeding the hungry).   Perhaps this absence from the movement situates me well to speak at this moment to this campus movement (and the anti-war movement in general) that has experienced its own ups and downs, periods of full engagement and of lulls, in its work to stop the wars.

We are living in a time of withering and confusion.  We are involved in two overt wars; we are the number one arms seller in the world; we are training militaries and police in over 150 countries in the world. These stats are withering to the anti-war activist’s spirit, and confusing (and overwhelming) to the one who wonders how to begin to right the balance.  

And yet, I have to believe that it is also a time of transformation and grace.  People are standing up and saying no to the powers of domination.  This Campus Anti-war Network has kicked military recruiters off of Seattle Central Community College, City College of New York, San Francisco State University, Southern Connecticut State University, University of California at Santa Cruz, University of Illinois in Chicago, and others. In December, over 1,400 people came from all the corners of the world to gather in Egypt to show solidarity with, and to draw attention to the plight of the people of Gaza.  When Venezuela’s President, Hugo Chavez, was ousted in a US supported coup, the people came to his defense demanding their democracy and his captors were forced to return him.

And in all of this transformation, and confusion, what is our role now?  That is the question I hear coming from CAN – what now?

While the people of the world in pain are shouting “enough of poverty, genocide, death” they also quietly whisper, “Who will come to my aid?”

And while many people in our country are screaming “enough of unemployment, of spending half our money on the military, of profit before people”, they also ask, “Who will help us?”

And while students are imploring, “we want education, not indoctrination; free thinking, not preparation for life in a corporation; education, not recruitment and school loans” they, too, are wondering “Who will come to my aid?” 
Who, indeed?  If not you, who? If not me, who? 

When I was younger, I was a pretty religious kid.  I had a postcard on my bulletin board that had a picture of a woman on a bike and the caption, “Here I am, Lord, send me.”  Answering this call has made up the majority of my life.  And while I am less inspired by the call of “the Lord” at this point in my life, I am still very moved by the notion that I am called, and we are called.  And that the only answer is really, “Here I am.  Send me.  Here we are.  Send us.”

The trick is, figuring out who is doing the calling, and then trusting that in answering the call we make a difference.   

And the truth is, what we do does make a difference.  If I hadn’t lived my life the way I have up to this point, it would matter: there would be less hope in the world, and less integrity – if I am to believe what people who have been touched by some of my actions have told me.  If you hadn’t made some of the choices you’ve made, it would matter.  Can you think of something that you’ve done that’s made a difference?   What did you do?  Often times, the examples are just, or begin with just, being in integrity.

That is the way Lt. Dan Choi’s story starts.  And that is the way that my involvement with the School of the Americas Watch began as well. 

First, I’d like to talk a little about Dan’s story.

He and three other West Pointers got together and decided to form Knights Out to repeal the DADT policy.  The official policy of the organization was not to encourage soldiers to disobey military policy by coming out.  But Dan had had enough and wanted to live his life in integrity.   Rachel Maddow got wind of this new group and asked Dan to be on her show.  Dan decided to come out on her show.  This got Knights Out some significant exposure.  However, when we tried to mobilize folks to call in and ask Obama not to fire Dan Choi a month later, the big gay rights organizations didn’t mobilize their members.  I activated some of the nonviolent networks and folks called in from the new Knights Out organization, but the action made hardly what you’d call a big splash. 

But Dan just kept speaking, and by doing so, he changed the terms of the debate.  It was not about human rights nor about unequal enforcement anymore, though both of these are still true; it was now about integrity.  Then the Courage Campaign picked him up, and launched a letter writing campaign that allowed him to take nearly 500,000 letters of support to his Army separation board hearing.  The Human Right Campaign, the largest GLBTQ national organization, put repealing DADT on their agenda.  Then more letters were generated that Dan could take to the Congress.  The rest is becoming history.   Dan is staying in his integrity and a year later is still pushing on to see this policy repealed.  History is calling him and he is answering – Here I am, send me. 

When I think of my involvement with the movement to close the SOA, a US Army school at Fr. Benning, Georgia, that trains Latin American soldiers in low intensity conflict in Spanish, it also feels like a call.  It didn’t start that way.  I was invited to participate as a nonviolence trainer in 2000.  As I got more involved, in 2001, I felt called to leave one of my BDUs (Battle Dress Uniform) on the fence that the Army had erected to keep out the protesters that becomes a memorial of crosses, flowers, and pictures of the thousands who have been killed at the hands of the graduates.  It was my way of giving back to the military that part of me that once believed that military solutions did more than just kill brothers and sisters of mine.   The next year, I wrote an article in a pamphlet and participated in a video of veterans opposing the School. 

In September of that year, I went down to Colombia and trained over 100 nonviolent activists, many of whom risked their lives and who passed on buses through heavily militarized territory just to be at the training.  When I came back to the States and realized that the SOA was training Colombian soldiers, and that these soldiers armed with their M16s and grenades and bayonets, would be the ones that the people that I had trained, armed only with their love, spirit, and skills, would be facing – I knew I had to take a bigger risk.  For those nonviolent activists.  For the people of Colombia.  So I trespassed onto the base (with 88 other protesters) the next month and was sentenced to three months in prison. 

Answering the call is not always easy.  Sometimes it takes sacrifice.  And there are obstacles as well.     

One of those challenges is which particularly big is that we don’t think that we make a difference.

