What Kind of Peace Do You Want?



"What kind of peace do I mean?" said the President of the United States, speaking at the commencement of American University. "Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war..."

"I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children," he continued. "Not merely peace for Americans, but peace for all men and women; not merely peace in our time, but peace for all time."

There was plenty of attention paid to the 40th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis last year. It will be interesting to see if any attention at all is paid to the 40th anniversary of the first arms control agreement between the superpowers, the nuclear test ban treaty of 1963.

In particular, we need to revisit the most dramatic moment of the test ban debate: the address delivered by President John F. Kennedy at American University on June 10, 1963, that began with the words quoted above. It remains one of the great speeches of the twentieth century, though one of the lesser known. Though the Cold War is over and more arms agreements have been made, the dangers of war, of nuclear war and even total nuclear holocaust remain. Especially considering the aggressive policies and rhetoric of the Bush administration, Kennedy's words are worth listening to again.

It was the sobering prospect of imminent nuclear war in October 1962 that created the conditions leading to that treaty. Apart from the immediate survival of humanity, this historic acknowledgement of the world’s mutual interest in peace was the major positive result of that crisis. Considering recent events—--such as the India-Pakistan confrontation that nearly led to the first atomic bomb exchange in human history, North Korea proclaiming its readiness to produce and even sell nuclear weapons, the use of near-nuclear weapons in Iraq and the Bush administration's plan to expand the American nuclear arsenal—--the test ban treaty and especially what it clearly meant to the leaders who negotiated and signed it are extraordinarily relevant.

The Cuban Missile crisis had forced all nations to consider what nuclear war would really mean. America was clearly the foremost nuclear power in the world, yet a nuclear exchange would have meant complete destruction anyway. Kennedy spoke about this to aides during the crisis. At one point Khrushchev sent a letter to Kennedy which sadly and graphically portrayed the consequences of nuclear war on both countries and the world.

Once the crisis was resolved, Kennedy saw a rare opportunity to change the paradigm of the arms race. He had been calling for talks on nuclear arms control since his first state of the union address in 1961. Now he revived his proposal for a nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviet Union, and staked his presidency on it.

At first the Soviets were receptive, but reflexive mistrust between the two nations and opposition within both their governments imperiled the negotiations through the winter and spring of 1963. It was then that Kennedy dramatically refocused the terms of the debate. He announced two initiatives at American University designed to advance the test ban negotiations, including a unilateral American commitment to end tests in the atmosphere until the Soviets resumed theirs. But it was the speech itself that provided the greatest impetus.

With blunt and sweeping assertions couched in characteristic Kennedy rhetoric (speechwriter Ted Sorenson mined previous statements for their best lines, and included phrases cut from the 1961 Inaugural Address), he went far beyond arguing for the specific test ban treaty to the heart of the matter: peace in the nuclear age.

"Total war makes no sense," Kennedy said, repeating the phrase several times, emphasizing devastation so extensive it would be visited on "generations yet unborn." "I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational men."

"I realize that the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war," he admitted. "But we have no more urgent task."

Some opponents regarded negotiating arms agreements as a sign of weakness-to them, the test ban efforts were "defeatist." Kennedy deftly reversed the charge. He said believing peace is impossible is defeatist, because it means "that mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view. " Then he used the phrase that more than any other sums up the Kennedy faith: "Our problems are man-made; therefore they can be solved by man."

Though he acknowledged the value of dreams and hopes, he advocated an attainable peace "based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions...Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts...For peace is a process, a way of solving problems."

Kennedy called for cooperation based on a certain historical objectivity that has since been borne out more dramatically than he could have dreamed. "However fixed our likes and dislikes may seem," he said, "the tide of time and events will often bring surprising changes in the relations between nations and neighbors."

For many Americans at the time, Soviet Communists were incomprehensible and threatening. But Kennedy suggested that, just as the Soviets misunderstood America, Americans had a distorted view of them. He then made an assertion that might well have shaken and angered some of his listeners, as it would today: "No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue."

Kennedy acknowledged the evils of Communism, but also complimented the Soviets on their achievements in science and culture. In speaking of the abhorrence of war that the two nations had in common he eulogized Soviet suffering in World War II. No act of honoring could have meant more to the Russian people.

The speech subtly links this theme of suffering with an assertion of mutual interest in ending the arms race itself. Kennedy pointed out that both nations are "devoting massive sums of money to weapons that could be better devoted to combating ignorance, poverty and disease."

All of these were truths that many found uncomfortable, and were rarely acknowledged by people in power. Kennedy added another one--the "ironical but accurate fact that the two strongest powers are the two in the most danger of devastation. All we have built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first twenty-four hours."

Peace, he concludes, is a primary interest for both nations---indeed for all nations. In the most quoted phrases of the speech (most recently, put into the mouth of a fictional Russian president, without attribution, in Tom Clancy's film, "The Sum of All Fears") Kennedy said: "For in the final analysis our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal."

But in June 1963, the immediate impact of the speech in America was blunted by an ongoing domestic crisis---police violence against non-violent demonstrators and whites rioting and firebombing in black neighborhoods of Birmingham, Alabama had pushed the civil rights struggle to a new level. Then Alabama Governor George Wallace announced he would personally bar the admission of the first two black students to be enrolled at the University of Alabama under federal court order.

The drama, which turned out to be little more than a ceremony of defiance for cameras, played the day after JFK's American University speech. Kennedy spontaneously decided to speak to the nation that night. With little in the way of prepared text, he delivered a speech on civil rights as perfectly timed and morally clear as he had the day before on world peace. Equality is a moral issue "as old as the scriptures and...as clear as the American Constitution....In short, every American ought to have the right to be treated as he would wish to be treated..." The day before he had urged empathy for the Soviet people; now he asked white Americans to imagine themselves in the place of black Americans. "Who among us then would be content with the counsels of patience and delay?"

But while civil rights absorbed media attention in America, the American University speech became instantly famous elsewhere in the world. In England, the Manchester Guardian called it "one of the great state papers of American history." Most importantly, the full text was printed in the Russian press, and its Russian language broadcast by the Voice of America was the first western program in fifteen years the Soviets did not attempt to jam. Khrushchev told Averell Harriman, in Moscow to negotiate the test ban, that it was the best speech by an American president since Roosevelt. Negotiations moved swiftly forward. Some six weeks after the American University address, the nuclear test ban treaty was signed.

It was, Kennedy told the nation on July 26, "an important first step---a step toward peace, a step toward reason, a step away from war." But the treaty required Senate confirmation, and conservatives as well as prominent military figures were decrying it as a threat to national security. Kennedy invited public debate, "for the treaty is for all of us. It is particularly for our children and our grandchildren, who have no lobby here in Washington."

In his June 11 address to the nation, Kennedy had announced the civil rights legislation that would become landmark law under Lyndon Johnson. Kennedy knew (as LBJ did later) that such forthright and principled support for civil rights would doom the Democratic party in the previously solid South, perhaps for a long time. Though he was equally prepared for defeat because of his stand on the test ban treaty, Kennedy believed that opposition was not as strong among voters as rising conservatives claimed. By September, it was clear that he was right. Overwhelming public sentiment in favor of the treaty led to Senate confirmation.

As Kennedy traveled across America in late fall, he spoke often about the issue of peace, to increasingly enthusiastic response. This was the last image, and the lasting image, held by many Americans and certainly many people around the world, when Kennedy was assassinated that November.

Forty years later, the world is dangerous in different ways. Soon after the American University speech, Kennedy spoke at a press conference in Germany about nuclear proliferation. "When Pandora opened her box and all the troubles flew out, all that was left in was Hope," he commented. "In this case, if we have nuclear diffusion throughout the world, we may even lose hope."

Today we have that nuclear diffusion, with every indication that it will become worse. Yet while pressuring others to forgo nuclear weapons or to prevent proliferation, the United States is itself attempting to test and field a new generation of nuclear weapons. Even the the latest treaty, signed this month to absolutely no fanfare by President Bush and President Putin in Moscow in early June, is actually a step backward from previous agreements, such as Start II and the ABM treaty which the Bush administration unilaterally abrogated. Kennedy knew that to win the confidence of other nations, the United States had to lead, to tangibly demonstrate its willingness to sacrifice the nuclear arms it insisted that others forgo.

Nuclear weapons are still a major danger to humanity. Even with the reductions the new treaty calls for, enough nuclear firepower is aimed and ready in the U.S. and Russia that both nations can still destroy each other in a single hour. A new RAND study asserts that due to disorganization in Russia as well as other factors, the danger of a devastating nuclear exchange between the U.S. and Russia caused by accident or miscalculation has not lessened but increased.

As Jonathan Schell illustrates in his instantly indispensable new book, "The Unconquerable World," the Bush administration strategy of preemptive warfare to maintain American supremacy and enforce its will is the most radical international policy in western history since imperial Rome. It seeks to create precisely the Pax Americana that Kennedy renounced. He renounced it partly because other nations would feel severely threatened by such a prospect. With nuclear, chemical and biological weapons-and perhaps soon, genetic weapons-- of inconceivable destructiveness becoming more readily available, such a policy invites catastrophe and guarantees a violent future.

Kennedy also understood the limitations of power. As the current chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan already demonstrates, even the current supremacy of American military power cannot effectively rule the world.

Yet in the midst of the Cold War, with the United States at greater risk of greater destruction, Kennedy took this step towards peace, and many in America followed. The popularity of the test ban treaty is most forgotten, but it may have proven to be the issue that contributed most to Kennedy's reelection.

As America emerges from this peculiar post-Gulf War II mood of vengeful triumph, we might remember that upwards of 10 million people marched for peace around the world in the weeks before the war, and in no European nation that the Gallup Poll surveyed did prior support for the American invasion rise above 11%.

Kennedy called for empathetic understanding of current enemies, not for sentiment's sake but to aid in objective judgment. He invoked history for the same reason. The contrast of Kennedy's realism with the fundamentalist absolutism of President Bush's rhetoric is obvious. The basic difference is that Kennedy saw the long-term national interest in finding common interests and common ground. The Bush doctrine is to force other nations to bend to interests his administration dubiously defines as American.

Kennedy was criticized for the hubris of believing that humans could solve the problems they create. But even in a different world, that faith, like the intelligent pursuit of peace, is without meaningful alternative.

Inside Sports: Lakers (Final Edition)

This is a blog, right? I can do what I want.

Last week the San Antonio Spurs took away the Lakers chance at a fourth straight NBA championship. There was a certain symmetry to it. The Lakers had regularly humiliated the Spurs during the playoffs for the last several years, often because the Spurs collapsed in the fourth quarter. This year in the sixth game the Spurs were very determined to win the fourth quarter, and it was the Lakers who collapsed. The series was essentially won in the fifth game. Last year it was clear to me that whichever team won the fourth game in the Lakers-Sacramento Kings series would win that series, and would then win the NBA championship. I felt the same way about the fifth game of this year's Lakers-Spurs series. Last year the Lakers won the fourth game on a last second three point shot by Robert Horry. This year the Lakers lost the fifth game on a last second three point shot by Robert Horry that went in, and came out. Their admirable comeback from 25 points behind in the third quarter fell just that short.

In the end it may have been sheer exhaustion that did them in. But now that Dallas has won the first game in the western conference finals, the Lakers should be really kicking themselves. If Kobe Bryant had hit that late fourth quarter free throw in the first game, they would have won that one. If Robert Horry's shot had gone down, they would have won that game. Despite losing one of their starters (Rick Fox), having his replacement miss a game and a half and be hobbled for much of the rest of the series, watch their coach go off for a heart operation, plus play at an intensity they are no longer used to, every other day, with nagging injuries to Shaq, Kobe, Horry and probably Derek Fisher, they still almost beat the much deeper and younger Spurs. They handled Dallas pretty readily in the regular season, and might have had a far less stressful conference finals once they got past San Antonio.

But it was not to be, and now the Lakers team that won three championships will slowly or quickly break up. (Samaki Walker is certainly gone, and Robert Horry probably is.) There are precedents for teams that miss a year in a string of championships, but it's likely that next year is the Lakers last chance for awhile. If they pick up some superior young talent (if you consider Juwan Howard young) and perhaps one of those still able but aging free agents out there, like Karl Malone or Scottie Pippen (Pippen knows the system but may want too much bucks; anyway, my personal favorite is still getting Michael Jordan to play one more year for his favorite coach, who is probably will be coaching his last year), they can still make a run because they can still compete with San Antonio, Sacramento and Dallas. This was the iffy year anyway, since they couldn't afford to seriously improve the team because of salary caps. They have more room next year. We won't know until the finals if any of the eastern team can yet compete with almost any team from the west. But it would be a surprise.

As for me, my season is also over. Fortunately I've got three years of playoff victories on tape, to watch with pleasure and with no tension from the comfort of an exercise machine.

With thanks to all who responded to my Skills of Peace article in the SF Chronicle, here and in the following (or, datewise, preceeding) entry, are two "sidebar" pieces that didn't get into the published text.

DIALOGUES OF PEACE


If dialogue is to really lead to peace, it must be inclusive in all relevant realms. It must represent the complexity of issues and interests through a diversity of voices and experiences.

That might be the message of the "Dialogues of Peace," organized by Angara Chatterji, professor in the Social and Cultural Anthropology program at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.

The fourth dialogue so far was held in April at the CIIS campus on Mission Street and included Norman Solomon of the Institute for Public Accuracy, Abdul JanMohamed of UC Berkeley, Kurdish Human Rights activist Soraya Serajeddini and representatives of the Middle East Children's Alliance, among others.

The series began in 2001 in response to September 11. "I watched students struggle with it," she recalls, "and I watched other students be targeted."

"We made it very clear that we did not want to have a flashy event that says, 'here are two sides, pro-war and anti-war.' I don't think that there are necessarily only two sides to any issue. It's not enough to say you are for peace. We want to discuss what are the issues of justice that need to be linked to peace."

The emphasis was on exchanging information that reflects the complexity of issues at the center of conflicts in the Middle East, South Asia, Africa and the United States. Each dialogue began with songs or prayers, and featured diverse panels of scholars, activists and journalists with intimate knowledge of those regions.

For example, they know the history. "In the present, concerns are taken literally as right or wrong, but they are not seen through the histories that produced them," Angana said. "I keep telling people that if you understand history, you would act from a place where you cannot talk about justice through any form of annihilation. You can't make justice by means of injustice."

Accommodating complexity often means listening to different points of view that emanate from different experiences. "Concerns of justice should dictate how we honor difference. When we are faced with difference we don't silence it or expect it to conform to our expectations of it. We honor what it is, and we force ourselves to change because of it."

"Through the Dialogues for Peace, the commitment is to address injustice and ally with those marginalized, and to support non violent struggles," she wrote in an official announcement. "We seek to build communities of peace, hope and solidarity. We seek to address and give voice to issues that are under represented at CIIS and in the Bay Area. "

Angana Chatterji also works with communities in India, where she was born, to foster social and ecological justice. She is the Director of Research with the Asia Forest Network, and her passionate writings appear in a variety of journals and newspapers.

Contact: Angana Chatterji
California Institute of Integral Studies
website: http://www.ciis.edu

SKILLS OF PEACE CONTINUED

Not everything I prepared for my “Skills of Peace” article made it into the San Francisco Chronicle of May 4, 2003. I asked almost everyone I interviewed for their definition of “peace.” What follows is a selection of those quotations…


WHAT IS PEACE?


"For me world peace and inner peace are closely connected. It's creating a sense of well-being in the world that comes from a realization that we're all connected to one another. It isn't just not making war, or not firing weapons. It has to do with really acknowledging the interconnectness of all things and of all beings, and living with a realization of the importance of that connection, so that if a child dies in Iraq, part of me dies there. We're all part of one another. The absence of peace comes, and war comes, when we make believe that we're not connected and the other person is expendable."
Paul Roy


"Peace has to start with us as individuals. For me peace is holding myself accountable to communicate from a non-defensive base at all times, so that I am living and modeling and working towards resolution, rather than attempting to control or punish other people."
Sharon Ellison

For me peace is when people trust that we're all conscious that our well-being is interdependent. We can never benefit at one another's expense. To the degree that we have that consciousness, we'll be at peace. We'll trust that other people see that our well being--- as people and with nature-- is one and the same."
Marshall Rosenberg

"Peace is being able to deal with conflict. As long as we see conflict as negative and peace as good, it's not a useful paradigm. Even in peace there's conflict, and in conflict there is peace. There will always be conflict, so the question is how can we work with conflict to tap into its innate energy for change, growth, insight and new understanding."
John Ford

"Peace is a way of being, a preferred mode. You have to live it everyday. It's not something I've ever pulled off completely, but it's part of that ideal self. But you have to work at it."
Betsy Watson


"If you accept that human nature is truly mixed and has pieces of good and bad, real peace is being able to accept equally what's good and bad in oneself in relationship to what's good and bad in another. It wouldn't be eradicating evil but accepting it and one's part in it and the other person's part in it, and coming to some solution. Coming to such a peaceful resolution in personal relationships requires an enormous amount of psychological work, so one can multiply exponentially the work required to find peaceful resolutions at the level of the group psyche which governs the relationships between rival nations."
Dr Tom Singer

On Being A Lakers Fan


I grew up near Pittsburgh, PA, and my first sport as fan and player was baseball. The voice of Bob Prince, recognized as one of the classic baseball announcers of all time, was a background to my summers even before I was sure what the difference between "balls" and "strikes" was. I became aware of the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1958, when the team finished second to the Milwaukee Braves. Left fielder Bob Skinner batted .321 that year. Roberto Clemente batted .321 in 1959, a disappointing year in the standings. Then there was 1960.

I had started collecting baseball cards, and I also had a favorite American League team, the New York Yankees. Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, Yogi Berra, Moose Skowron, I had them all, and would lay out the cards in the diamond shape according to their positions for games of swatting a spitball sized wad of paper with the cardboard cards.

How well did I know the 1960 Pirates? For years I could go through the lineup and demonstrate the batting stance of each player. I can still list them by position. I saw games at Forbes Field, one of the old classic ballparks, the kind the new parks are trying to emulate. I shook hands with Roberto Clemente, Bill Virdon and a number of other players down on the field before a game. There is one game, or part of one game, I remember vividly. I was half asleep at a night game, the spray of beer from popping cans visible in the lights, in the tenth inning. Roy Face got us out of a jam and in the bottom half, somebody was on second base when Clemente came to bat.

Here's where the fan part comes in: if you were a Pirates fan, you knew the Clemente drill. He never hit the first pitch. He would often swing at it, swing so hard that his batting helmet would fly off, and so would his cap underneath it, and he'd probably fall down. But of course he often got spectacular hits later in the count. So everybody in the stands was just settling down, not paying a lot of attention to the first pitch. I know I wasn't, but I heard a clap of thunder, the roar, and looked up: and the game was over. Clemente had swung at the first pitch, and connected. He smoked a line drive that hit the chalk line on the right field fence. It really was chalk, and he'd hit it so hard that a cloud of chalk dust was still rising in the lights, like smoke from a cannon. The run came in from second, the Pirates had won.

My two favorite teams played each other in the 1960 World Series. But there was no question which one I was rooting for, was living and dying for. There was a kind of lottery for World Series tickets---you sent in your money, and you might get seats by the luck of the draw. I had good luck and bad luck. The good luck was getting tickets. The bad luck was getting them for the sixth game. The Pirates could have won the series that day, but they lost the game, 14-0 or maybe it was 16-0. It was awful. We sat in the left field bleachers and by the late innings, left fielder Gino Cimoli was talking to us. But I did get to see some of the Yankee greats, like Mantle and Maris, Tony Kubec, Bobby Richardson, Berra and so on. The next day the Pirates won the series on Bill Mazeroski's incredible ninth inning home run.

I was in my first year of high school. Some teachers let us listen to the game, most didn't. But the news of each inning, each batter, was passed from row to row, as the kids near the windows heard from radios in other rooms above and below. School was over just as the game was tied. Most of my classmates heard the final inning in the school bus, if at all. Drivers in Pittsburgh were refusing to go into the tunnels where they would lose radio for a minute or two, and pulled off the road. Our football team was gathered in the biggest classroom on the third floor watching it on TV, and that's where I saw the most famous hit in Pittsburgh history.