When I think about my involvement with the SOAW, I am tempted to say, see ‘The school is still open;  What did all my work accomplish?’  Easy, foolish, temptation.  Perhaps you in the anti-war mov’t say the same thing – all of my work, and what?  The war is still on.  Easy, foolish temptation. But I fool myself if I don’t think that I affected the people that I came into contact with in that struggle: the Colonel from West Point on the bus to whom I gave the pamphlet with the article I had written; the Commandant of the school, another West Point grad, that I debated at the University of Southern California; the guards and the inmates at Dublin, CA’s Federal Correctional Institute for Women where I did my three months; or my family and friends, many of whom walked 30 miles with me to prison. 

And I affected myself – I have always liked the quote “I do the work not to change the world, but so the world won’t change me.”  At times, this is the most I can hope for.  But, in this case, my hope remains that the SOA will close as the movement continues, working now directly with Latin Americans and their governments to try to persuade them not to send soldiers to the school. Five countries have agreed.

We in social change work must remember that there is a concerted effort to keep us in the dark about the positive effect that we are having.  Often we don’t find out til many years later that the work that we did had an effect.

For one example: in the 1950s, the interfaith pacifist organization Fellowship of Reconciliation launched an ambitious campaign to challenge the American people and government to look beyond politics and to feed the hungry. They organized a “Feed Thine Enemy” program, in which tiny bags of rice were sent to President Dwight Eisenhower at the White House with a message concerning famine in Communist China: “If thine enemy hunger, feed him.”  It flopped. No one in the White House acknowledged the existence of the campaign, and it didn’t change the public silence on Chinese suffering. Hostility grew between the nations, and there was no alteration of any Chinese policy. Except one.  A crisis arose over the possession of the islands of Quemoy and Matsu, islands disputed by China and its U.S.-backed Taiwanese enemies. Twice the generals advising Eisenhower recommended preemptive nuclear strikes against China, and each time Eisenhower turned to his aides and asked how many little bags of rice had come in. Thousands, he was told. In deference to the opinion of so many Americans, Eisenhower cited the little bags of rice as the reason he ruled out nuclear weapons in this case.   This didn’t come out til 30 years after the fact!

These actions did make a difference, and one reason they did is because they were not done in isolation.  Dan Choi’s witness, without the support of Knights Out, the Courage Campaign, HRC, and some senators, would be powerful, but would not make the difference that it is. 

My action of walking around the lake by my house holding my girlfriend’s hand is paradigm shifting and made so by so many other GLBTQ people living life the way they would like it to be lived.  Answering the call of Future generations who want equality for all people. 

10 anti-capitalists in a sea of 10,000 capitalists make a difference.  To the anti-capitalists who are holding a vision of another way, and to the others who perhaps have not yet seen that, how things are now is not how they always were, now how they will always be. 

A final obstacle or challenge might be that we’ve answered the call and feel like we’ve gotten burned.  Obama called, and we organized.  Hope called, and we knocked door to door.  And now, what? 

Obama has much to teach us - about organizing, finishing a fight, staying positive, listening to others we don’t agree with, and engaging fully with others.  Your conference slogan that “Hope only goes so far” is true in the sense that without action hope is nothing.  But sometimes we fail to hope, or, really, to imagine big enough.  And I think that is what has happened when I look at Obama’s decision to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan.  There are only several very limited opinions that are getting offered – war with 70,000 troops or war with 40,000 troops; capitalism A or capitalism B – and he is choosing between them.  Someone once said that violence is a failure of the imagination.  And so it is here.             

I want to ask, Really? … There is no better way to protect the women of Afghanistan than to bomb their villages; no better way to defeat Fundamentalism than to kill the young who have been seduced by it?  Really? There is no nonviolence option getting heard, no non-imperialist option getting imagined, or dreamed about.   
We need to get clear on our vision and make sure that our alternative gets offered and heard.  CAN is clear on what you are against - imperialism, capitalism, war - and that is good.  I would imagine you are also clear on what you are for.  Is it that - you really want a different way of relating with our brothers and sisters all over the world?  You want educational exchanges, cultural exchanges, mutual learning, a thriving environment for all people. 

Correct me if I am wrong … No advantages for you just because you are from the US, or white, or male.  You want that all people can read and write and have access to clean water.  You want everyone to have full human rights (both collective and individual).  You want people before profits.  You want to love our country and feel good about what it is doing in the world. 

And for how you get that world … what your role might be in stopping this war … that is the question you are here to answer.  It can’t be business as usual in the anti-war movement.  We need something new, something creative.  Marches, I see from your website, are part of your strategy and they should be, but they can’t be most of the strategy.  Counter-recruitment – great!  Palestinian solidarity – super!  Other ideas?  How can we CAN the Man in Afghanistan? 

Maybe it’s something like it is something Kandahar Kamps on Kampus, or adopting sister cities, or sister schools.  Perhaps it is sending one peace activist or anti-imperialist to Afghanistan for the summer – one for every soldier we have in Afghanistan (sort of like a Summer of ’64 convergence).   What are we being called to consider here?

And while we consider, know that the Afghanis are calling.  Iraqis and Palestinians are calling.  Future generations and History are calling.  Integrity is calling.  It matters what you think.  It matters what you say.  It matters what you do.  I am going to answer, Here I am, send me. 

How about you?