I played baseball every day in the summers, a few times at the Little League level (one team I played for was called the Ghosts. We played the Zombies and the Vampires) and I pitched for a Pony League team. At first I tried the elaborate windup of Wilmer "Vinegar Bend" Mizell, then Whitey Ford's, before settling on the more modest windup of Harvey Haddix (all lefthanders, as I was.) I hadn't thrown three pitches before I could hear the men who came to all the games---some of them fathers of players, but not all---commenting on my Haddix windup. I was a relief pitcher mostly (which had something to do with the fact that my father had no pull and seldom came to the games. Our coach worked for the father of our starting pitcher.) I won 3, lost none, saved a couple. I kept my own stats.

Football came into my life when I went to my first high school game with a neighbor kid, Corky Cocheletti, who became a famous male model in the 70s, and was engaged for awhile to Pam Dawber; we still see him on TV commercials. The NFL was small potatoes then; most of the excitement was for college football: Pitt and Penn State, Notre Dame, Army and Navy. Seeing the game live was much more exciting. I don't know how old I was then, but I do remember nervously ordering an ice cream cone from the Hempfield Spartans' star quarterback at the Silvis's Dairy store where he worked in the summer. He got it wrong.

I was an avid fan of our high school team (the Greensburg Central Catholic Centurions), even though I wasn't on good terms with a number of the players. Besides daily games of touch football at school, I played in various informal and intermural games in junior high and high school, and had a few moments of anonymous glory catching passes and running back kicks.

It wasn't until after college and a period in my life when sports seemed irrelevant if not warmaking in another form, and while I was living in Boston, that the Pittsburgh Steelers became a very good team. When I returned to western PA I was amazed at how thoroughly Pittsburgh had been transformed into a football city. Of course I became an avid Steelers fan, too, in the 1970s when they won four Super Bowls. Between the last two, the Pirates won the 1979 World Series. I got myself a story assignment that led to meeting the stars of both teams: Terry Bradshaw, Mean Joe Greene, Lynn Swan, Willie Stargell, etc. I've even got Dave Parker on tape threatening me. (Unlike a lot of Pittsburghers, I liked Dave Parker, and I knew he was playing me.)

Those are the easy years to be a fan. But there were many other years of suffering and dying for games cost by a lost fumble on the last play, a string of errors that I would obsessively replay as I tried to get to sleep that night, or two bonehead interceptions that lost the damn Super Bowl.

But those are my hometown teams, the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Pittsburgh Pirates, and they're my hometown teams for life, good or bad, win or lose, live or die. I follow and root for other teams closer to where I live now---the San Francisco Giants, the As, the Niners, even the Raiders---but never against the teams from Pittsburgh.

(It helps that a player I often went to Three Rivers to see wound up in San Francisco. Barry Bonds wasn't the most popular player on the Pirates, but I always liked him. His last year there was the last I went to games at Three Rivers, not long before I left the city. The last game I saw there Bonds got four or five hits, all line drives hit unbelievably hard, to different fields. But my best 3 Rivers memory was sitting behind home plate when Bobby Bonilla hit a home run. I was in the perfect position to watch his swing (left handed, like me), and watch the ball---it was the closest I came to feeling what hitting a major league homer was like.)

But Pittsburgh doesn't have, and never had, a National Basketball Association team. (The Pittsburgh Penguins with Mario Lemieux won several championships when I lived in Pittsburgh, but though I watched a few of the Penguins' Stanley Cup games, and that famous U.S. Olympic team in 1980, I've never liked hockey.) Pittsburgh had pro basketball teams a time or two, before pro basketball was anywhere near as big as it is now. For awhile they had one of the better teams in a long-gone league, but it didn't make much of a ripple in the city. The Pittsburgh Pipers played at the Civic Arena, and attendance was so bad that they had to sell tickets by scheduling high school games there as preliminaries. My high school played there, which is how I got to see one of the all-time basketball greats, Connie Hawkins, who played for Pittsburgh.

I played basketball at about the same level as those other sports---small time or semi-organized leagues and teams. My few moments of glory as second-highest scorer playing for the intermural champs of my high school (the joke being that we were the National Honor Society team, who beat the Letter Men Club of athletes except for varsity basketball players, two years in a row) were played to utterly empty stands. There's nothing like the echoes in an empty gym. My feelings about sports are tinged with this melancholy: being sort of good, sort of athletic, but never good enough, or tall enough for basketball, or heavy enough for football on a varsity level. You learn very quickly that it's the athletes who play well early, rather than those who might have potential, that get all the attention from coaches and so on.

I like basketball as a sport, and it's a great sport to watch on TV. Without a hometown team I'm free to pick the team I follow. After a brief look at the Celtics, I went with the Los Angeles Lakers, mostly because of Kareem Jabar and Magic Johnson. When they retired, I followed the Chicago Bulls and Michael Jordan. When the Bulls team was broken up, and after a decent mourning period, I started looking at the Lakers again, with Shaq and Kobie.

My feeling was simple: you can't pick your hometown team but when you have a choice, why not the best? Why not pick a winner, and save yourself a lot of aggravation? Besides, the joy of the sport is in following those who play it best. It's not for nothing that when Michael Jordan retired (again) last night, he was given several standing ovations by the fans of a team he didn't play for. He was the best. He was an artist, who changed the art form.

You learn about winning and about playing at a high level from winners and people who play at a high level. But it's not all flash and poetry. Who can forget Michael Jordan, so sick he could hardly stand, outplaying everybody on the court, willing his team to win in the NBA finals? How to deal with pressure, how to deal with injuries. Shaquille O'Neal is a dominating player, but when he's been hurt, his vulnerabilities show. Other teams take advantage, and he looks bad. But he plays, and his teammates find a way to use what he can do, and augment with what they can do. Right now Kobie Bryant is the most exciting player to watch in the NBA. These great players-Magic, Kareem, Michael, Kobie and Shaq-are admirable for what they represent in the game and generally as human beings. These teams played as teams, with professional demeanor. They had class.

I could go on. But after three straight titles, being a Lakers fan this year is a different experience. They're vulnerable. Other teams have improved and they haven't. They are a dependably good player short. Winning the title this year is not a given, and will very difficult. It will be especially painful if they lose to Sacramento, a city that is closer to where I live than is LA, but it's a team I don't respect. They're talented but otherwise, they're losers. Chris Weber turns me off. But the Lakers might not even get that far. The conventional wisdom is that they did well to get Minnesota in the first round rather than Dallas. I don't agree. I think Minnesota is more dangerous.

Being a fan, even an elective one, means you don't desert your team in tough times. So I'm still a Lakers fan, and will be as long as Kobie and Shaq play, and Phil Jackson coaches. Of course, Michael Jordan is officially unemployed at the moment. I wonder if he'd be interested in playing for his old coach, just for the playoffs???

In the Middle


"In the middle of the journey of our life, I awoke in a dark wood, where I had lost my way."

Or words to that effect, depending on the translation (of Dante's "Inferno" as it begins.)

This passage has been used to help define what in common parlance is called the "mid-life crisis."

It seems to me every time we pause---or are forced by circumstances to "re-evaluate"--- we find ourselves in the middle of the journey, and most of the time it is in the middle of a dark wood.

Clearly I am in that second half of my life, maybe even in the middle of the second half. I don't know how much time I have left, and how much of that will be with relative freedom and reasonably good health and energy. I face as well a very uncertain immediate future. So I am looking at what I need to do and want to do, assuming I can clear my own path.

The most obvious sort of project, and the one I've been fitfully yet consciously engaged in for several years, is to pass on in the best form I can what I've learned and what I've experienced in five decades plus of sentience. That project continues, and I see it moving into a new phase, in which I share more specifically the elements of my own story.

Publishing a new edition of my mall book was one such effort, especially since it included a personal account of my experiences in the course of writing it and its first publication. So far I can't count those chapters as a stunning success in terms of response, which makes the future look bleaker, but you need a lot of stubbornness in this game. Sometimes people wonder why I'm not more gratified by praise. I am gratified, but I am often puzzled because I never know why I'm praised for one thing and not for something else that I believe is just as good if not better.

I've also been posting old articles and columns on one or another of these blogs, with contemporary comments and contexts. Eventually, if I'm able financially and otherwise, I'll publish a collection in book form.

Also, if I'm able, I want to take this a step further with some personal essays, and eventually go back to fiction and dramatic forms. These are hard. It's easier to be topical and riff on politics. But the journey of my life, if it is my life, should include these.

Besides these and other efforts that have to do with personal history and history in general (I told my first 'historical society' audience that I got really interested in history when I'd lived long enough to have some), I find myself in another place it's becoming apparent I've been moving towards for the past several years.


Jung wrote of changes, some of them revolutionary, which often occur in the second half of life. I don't think I've experienced the flip into the opposite, from extravert to introvert, for example. I'm as introverted as ever, and probably more so. But I do detect one change in emphasis.

I've seldom been accused of optimism. I've been called "cynical," which I'm not, and "skeptical," which by nature and on principle, I am.

I don't trust optimists, as a rule. If they're not conscious or unconscious con artists, their innocence is often unearned, and they can be dangerous. Cheerful people are nice to run into, but I wouldn't necessarily want to live or work in a building designed by an optimist, at least of the kind who believes things will just work out for the best, with or without fireproofing and emergency exits.

Optimism really lets you off the hook. If you say the glass is half empty, they laugh at you and call you a pessimist. But if they drink half a glass and there's no more water, they throw up their hands and say, "We didn't know! Don't blame us!"

Still...the truth is that bitterly enumerating everything that's wrong with the world, proving there's no hope and all is lost with incisive despair, is all much easier when you're young. You may channel your hormonal anger into apocalyptic pronouncements, but your skin tone is telling you that you will live forever and be immune from every disaster that befalls others.

I've been living with the analysis of apocalypse since the 60s. And yes, as Abbie Hoffman said, "We were reckless, we were headstrong, we were impatient, we were excessive. But goddammit we were right." And the decades have rolled out one analysis after another showing just how bad things are, how complex and intertwined and embedded the destructiveness is, how powerful the agents of destruction are.

There will be hell to pay, and there was a moment when I thought I might not live to see it, and that was good enough. I wasn't the only one doing that kind of calculation. I took boxes of my LPs to a used record place in Pittsburgh shortly before I left for California (hauling with me, it must be said, other boxes of old LPs). The place was run by a guy roughly my age, a fellow early baby boomer. At some point in the conversation he mentioned the crap to come we all know is coming and said, "but fortunately, we'll be dead by then," and we both laughed.

I don't think the calculation has changed much since then, in terms of when, for instance, the climate crisis wreaks pervasive havoc, but I don't feel much comfort in that, if I ever really did. For it was at about that time that I really started trying to put together some meaning, some pattern, that could possibly sustain a future, that could be a direction for hope.

Somewhat by accident, or at least coincidence (which should make Jungians etc. all warm inside), I found some directions to at least pursue a pattern of hope. And that became more and more central to the work I wanted to do. It’s not what you would call optimism, but it is an attempt to leave behind a way of hope, which has me in the odd position of accentuating the positive.

Again, I found writing about it, writing that way, is difficult. And again, I'm not getting a lot of positive response to being positive. My first efforts have been in the "Soul of the Future" projects. I've worked hard and written a lot, and so far with little to show for it in finished work. Just a lot of unpaid for time that’s gone.

My most recent efforts in a different but related area are going to show up in some form here and there in the coming months, all concerned with what I've been calling the "skills of peace." Just as waging war requires knowledge and practice, strategies, concepts and attitudes, so does making peace. These skills of peace have little to do with organizing demonstrations or petition drives, though they do bear significantly on how people talk about war. They are the skills required for peace in schools and the workplace, peace in the home, and peace of mind as well as peace on earth.

They are tools of compassion, skills of empathy, strategies of cooperation, tactics of conflict resolution, paths of facing up to the good and evil in each and all of us. I've talked to a number of people engaged in such activities in the past couple of months, and if things work out I may have a book proposal on the subject soon.

Unfortunately, this project is going to have to be more sustaining financially than it has been so far. Or something else has to materialize if I'm going to be able to continue with this program. Or be in reasonable control of just about any program.

Pausing in the middle, you try to look ahead. But you wind up looking back, and wondering how you got so lost, or at least you wish you used your time better when the way was clear. I wonder if I tried too hard to stay in the middle, being too stubborn and at the same time not ruthless enough.

But then, so what? Is the intense masterpiece so important, and kindness isn't?


The difference between publishers and writers, some wise person once said, is that publishers care about markets, while writers care about readers. Which implies that the readers don't have to be many. You don't have to know who they are. They don't even have to be alive until after you aren't. You don't make any money that way perhaps, and you maybe don't get to live as a consequence of your writing and its contribution, but the writing that gets done has some possibility of that life.

But at least one form of publishing---in the sense of making it public, even if there's no financial reward--- is available and not dependent on markets, and you're looking at it.

Doing these blogs and posting on the Internet has been vitalizing. Thanks to the Internet and email, I'm now back in touch with old college friends I haven't seen in decades, and far-flung extended family, including the first person I ever corresponded with, one of my cousins in Maryland. I'm in touch with writers I've read, people I've just met briefly, and people I've never met at all. My writing becomes part of a dialogue, it prompts a response in someone else's thoughts, feelings and memories. And sometimes I find out about it, very quickly.

I hope I can continue. I hope I can continue a lot of things, resume others, and do some new things. I'm sending out chapters of a novel for young readers (I figure middle school through high school) and proposals for a couple of biographies for the same age group. It takes me back to when reading first became really important to me. It would be nice to be able to do some of that. But the chances aren't real good. Saving the postage and putting that into lottery tickets is probably a sounder investment than sending out this stuff unsolicited.

Gee, did that sound cynical, pessimistic? Some say the glass is half full, some say it is half empty. Some say the glass is twice as big as it needs to be. Some say it is half full of bilge water and half of hot air. Some say it is entirely empty of fossil fuel. Some say the glass is half full of milk and half full of cream, which makes it entirely full of half and half. Some say the glass is half-naked, some say it is half-crazy.

Here is an opinion on a similar subject by Shunryu Suzuki. Asked the old favorite of philosophy students, "If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?", he replied:
"It doesn't matter."

This War

In 1954 or so, Carl Jung was asked if he thought there would be nuclear holocaust. His reply: "I think it depends on how many people can stand the tension of the opposites in themselves."

What we are seeing is war. The consequences of releasing the dogs of war. We are seeing the havoc.

What we are seeing is all wars. The state of the art violence, death, heroism, blunders, unforeseen consequences, adaptations, lies, crimes,hysteria, back-biting, glorifying, vilifying, relentless unfolding of havoc. People become their group, because they are attacked and because they are attacking. Most do what they must do, to stay alive, which at times is the same as winning, the same as killing, and at other times and places is the same as escaping, surrendering. Many do what they must do as captives of their allegiance in a particular situation, which is to kill and die, to glorify and vilify. There are always those seeking personal advantage from death-dealing and dying, while in lofty safety elsewhere.

War evokes love and unleashes hate. It dictates behaviors that generate hate and liberate love. War is not necessary but when we will not understand ourselves, war will happen to provide us with object lessons. As this war began, it seemed to make sense that the best chronicles of World War II were the works of absurdity, of black humor or gallows humor: Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five. But they were written two decades after the war. The absurdities of the moment are much too grim. They are cause for shock and awe.

War unleashes and liberates everything inside us, especially from the unconscious. We act with emotional certainty that appears even to us to be rational deliberation, and react with rage, fear and impulse, whether fighting the war, fighting against the war, reporting the war, running the war. We are immersed in events. The events matter, but they will control us until we understand ourselves.

Everything soon becomes the good guys against the evil ones. And so at the moment every war begins, it is lost. It doesn't have to be that way, even as a consequence of defending against the evil that men do. But until we can understand that this tension exists, of the opposites within ourselves, every war will do what every war has done, which is to prepare the ground for the next war.

Living with this tension is essential. Acknowledging it is basic to taking effective action. Sometimes taking a step back is to take a step forward. In our world taking a step back is to look more deeply in the mirror.

On the Sunday before the war...

On the Sunday before the war, Margaret and I walked down to the Arcata plaza to participate in a candlelight vigil for peace that had begun, I'm told, in New Zealand, and circled the world until it got to us. You can't get more than maybe five miles any farther west than we were, anywhere in the lower 48 states, so as Margaret said, we were sending the light back across the Pacific towards where it began.

When we arrived shortly before seven p.m., some people had already gathered in the center of the plaza, a concrete circle ringed with planters, and around an absurd statue of William McKinley. Even though it's mid March, our coastal climate doesn't vary much, and there's always something growing. The Iris were conspicuously in bloom; they are Margaret's favorite flower.

Margaret carried in her backpack a tall candle in a glass tumbler, a clear-glass version of the candles usually decorated with the images of saints that are apparently favored by Mexican Catholics. Until recently, it was possible to buy them pretty cheaply in the ethnic food section of the Safeway supermarket. But somebody caught on to the fact that they've become a bit stylish---now they're with other decorative candles, and they've doubled in price.

These candles burn for days, and Margaret's idea was to light it at the vigil and keep it lit on the mantelpiece at home, where she would always have such a candle lit, until there was peace again.

I carried a bare white candle, very cheap to buy and also long-burning, the kind that many people had at the vigil I attended just a few weeks ago. That vigil was an annual event, a memorial for the Wiyot slain on Indian Island during their "fixing the world" ceremony in 1860. That vigil had also begun at around dusk, a few feet from Humboldt Bay. The candle was the very same one I had held from dusk into darkness that evening. For the last several years it had rained---a couple of times it really poured---but this year it was clear and bright. We watched geese fly over in V formation. Then it got windy and eventually cold. I was colder than most; I was in the middle of some strange flu or cold or whatever bug it was.

But on the Sunday before the war, the evening was pretty warm. At the Wiyot memorial there had been prayers and talk, songs of a half dozen Indian cultures, and drumming. Here there was only silence.

We stood in the silence, a nearly full moon sliding in front of clouds. I thought of the first candle-light demonstration against a war I had attended, in 1965 or 66, in Galesburg, Illinois, also in the town square. There couldn't have been more than ten of us, a mix of students and young faculty from Knox College. It was not a popular thing to be doing, and people hooted at us from cars and trucks and nearby sidewalks. There was real danger in opposing that war too visibly. I seem to remember we huddled a little closer together, for more than warmth, for more than shelter against the wind for the flickering candles.

Eventually there were several hundred people in the Arcata Plaza. I'd say 400 at the peak. That's a pretty impressive number, since Humboldt State was on spring break, and when the students leave the population of the town drops by half.

There was a little noise around us---people smoking in front of the bars across the way, and there was one camper that circled the plaza a few times, with an American flag waving from the radio antenna. But that was about it.

I noticed that the flag at the post office seemed to be at half mast.

This was a day after the largest peace march in Eureka-lots of color and noise, clever signs and rhythmic chants, then a rally and speeches.

But in the Arcata Plaza no one said anything. There were no signs. Just people holding candles, people of all ages, descriptions, pairings, groupings. Most candles were more practical than mine---if they weren't in glass, they had little aluminum foil wax-catchers. I had to keep spilling the wax from mine or it would drip down over my hands. This was a new problem--I'd never been able to keep my candle lit for very long out by the Bay.

We stood for an hour in silence, holding small flames, small scratches of light. A few people sat on the concrete or on the grass. Some meditated. I stood and watched, watched the camper circling the plaza, watched the faces of all these strangers, watched the moon through the bare branches of a tree.

(Later Margaret remarked that she recognized only a few people and we didn't see anyone either of us knew. I remarked that it must be a peace demonstration for introverts.)

The silence started to seem a little strange, a bit surreal after an hour. I was thinking that in the old days people would at least sing "We Shall Overcome," but I thought that idea probably just dated me. And then it started, very softly from the other side of the statue, until it got to the verse that says "we shall live in peace, someday," and then it got louder. After wanting to sing it, I was so moved I couldn't.

As we walked home, I noticed some light down a side street. There was a traffic circle there, something of a new addition to Arcata culture, and the neighborhood had turned the center of it into a flower garden. Now it was ringed with candles. Perhaps they'd had their own vigil there a little earlier, and left the candles there.

I heard a reporter next evening on Bill Moyers remark that in walking around Washington on Monday she'd noticed people standing in small groups here and there, silent, holding lit candles. I crossed the plaza in Arcata on Wednesday afternoon, before the bombing started, and a scattering of people were standing, facing outward, silent. They were standing on the corner where Women in Black assemble on Friday evenings, facing that same way, silent. But these weren't just women, and they weren't all in black.

Silence and candles. To me the message---and certainly my thoughts when I was standing there---was part memorial, and part hope, the endurance of hope. I was thinking of the people who were going to die, as I looked at the children with their parents holding candles. People who got blown to bits suddenly out of the silence would be the lucky ones. Yet some in Baghdad would endure, would rebuild, would have children who would endure. Some of the children of America would come home, and though few would ever be the same again, some would endure, and have children. And those here would still be here, and some through whatever disasters are unleashed, would endure.

The candles burn for the living who might soon be dead, they burn as the light of hope. There is reason to hope, even in this moment of peril. Though so much of what is happening has happened before, and some have learned nothing from the suffering and stupidity of the past, some have learned something.

I've spent much of the last several weeks learning that there is reason to hope, in the work that people are doing towards furthering compassion and cooperation, in creating systems of communication and participation, in schools and organizations, in daily life. They've been working at this all along, when few of us were looking.

There's reason to hope in what we were doing there, we silent strangers, holding candles, on the Sunday before the war. That George II didn't heed us does not mean that what happened here and around the world for the past several months is meaningless. Not at all. The worldwide opposition to a war expressed openly in huge demonstrations is a reason for hope.

Jonathan Schell wrote in The Nation magazine about the demonstrations on February 15: "When terrorists attacked the Pentagon and knocked down the World Trade Center on September 11, everyone marveled that nineteen men had coordinated their actions for evil with such efficiency. On February 15, 10 million coordinated their actions for good. February 15 was the people's answer to September 11."

Parts of Schell's new book have been published in the last two issues of Harper's Magazine. After reading the first one, it became much clearer to me why people in Europe, by from 85% to 92% in polls, opposed this war. He describes some of what has been going on in Europe, and put it in historical perspective. This is the part of the world, he reminds us, that was mostly at war for centuries, and plunged the world into horrific warfare twice in the twentieth century. But the nations that fought those wars are now becoming so intertwined in the European Union, that war among them is virtually impossible.

These are nations where the wreckage of world war is still physically present. Nations that lost generations of young men. Nations stripped of their fondest and proudest notions, stripped of illusions in bitter pain, and still wounded by the pain they caused each other and themselves. The Holocaust, the terrors of empire. The denial is not over, new illusions replace the old, not every part of Europe is there yet, it isn't the perfect society, and yet...look at what they have done. The nations of "old Europe" have banished war. Yet they are economically strong, culturally alive, and socially much more responsible and enlightened than the self-satisfied North Americans. They know something we apparently don't.

Schell wrote one of the best and most hopeless books about the prospect of nuclear war, "The Fate of the Earth." At least I experienced reading it with hopelessness. But his new work strikes me as hopeful. A few years after "The Fate of the Earth" was published, the apparently fatal blind alley the U.S. and the USSR had gone down suddenly opened up. It was the largely peaceful collapse of the Soviet empire in a few short years that changed everything. The Reaganites have tried to take credit for it, but as Schell writes now, it was really the people of eastern Europe who did it. We forget the changes of the twentieth century for the better that happened in the same way, from the liberation of India from the British to the end of apartheid in South Africa to the end of the Cold War: they were brought about by the people, and they were brought about without war.

I don't know that I'll go back down to the Plaza on the Sunday after the war has started. But there will be a candle burning.

C’est le vie in Washington: The name of pomme frites has been changed in the U.S. capitol to “freedom fries.” Viva la difference. Homeland Security now monitors video rentals for suspicious characters viewing films by Truffaut, Godard, Agnes Varda, Renoir and Jacques Tati. An amendment to the Patriot Act will now make it a federal crime to read Moliere, Flaubert, Baudelaire and above all, Alexis de Tocqueville.


TODAY IN HUMBOLDT COUNTY

A gallon of the cheapest gas: $2.25

A month of "reality" shows, reruns, war hype, studio wrestling
and Rudi Bachtiar but without HBO and BBC America: $41.45

A month of catastrophic health insurance with a
several thousand dollar deductible : $200

War, tax relief for the wealthy, and no response
to the climate crisis : priceless



TODAY IN HUMBOLDT COUNTY I saw my first homeless person with a cell phone.

But when you think about it, who needs a cell phone more? Actually, who else really needs a cell phone at all?



I get a kick out of Zen. I enjoy meditating though I don't do much, and I have really enjoyed books on Zen and Buddhism by (among others) Charlotte Joko Beck, Mark Epstein and Shunryu Suzuki, who founded the San Francisco Zen Center and is credited for being largely responsible for bringing Buddhist practice to America (though there has been some kind of Buddhist presence in America for a long time. Emerson was fascinated by it, for example, as was William James especially.) (Wasn't that a song on Blonde on Blonde? William James Especially?)

I've never visited the Zen center in San Francisco and wondered if I should. Somewhere I recall reading about a scandal there, and the other day I came across a book about it: "Shoes Outside the Door" by Michael Downing. It begins with that characteristic Zen wit (he quotes an elderly Zen priest advising him at breakfast, "You can't change your karma, but you can sweeten your cereal.") before it turns decidedly grim, and even that enlightened drollery takes on tragic meanings.

I'm only part way through the book, but I've already gotten to the place where the American Abbott who succeeded Suzuki has everyone lined up to bow to him as he drives away in his BMW. His excesses and autocratic abuses went on for years, pretty much in full view of everyone, until a few events (not all that different from those that came before) brought him down suddenly and completely. Apparently the Zen Center just about collapsed in anguish and confusion, and felt the effects for many years (the crisis occurred in 1983).

There's a lot already that's reminiscent of other situations in which a charismatic leader who is apparently succeeding, especially in bringing in money, gets away with a lot because people around him look the other way, or just don't see what they see. But there's also the particular abuse of the leader sanctified by religious belief.

The first thought that came to me is that I have a reason after all to be grateful for the abusive nuns and hypocritical priests in my own twelve years of Catholic schools and 14 or so of practice. I, too, looked the other way even when I noticed that the parish priest who hectored the congregation for money every Sunday was driving a new Chrysler when my father could barely afford a second hand Ford.

I had a number of painful personal experiences in which either my rebellious spirit or my idealism or most often a combination of the two got me into the kind of trouble that involves being accused of not having faith, or being a stubborn and willful sinner. They could have been right about that, I thought, they're the experts. But then I started putting things together, such as my expectation that if, for instance, the Church couldn't quite live up to its teachings, it could at least not deny its mistakes. (I vividly recall questioning the morality of giving safe passage to an accused heretic to defend himself in Rome, hearing him out and then burning him at the stake. Sister Cornelia explained that safe passage didn't mean safe passage back.)

Ever since I've erred on the side of being too skeptical of authority, and the older I get the more impatient I am with officiousness. So I feel for those Zen students who got sucked in, but if I ever seriously abdicated my own moral responsibility to others, I've repressed the memory. (My problem is an often misapplied Hero complex, but that's another story.) I've never had authority for long enough to seriously abuse it, and I probably have morally shortchanged myself on occasion, but thanks to those nuns and priests of my childhood, not for very long. So in the spirit of Zen I won't not say thanks.

The voice of wisdom in this book, as he is on many matters, is Gary Snyder. Of how to view the fallibility of “roshis” or the Buddhist teacher-authorities, he says, “So you get the best you can from the guy, and you don’t imitate his bad sides. That’s basically the way monks and laypeople approach the teacher in Japan.”

I expect some Democratic party funds are going to research the wealth of statements prominent Republicans have made about the sanctity of the balanced Federal budget and the devil of the deficits. But I wonder if there is a reporter out there with enough guts, enough time and access to Lexis-Nexis to ferret out the vituperative statements of Republicans who considered Bill Clinton's lack of military service a scandalous disqualification for the post of Commander in Chief.

I'm reminded of this partly by Chris Hedges' interview on Bill Moyers the other night. Hedges has covered many wars and wonders why each generation cannot seem to learn from the awful experiences of the past. (Even the Gulf War I: he said for example that the Marines there loathed CNN and its sensationalistic coverage of a clean, technological war in which no one at all got bloody, maimed or killed, and the war was conducted with high efficiency, instead of being the fractious, confused, bloody mess we've since learned it was. And this was a war that Hedges supported; yet knowing war's cost is a heavy consideration in deciding to wage war. He believes Gulf War II is irresponsible.)

I wonder, too why every generation has to learn it all over again---that war is not a video game or a commercial, any more than it is a patriotic song or John Wayne movie. I suppose what links these thoughts with those prompted by the Zen Center book is something else I'm grateful for: an imagination. I experienced the war against the war in Vietnam in the United States, and all those painful and tumultuous years. I was a witness to the war itself only through information and imagination. Information, and judging information, are important. But was through imagination-through feeling the experiences of others, through entering into the published descriptions and accounts, as well as through the poetry and the films and novels of that war and of previous wars-that I learned enough of the realities of war to form my convictions, and inform my judgments. It is through imagination as well, through analogous experience, through empathy for the victims of authoritarian abuses and injustice, that I judge the rightness or wrongness of such situations, and above all, judge the rightness or wrongness of my participation in them and support of them.

It makes me feel again that to create works of the imagination that speak to the imaginations of others, that first of all help create the capacity to imagine more fully, and then to give the imagination something worth engaging, is a high calling, and a social necessity, particularly in our times, when we are aware of so much and experience so little of it.

Cartoon of the day: Satan gathers his minions in hell and says, “I know it’s tempting to rest on our laurels but it’s time to think ahead to 2004.”

Instant Karma

This is exciting--- the first actual blog-like entry in this blog space, a series of formally unrelated items...

Reaction by some who've attended the meetings of Humboldt County Democrats and Greens described in the piece below (“Thoughts on the Politics of Blue and Green.”)
prompts me to this clarification. At the end of the piece I mention that I'm unlikely to attend future meetings and I say why. My reasons have more to do with me than the meetings, and I certainly support the continuing dialogue between Dems and Greens. My essay was merely an attempt to contribute to that dialogue. I wish everyone well who attends these meetings, and I salute their commitment, especially those who travel considerable distances (50 miles or more) to attend them. Nor did I intend to leave the impression I definitely wasn’t going to go to such meetings in the future.

This reminds me of an essay I read recently from the Atlantic magazine on being an introvert in an extravert world. It probably helps explain my meetings phobia, though again I must hasten to add that I am fully capable of functioning at meetings. Some people find writing difficult, but they do it when it's part of their job, or they feel so strongly about something they have to do it and it's the only way to get accomplished what they want to accomplish. I'm the same way about meetings. I don't find writing all that difficult (writing well is always a challenge, however). But I do find meetings difficult, especially the recovery period. I doubt that my attendance at these makes much of a difference.

Here's a link to the introvert essay.

Comment on President Bush's prime time press conference: the Washington Times noted that it defied tradition when Helen Thomas, the senior White House correspondent, was not only not called on first, she wasn't called on at all. It's not hard to figure out why. When she was a wire service correspondent, her questions were mainstream. Now that she's a columnist, she is much more combative, especially on the topic of the upcoming bombing of Iraq. She thinks its immoral to bomb Iraqi civilians and she is relentless in questioning on the subject. See
http://AmericanSamizat.blogspot.com, the archive for Friday, January 24: “Milky Way in Review.”

Department of polls I wish to quote because they agree with me, as opposed to the polls whose methodology I question when they don't:
a Quinnipiac University survey shows that American voters favor "an as yet unnamed Democratic party candidate" for President over President George W. Bush by a 48% to 44% margin.

And the television network Americans trust most for news: PBS.
I don't know the source of this poll, though I heard it from an unbiased reporter during a PBS pledge drive.

Accepting Fred Rogers

Rege Cordic, Bob Prince, Bill Burns, Don Shannon, Hank Stohl, Patti Burns, Ed and Wendy King---depending on your response to these names, I can tell not only that you lived in the Pittsburgh area at one time (and if you grew up there, I've likely already spotted your accent) but when you lived there.

These are some of the legendary names of Pittsburgh media. Pittsburgh has more of a local culture than a lot of places, but like all cities these days, the cast of celebrity names is heavy with local media---the radio jocks, sportscasters, television anchors and weatherpeople, and the hosts of occasional local entertainment programs.

Few become known outside their city, and like these Pittsburgh icons, they almost never achieve anything like their local fame even if they go elsewhere. About the only exception in Pittsburgh was Fred Rogers. He became a part of childhoods from Alaska to Mexico for more than thirty years. He died in late February.

He was part of Pittsburgh TV just about from its beginnings in the 1950s. I was already in college when he began "Mr. Roger's Neighborhood" as a local program in the mid 60s, but I'd seen his work---even some of the same puppets---watching Josie Carey's show for children in the fifties. He was that show's producer.

That's maybe the aspect of Fred Rogers that was least noticed---he was a TV professional. He started out on production teams---doing everything from fetching coffee to being floor manager---for early TV outings like the Lucky Strike Hit Parade and the Kate Smith show.

I remember seeing him in the late 80s or early 90s on a local TV retrospective of the early years in Pittsburgh, surrounded by other on-camera pioneers, sensing their camaraderie from the days when they had essentially created an industry. He was one of the few who was still working in TV by then.

Even though I spent some time at the WQED studios and lived in the same part of Pittsburgh for awhile as he did, I only met Fred Rogers once. The word on him in Pittsburgh was that while his company was a bit dysfunctional at times, he was a very smart guy with not a whiff of hypocrisy about him. He was genuine---genuinely Mr. Rogers.

I met him in 1996 or so, after watching the taping of one of his shows. Even then it was rumored that the neigborhood's days were numbered. His musical director, Johnny Costa (another legendary Pittsburgh name in music as well as TV), was ailing, and Fred was said to be inclined to fold the show if Costa retired. But he kept making new programs for several more years, until 2000.

Even in a brief meeting, you could tell he was one of those people who is alive to the moment. Some people have to fight through their self-absorption, their thoughts or emotions, just to see and hear and feel what's in front of them. He took in everything with his senses, which made him perfect for television, and perfect for understanding how children perceive the world. He could be vulnerable in front of the camera, and behind it he could pick out the shadow in the background of the camera shot that might feel threatening to a watching child.

He was way out in front in understanding the power of accepting children for who they are, and for children accepting themselves. Yet he fed their ability to change and grow by realizing that curiosity is the essence and the joy of childhood. He knew how much children sensed, and how much they thought about their world.

He used what he sensed to develop ideas about how to speak to children's concerns. Some of his on-screen rituals, like changing shoes, still seem weird to me, but he somehow knew their symbolic function for kids. It took considerable courage to do what he did. He was one of those rare people who seemed made for exactly what he was doing, and maybe not much else. It was mutual good fortune that Mr. Rogers found his neighborhood, and it found him.

Thoughts on the Politics of Blue and Green

A couple of months ago I attended a meeting of people who identified themselves as Green Party members and Democratic Party members here in Humboldt County. The idea was to explore ways the two groups could work together.

We introduced ourselves and talked briefly about how we got to where we were politically. As I recall, many of the Greens spoke of being part of other movements that failed, such as socialist parties, before gravitating to the Greens. The Democrats often spoke of family and community loyalties in past generations of Democrats.

I was invited as a Democrat. I don't go to many meetings nor work in many groups anymore, so group dynamics are always interesting. I talked about my background as a third generation Democrat, who as a teenager worked for John F. Kennedy's presidential campaign, went to his Inauguration and shook his hand, and a couple of years later returned for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which is what that famous 1962 civil rights march was called. I said I worked registering voters for the Democratic party in support of Lyndon Johnson, and marched against Johnson, including at the Pentagon in 1968, pretty much short-circuiting what could very well have been a political future in my home area of western Pennsylvania.

Maybe I didn't get to say all of that, but I did mention that I supported Robert Kennedy in 1968 and still consider myself a Robert Kennedy Democrat. It was interesting how emotional I felt in support of this identity, in that company. For the truth of the matter is that in terms of many basic beliefs and political positions, I could have just as well been on the Green side. For instance, I believe that the overriding issue of our times is global heating, the climate crisis. Much of my work has been in environmentalism on one level or another. I wrote the video script for "Voices of Humboldt County: Cumulative Impact," which the Humboldt Watershed Council has used as an organizing tool and as a potent weapon in court cases involving Maxxam and their repulsive logging practices. I designed and put together the "official" web site for the late Paul Shepard, one of the most important ecological thinkers of his generation.

My work since I've been in Humboldt County has been mostly involved in the arts and with or for local American Indian organizations. I used my one contact very highly placed within the Clinton Administration exactly once in 8 years: to advocate for a pardon for Leonard Peltier. So obviously, I am not proud of everything the Clinton administration did, or didn't do.

But identifying yourself on one side or the other inevitably makes you an advocate for your side. So I was looking at the Greens from the perspective of a third generation Democrat (the first that I know of being my father's father, who I knew only as an old man who lived in his own basement, retired from the coal mines with black lung; the second was my father, who held a few minor township offices in addition to his regular job as a salesman. He was on the county Democratic committee for many years, so I remember the piles of pink "specimen ballots" distributed to Democrats to take to the polls; I used the backs of the extras to draw my cartoon panels on.)

So from this perspective, one of the places the Greens are ideologically vulnerable is class. There is insufficient attention paid to the working class and the poor in their ideology; moreover, when they oppose Democrats who have at least some institutional memory of being a party of the working class and minorities, they sever that last lifeline, however frayed. That's why at this meeting I quoted Harry Hopkins, FDR's chief advisor, who advocated programs to help those in need as well as programs to foster economic growth in the Depression. "People don't eat in the long term," Hopkins said. "They eat every day."

This got a laugh but the next Green to speak said that he also worried about the long term, which of course is also what I believe. I worry about life on earth as we know it surviving the 21st century. The future is one of my political concerns.

So this is the problem and the opportunity of dividing this way. Issues at least get raised. But you tend to get locked into a particular point of view that doesn't necessarily even represent what you really believe, at least not totally.

What I do think is that Humboldt County in particular has a great opportunity for what I've seen elsewhere called a blue-green coalition: blue collar and environmentalists. For after all, the facts about the extractive industries as well as other economic and non-economic, community and family interdependencies with the environment, should favor such coalitions.

Instead, the ruling class has managed to pit blues against greens on issues of jobs especially, but also by playing to class prejudices on both sides. It's a political tragedy, with vast consequences.

Such a coalition requires a search for a common language, which will require much soul-searching on the part of individuals and groups of both hues. And here in Humboldt we also have the great advantage of indigenous Native communities, elders and activists. Native groups and environmentalists have worked together on some issues, and have opposed each other on others. There is great skepticism among Native activists I've met about how much environmentalists understand about their point of view. (This goes double for attitudes towards the frequent soft-green allies among the New Agers.)

One notable item from this first meeting was that nobody was very interested in hashing over the 2000 election. In part, this was a kind of denial, for I noticed that it kept coming up in the discussion of other issues. In part I'm sure it was a genuine impulse to move on.

Some Greens, including the co-chair of the meeting, are apparently unrepentant about supporting Ralph Nader to the bitter end. Some (evidenced by discussions after the meeting) are shocked by how extreme the Bush administration is, and have realized that in important ways a Gore administration would be very much better, despite the "Bore or Gush" rhetoric of the Nader campaign. Some spoke of their "vote swapping" efforts, trading Nader votes in safe Gore states like California for Gore votes in more hotly contested states. They realized to some degree what a disaster Bush would be, prior to election day.

Before the meeting, attendees got an email copy of an article by a former Nader aide urging Nader not to run in 2004, which he apparently is intent on doing. This wasn't discussed either.

I wanted to discuss this issue, not because I wanted to argue that Nader cost Gore the election. I was thinking about the future. I said that on specific issues-the war in Iraq which was brewing even then, or California issues such as single-payer health care or state campaign finance like Arizona's-I'd be happy to work with anybody, regardless of what party they belonged to. But that I wasn't interested in entering into a coalition that did not recognize the realities of electoral politics.

Do you vote for the lesser of two evils, or make your vote a protest vote, to possibly influence future elections? I've gone through my own very painful process on this issue. When Robert Kennedy was killed in June 1968 I vowed I would not vote for a candidate who supported the Vietnam war. And I didn't. But I still found myself watching the late returns on television on election night, rooting for a Humphrey victory. Hubert Humphrey didn't seem to be the courageous visionary he once had been, but even then I knew that Richard Nixon was a functionally evil politician. And nobody, at least until Bush II, did as much damage to constitutional government as President Nixon.

I went through this process in every presidential campaign thereafter, mostly in the primaries. Do I support the best candidate, or the best candidate who has the best chance of winning the presidency?
I knew how corrupt and compromised the whole system, and the political dialogue was. Even in 1972, for awhile I went around wearing a campaign button for the Firesign Theatre's imaginary candidate George Papoon, whose slogan was "Not Insane." But eventually I advocated strongly for George McGovern, who even members of the national press felt had a chance of winning right up to the last week or so of the campaign. Despite the poll numbers, he drew large and enthusiastic crowds.

I supported Bill Clinton even in the primaries in 1992, because it was essential that a Democrat be elected, just to slow down and reverse at least some of the damage that a generation of mostly Republican administrations had done. Reagan had come close to destroying the federal government along with the untold suffering his policies caused.

I saw Clinton try to do the right things in his first term, and the kind and quality of vicious opposition this inspired. I was surprised by the vehemence also of people who had supported him and now were ready to castigate him as a failure, if not a traitor to the cause. I realized again how much of our collective unconscious we invest in a President (or presidential candidate). We project so much onto a person who is after all just a human being, that our disappointment is all but inevitable.

I think I became especially conscious of this because Bill Clinton and I are almost precisely the same age. In fact, he is about six weeks younger. Our first baby boomer president had some strange effects on other baby boomers. I remember one of the commentators on TV covering the Inaugural Parade, when the new President and Mrs. Clinton were walking part of the way. He mentioned that he and Clinton were about the same age. And now he's President of the United States, he said, and I'm...covering his parade.

Part of Clinton's problem with fellow baby boomers was that he was president and we weren't. I suppose we felt that there was still time, until he showed up. But there was another side to this identification. I remember talking about Clinton with people who were so disappointed in him, and then talking to a friend even closer in age to Clinton than me, who was working in state government. When we talked about Clinton, it was in terms of not only political realities but of what one person could reasonably do in one day's work. It seemed nearly a miracle anything got done at all. To us he wasn't only the symbol, the President. He was a guy like us with a job. A very tough job.

There was also a lot of class prejudice against Clinton in Washington. Class warfare of the Bush kind has been going on for a long time, and that's another reason that class has to become part of our political dialogue again.

But there are actions Clinton took and didn't take that are more than just disappointing. The human costs of the Iraq sanctions to the utterly innocent, the human costs of so-called welfare reform, are just the first that come to mind. Still, activists bear some of the blame, too. The civil rights progress of the mid 1960s happened because of the coexistence of strong pressure from outside government with an administration that was persuadable, and willing to take advantage of political opportunities this outside pressure created, even to the extent of taking political risks. (For don't forget that one cost of the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s was the end of the Solid South for the Democrats and the beginning of a new Republican stronghold, which the Kennedys and other Democrats knew would happen.)

But in the 90s, activists relaxed a bit too much, in my view. Environmentalism in particular got flabby and institutional. Instead of using radical activism as energy and threat, the established environmental movement got bogged down in technical lobbying and basically in waiting for the Clinton-Gore administration to do stuff.
Clinton needed more visible pressure from the left, to begin to counter or at least challenge the power of corporate lobbying.

On the other hand, Clinton did stem the destructive tide in many areas. There were lots of environmental victories along with compromises. For someone who was fighting for his life most of his eight years, he and his administration left the country in far better shape that it was when they took office.

Then came the election of 2000, and the eventual Supreme Court coup. At this moment it is difficult to exaggerate the folly and the evil being perpetrated by the Bush administration in just about every way imaginable. Damage is being done that even with luck could not be undone for many years. We have two more years before the next presidential election.

So the point I was trying to make to that mixed group was this: I'm not interested in assigning relative blame for Bush to Nader draining key votes in Florida versus Gore's campaign mistakes or how fed up many Americans are with the whole system, or more sinister scenarios. What does concern me is 2004, and the lessons learned or not learned. The reality is that Ralph Nader is not going to be elected President in 2004, nor is any candidate the Green Party is likely to nominate. The reality is that the election in practical terms is about hiring somebody to be president, and by the day of decision there are only two candidates for the job. You choose one or you choose the other.

The time to build a new party is long before election day. The place to build it is on the local level. Sure, a presidential candidate with enormous media appeal might beat the two party candidates---and just who might that be? Jesse Ventura?

I want to hear Greens say, we were wrong to support Nader to the bitter end in 2000, because it at least helped make Bush possible, and we won't make that mistake again.

Then I can work with them. Despite the institutional confusion and in-fighting apparently occurring within the Green party on whatever state or regional or national or international levels.

I can work with them anyway, on individual issues-or so I thought until a recent event which in fact prompted this column. I attended an "Education Summit" at Humboldt State recently. It was mostly about alternative education, and I found the sessions I attended stimulating, thought-provoking and even exciting, and I felt everybody was on the right track, as well as having their hearts in the right place.

Just outside the main assembly room on the last day of the conference there was a table. On it was a petition for a single-payer, government funded health insurance system in California. I moved towards the table to sign the petition. But then I saw some more literature on the table. One sign said something to the effect of "Reasons why the Republicans and Democrats are the Same." It was a Green Party table.

Despite the commonalities fostered by the current system of campaign contributions, lobbying and corporate power, I don't believe the Republican and Democrats are the same. They don't support the same policies, or appoint the same judges, and they come from different constituencies. The differences in some aspects may be marginal, but that margin makes a very big difference, if you're interested in, say, a woman's right to choose, some limits on the rapacity inflicted on the natural world, and decisions on when and how and why to go to war or not.

To say they are the same may help convince people to support the Green party. But on every level, this turns out to help Republicans win elections. One Republican candidate here in Humboldt County was quite open about pitting a Green against a Democrat in order to split the vote.

I voted for a couple of Green candidates myself in local elections. But to do so on a national level is profoundly self-destructive. To do so even on intermediate levels is risky, because there is no real reliable Green party structure to back anybody up. Not in the way that there is a Democratic party infrastructure, as well as a tradition that can be appealed to.

To say there is no difference between Republicans and Democrats is personally insulting as well as foolishly inaccurate. In 2003 it tells me the judgment of these people can't be trusted. I wound up avoiding that table like the plague. I didn't sign the petition. I'll make my views known to my representatives, who at the moment are all Democrats, in other ways.

I'm probably not going back to those meetings of Greens and Dems. I'm not a Democratic party insider anyway. No Democrat here has hired me for anything, and I'm not economically able to volunteer much time, especially for activities my presence doesn't enhance in ways as possibly valuable as, say, what I'm doing right now. There will come a time, however, when licking envelopes and making phone calls for free will be more useful than writing for free. I've done that since I was 14, and I'll probably do it again in 2004. And it won't be at Green party headquarters.

Welcome to the Chaos.

As evidence of the Iraqi threat, the U.S. Secretary of State lauds a report of purported new findings by British intelligence, which turns out to be a thoroughly disreputable cut-and-paste from old and questionable sources, including the work of students, revealing information that is a more than a decade old. The plagiarism itself was so complete that it reproduced not only the very words of one of the student's papers, but also the grammatical errors and misspellings.

Sorry, but if my opponents from St. Philomena High in rural western Pennsylvania had tried to pass off that kind of evidence in a scholastic forensic league debate held in an empty classroom and witnessed by a track coach and two nuns, my high school debate partner and I would have been embarrassed for them.

Turns out it wasn't British Intelligence but Tony Blair's press office that produced it. British Intelligence was actually saying that there are no ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

No wonder Powell's attempt to tie Al Qaeda to Iraq on the basis of a purported bin Laden tape inspired skepticism. (Let's not embarrass the emperor by pointing out that last year's Satan and Public Enemy #1 is apparently still at large.) His other evidence previous to the tape---which even if genuine doesn't establish a relationship, others say---was a supposed base and chemical weapons plant in Iraq which turned out to be a few falling down shacks with minimal electricity outside Saddam's territory.

But look closer at the case the Bushies are making and it gets even more sinister: Sure, bin Laden despises Saddam as an apostate, but lots of terrorist groups are finding common cause as war nears, because they have a common enemy. We can expect terrorist acts even in the United States, possibly including dirty nuclear devices, chemical or biological weapons, planted by Al Qaeda and possibly supplied by Saddam, because the U.S. is preparing to attack Muslim territory.

In other words, the Bushies are making the case that we need to attack Iraq because it supports terrorist Al Qaeda, and the reason Al Qaeda and Iraq may be combining forces is because the U.S. is going to attack. Where is Joseph Heller when you need him, may he rest in peace.

Meanwhile North Korea is preparing to make nuclear bombs, and warns the U.S. that it isn't the only country that can engage in a pre-emptive strike so don't even think about it. A few days later, Iran announces it is doing some new nuclear fuel processing of its own, but not to worry, they aren't going to make bombs, which is just what North Korea says, wink wink, nudge nudge.

This is while France and Germany are joined by Russia in supporting a plan to put UN people on the ground in Iraq before the U.S. bombs can fall. Stayed tuned for Security Council: The Dueling Vetoes. In their different ways, all of these countries are responding to the Bush foreign policy of arrogance and bullying

They're seeing consequences of American arrogance in more terrorism in Europe and Britain. The closer war gets, the more menacing the threat. The U.S. is put on alert. Nobody seems to know if much has actually been done to protect the country's most vulnerable and potentially destructive terrorism targets. The head of the International Association of Firefighters says nobody has provided equipment or training to most firefighters in most places to cope with bio, chemical or radiation attacks, and they're understaffed in most cities even for more conventional threats. Communications is still a mystery in most places, and while Americans are being urged to buy battery-powered radios, there may be nothing to hear on them but the latest from British intelligence.

Congress holds hearings on plans for postwar Iraq and finds that practically speaking there are none. NGOs and the UN aren't prepared to deal with "humanitarian needs," which is nicespeak for starving, bleeding, thirsty, maimed and terrorized civilians. But the Bushies did say they expect Saddam to blow up his oil wells, creating a blanket of deadly pollution we'll probably all get a taste of.

Conservative estimates have the U.S. occupying Iraq for two years. An army of occupation is likely to face armed opposition, as it tries to restrain the opposing ethnic and religious groups in Iraq from savaging each other. The retired general who led relief efforts in the region after Gulf War I said that even without those responsibilities, tens of thousands of American troops remained for the next 11 years, long after the cameras went home. "The war never ended," he said. "We aren't going to go home from whatever we do in Iraq."

Meanwhile back in Iraq the inspectors say Iraq is cooperating better, but everybody knows the Bushies won't take yes for an answer. They insist that war isn't inevitable, and if it happens it will be regrettable, but nothing anybody does gets any reaction other than derision. Everybody else is deluded; only the Bushies are right.

Thanks to that self-righteousness, Americans will be paying for the war and the occupation of Iraq into the indefinite future. It doesn't look like France and Germany will help much.

Instead Bush stands shoulder to shoulder with his staunch ally, the prime minister of Australia. He shouldn't expect much from that country in the long term either. Everybody in Australia knows that come the next election, this guy is toast. Why? Because he stands shoulder to shoulder with Bush.

Bush submits a budget with huge tax giveaways for the rich and the largest deficit in U.S. history, batteries and the cost of the war not included. All the voices that despaired over government deficits are silent. State governments are already saying it and pretty soon the federal government will say it, too: Gee, there's no more money! We'll have to tighten our belts, so the majority of families in America can look forward to worse education and health care, and an old age of poverty and untreated illness. I guess they're hoping we'll suffer in silence, ashamed of not being billionaires and getting tax cuts, too.

The ax is already starting to fall here in California, thanks to state budget cuts. People will be thrown out of work and others will be overworked, students and their parents will pay more for less education, and as for the poor---let them eat tax cuts.

A draft proposal for Patriot Act II circulates in Washington. Patriot Act I already allows homes to be searched secretly, without a warrant. Patriot Act II apparently proposes secret arrests. You know, the very definition of totalitarian government---the knock on the door in the middle of the night, and somebody disappears. Only they won't knock. Of what form of government is this act a patriot of? Where are Stalin and Pinochet when we need them?

If there's another terrorist attack, we'll probably find out. Just don't keep this column on your hard drive.

Meanwhile, the crashing sound of icebergs falling apart, the chainsaws and bulldozers and the drills cut the life out of the planet, the quiet dying of the last of their kind as species vanish forever.

Welcome to the Madness.

What To Do When the War Starts


War may be imminent, it may be delayed, but war is probably coming. If it does not, the growing global peace movement and demonstrations can rightly take the credit. But assuming it does, what then?

For however long it lasts, many people---and all politicians--- will feel that protest must quiet, in deference to the soldiers who are endangering their lives. As a practical matter, protestors risk seeing their message subsumed in a debate over the seemliness as well as the patriotic duty involved in protesting at such a moment.

Of course, if the war goes on for years as Vietnam did, the taboo weakens, though the emotions involved don't.

Apart from protest, there is much that those who oppose this war can do, and should do. Here are a few of my suggestions:

1. Pressure the press to report fully and accurately. The media will be under intense pressure to say what the Pentagon wants them to say. They've gotten fat and lazy with their inbred cynicism and their chirpy personae, and there seem to be fewer correspondents with journalism training, at least in the era that differentiated between reporting news and making commercials. Getting the real news will be hard, since the Pentagon will try to stop them. They will need relentless badgering and counterpressure to even get motivated.

Don't let them off the hook for a minute. They are acutely sensitive to viewer feedback, so get on their case relentlessly. It's your patriotic duty to have the truth, because we actually do care about the welfare of our soldiers, both in what they'll be facing and what damage it does to them for the rest of their lives.

2. Actively support organizations and efforts dedicated to mitigating the suffering of Iraq's people, particularly the children. Millions have already suffered and died because of sanctions. A report by the International Study Team, an organization comprised of academics, researchers and physicians, warns that thousands if not hundreds of thousands of children will be among a war's casualties.

Half a million children in Iraq are malnourished now. Efforts must be made to ensure that supply lines of food and medicines are established and maintained, and that refugees are supplied. The outlook is especially grim because, according to a doctor on the team, "No one is ready for this war. Not the national government [of Iraq], not the United Nations."

3. Pay close attention to the weapons used in this war and make your feelings known about the bombing of civilians and the use of depleted uranium in munitions such as shells, which as called DU weapons. This is low-level nuclear waste used to both pierce armor when used to tip bullets, and to shield against bullets when used in tank or bunker armor.

DU weapons create a burning radioactive cloud. The radioactivity of these weapons stays in the environment for 4.5 billion years. It's likely that DU weapons used in the last Iraq war is among the factors responsible for the marked increase in cancers there, including among children. The U.S. has done the usual Gulf War dance, promoting flawed studies as proof there's no link. American soldiers were also affected, and they will be again.

Summarizing the rationale for using them, a defense analyst said, "This is war, and a destroyed enemy tank is less dangerous than one that's shooting at you, regardless of whatever residual effects DU may have."

That's the logic of war, all right. Someone has to assert the logic of life. That someone is you.

At least some of us who protested in the Vietnam era learned what supporting our boys, our fighting men, really means. I wasn't very charitable towards my contemporaries who voluntarily went to Vietnam to fight, and I thought I had little in common with the veterans who came back. Until one day when I was hitchhiking on an interstate highway near an exit. Down the road I saw a soldier in uniform who was also hitching. I saw him see me, and he walked briskly toward me. I had long hair and was carrying a guitar case. I wasn't expecting this meeting to be friendly. But it was. He was happy to see me. He wanted to tell somebody, "You guys were right."

After 1969 or so, about the time that John Kerry returned from Vietnam to lead Vietnam Veterans Against the War, that kind of encounter was the norm, though it hadn't been before. But the fact that some veterans realized they'd been had is not what I learned. That was just the ice-breaker. I remember watching in horror the kind of treatment wounded vets were getting in veterans hospitals, as depicted in the movie, Fourth of July. I couldn't believe that the people who sent them over there would treat them like that when they came back. But that's the history of war. It happens just about every time.

The Vietnam vets had it the worst. But even the Gulf War vets who came back to official honors, were ignored when they started getting sick.

It's the message of every war poem, novel or film worth the name: the people who pay the price for war are the soldiers. Thanks to the unspeakable immorality of bombing civilian populations, wars of our age have many other victims, almost none of whom have much of a say in the decisions to go to war.

If we want to support our brothers and sons, our grandsons and now granddaughters, we must go to war in our own way, and fight for their health and well-being. If we can't stop the war, we can do our best to help the victims: soldiers on both sides, and the people and the children in harm's way.

A Different Agenda
Last fall, the press and politicians as well as scholars paid considerable attention to the 30th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. We'll see whether they will all take equal note this summer and fall of the 30th anniversary of the chief outcome of that crisis (apart from the continuing presence of human civilizations): the nuclear test ban treaty and the beginning of détente.

President Kennedy had begun pushing for such a treaty some six months before the missiles of October. The immediate focus was ending nuclear bomb tests in the atmosphere, and to encourage the Soviets to stop, Kennedy imposed a unilateral ban on such tests by the U.S. Eventually, not quite a year after the Cuban crisis, the two superpowers took this step.

Kennedy probably selected this step because the U.S. military could be convinced that the ban hurt the Soviets more than America (U.S. technology was suited to underground tests) and because the harm caused by fallout in the atmosphere was a present danger and easy to dramatize. Still, it wasn't an easy sell in the midst of the Cold War.

But clearly Kennedy considered it only a step. In one of his most important (and most ignored) speeches, at American University in June 1963 he made the definitive statement on the subject of peace of his generation.

He asked that we examine our attitude toward peace itself. "Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable, that mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces we cannot control."

And in the sentence that sums up Kennedy's core belief better than any other, he asserted: "Our problems are man-made; therefore they can be solved by man."

Kennedy asked for perspective. He called for nations to submit "their disputes to just and peaceful settlement. And history teaches us that enmities between nations do not last forever. However fixed our likes and dislikes may seem, the tide of time and events will often bring surprising changes in the relations between nations and neighbors."

Think of how the world has changed since 1963, particularly the relationship of the U.S. and the Soviet Union: Russia is almost an ally, while other nations in the former Soviet bloc are among the staunchest supporters of the U.S. now.

"So let us persevere," Kennedy said, in something of a reference to his own Inaugural call to action of "Let us begin."
"Peace need not be impracticable, and war need not be inevitable."

But the key statement in this speech for our time, for all time, is this: "There is no single, simple key to this peace, no grand or magic formula to be adopted by one or two powers. Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts. It must be dynamic, not static, changing to meet the challenge of each new generation. For peace is a process, a way of solving problems."

At a time when we are openly urged to wage war as an instrument of foreign policy, and covertly told it will be to our economic benefit (eight times the current yield of oil from Iraq), it is well to remember that it was once a political judgment of what is best for the American future as well as the moral statement by a President of the United States, that peace, not war, is a way of solving problems.

Peace is a process. It is a matter of choice. It is a hard, sometimes painful commitment. It requires effort, attention and self-knowledge. Marching for peace when war is threatened is a political necessity and part of the process. But marching and protesting alone are not enough.