Monday, December 23, 2019

A Ceremony to Commemorate Hiroshima: "Remember the past to commit oneself to the future."

(Originally published in August, 2012, as "Our Dark Beacon: Prayer Vigil for Hiroshima and Nagasaki" on the Protest Chaplains of Chicago blog.)




Water Tower Monument
Chicago, Illinois

August 5, 2012, 6:15 PM
(Corresponds to 8:15 AM in Japan, August 6th, the exact time of the first bomb and the time of most commemoration services.)


To remember the past
is to commit oneself to the future.
To remember Hiroshima
is to abhor nuclear war.

       -- Pope Paul II


ORDER OF SERVICE

Ringing of singing bowl twice (one for the bereaved families and one for the children)

Welcome and Opening Words by Joe Scarry from No Drones Network and Rev. Loren McGrail from Protest Chaplains of Chicago
O God, tender and just
the names of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
cut through our denial
that we are capable of destroying the earth
and all that dwell therein.
Forgive us---
and help us always to remember.
We must remember because this must never happen again.
We must remember because you would have us live
in harmony with each other,
seeing the joy of your creation in our
sisters and brothers.
Holy God, God of all ages,
lead us from death to life,
to the stockpiling of hope and possibilities, and of love
rather than the stockpiling of weapons, or of stones to throw,
or of hate.

Opening Ritual

(Lighting first candle and placing it in the fountain) Sixty-seven years ago tonight, morning in Japan, a single B-29 dropped the first atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. This incredible blast destroyed most of the city and killed over 60,000 people almost immediately. Another 80,000 more died in subsequent months and years from the deadly radiation.

(Lighting second candle and placing it in the fountain) Three days later, another B-29 dropped the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, killing about 20,000 people almost immediately and about 60,000 more in subsequent months and years from radiation.





From Mayor Matsui Kazumi’s Peace Declaration (2011)

“The time has come for the rest of us to learn from all the hibakusha and what they experienced and their desire for peace…

This description is from a woman who was sixteen at the time: “My forty-kilogram body was blown seven meters by the blast, and I was knocked out. When I came to, it was pitch black and utterly silent. In that soundless world, I thought I was the only one left. I was naked except for some rags around my hips. The skin on my left arm had peeled off in five-centimeter strips that were all curled up. My right arm was sort of whitish.

Putting my hands to my face, I found my right cheek quite rough while my left cheek was all slimy…Suddenly I heard lots of voices crying and screaming, ‘Help!’ ‘Mommy, help!’ Turning to a voice nearby I said, ‘I’ll help you.’ I tried to move in that direction but my body was so heavy. I did manage to move enough to save one young child, but with no skin on my hands, I was unable to help any more…’I’m really sorry…”


Now, we must communicate what we have learned to future generations and the rest of the world. Through this Peace Declaration, I would like to communicate the hibakusha experience and desire for peace to each and every person on this planet. Hiroshima will pour everything we have into working, along with Nagasaki, to expand Mayors for Peace such that all cities, those places around the world where people gather, will strive together to eliminate nuclear weapons by 2020…

The accident at Tokyo Electric Power Company’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station and the ongoing threat of radiation have generated tremendous anxiety among those in the affected areas and many others. The trust the Japanese people once had in nuclear power has been shattered. From the common admonition that “nuclear energy and humankind cannot coexist,” some seek to abandon nuclear power altogether.

Others advocate extremely strict control of nuclear power and increase utilization of renewable energy…

Message From Hiroshima

Dear all,

We appreciate very much the fact that you are holding a special gathering commemorating the dropping of the A-bomb on Hiroshima on August 6.

The nightmarish days following the Tsunami had nearly every person in Japan filled with fear of truly catastrophic scenarios, and actually the situation surrounding the Fukushima Nuclear Plants still remains very precarious and requires utmost caution.

Although one of the nuclear plants has been restarted, the mass demonstration of anger at the government’s decision is becoming more and more visible and intense. We hope these rising waves against nuclear power will be united around the globe so that we can advance steady steps toward creating a nuclear-free way of life.

On August 6 in Hiroshima, we are going to hold, beside many other events and conferences, the 9th NO DU gathering; this year we aim to draw people's attention to the fact that next March will mark the 10th anniversary of the start of Iraq War by announcing that we will hold a commemorative conference in Tokyo around mid-March next year in order to call into question again the military use of nuclear waste, that is, DU weapons, as a wedge problem relating to the whole nuclear cycle.

We hope you will join us in such reflection, too, and we wish you great success in your activities on August 6 and further on.

With friendship and solidarity,
Kazashi Nobuo
Director, International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons (ICBUW) Hiroshima Office

Song: This is My Song

Excerpts from Blessing the Bombs, a speech by Father George Zabelka

“The ethics of mass butchery cannot be found in the teachings of Jesus… What the world needs is a grouping of Christians that will stand up and pay up with Jesus Christ. What the world needs is Christians who, will proclaim: the follower of Christ cannot participate in mass slaughter. He or she must love as Christ loved, live as Christ lived and, if necessary, die as Christ died, loving ones enemies…

To fail to speak to the utter moral corruption of the mass destruction of civilians was to fail as a Christian and a priest. Hiroshima and Nagasaki happened in and to a world and a Christian Church that has asked for it---that has prepared the moral consciousness of humanity to do and justify the unthinkable…

As an Air Force chaplain, I painted a machine gun in the loving hands of the nonviolent Jesus and then handed this perverse picture to the world as truth. I sang, “Praise the Lord” and passed the ammunition…As Catholic Chaplain for the 509th composite Group, I was the final channel that communicated this fraudulent image of Christ to the crews of the Enola Gay and the Boxcar...”

Excerpts from The Drone Summit, the Lunchbox and the Invisibility of Charred Children by Hugh Gusterson

I kept thinking about the lunchbox.

The lunchbox belonged to a schoolgirl in Hiroshima. Her body was never found, but the rice and peas in her lunchbox were carbonized by the atomic bomb. The lunchbox, turned into an exhibition piece, became, in the words of historian Peter Stearns, "an intensely human atomic bomb icon."

The Smithsonian museum's plans to exhibit the lunchbox as part of its 1995 exhibit for the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II enraged military veterans and conservative pundits, who eventually forced the exhibit's cancellation.

Everyone knows, in the abstract at least, that the atom bomb killed thousands of children in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But any visual representation of this fact - even if done obliquely, through a lunchbox, rather than through actual pictures of charred children - was deemed out-of-bounds by defenders of the bombing.

Today, we must still make an enormous effort to bring forward visual representations of the victims of U.S. attacks, such as in the remote borderlands of Pakistan. Brave activists like the Pakistani lawyer Shahzad Akbar of the Foundation for Fundamental Rights -- a Pakistani lawyer who represents civilian victims of US drone strikes in Waziristan (a tribal area on Pakistan's border with Afghanistan) -- are making sure this happens.

In Japan after World War II, the US occupying authorities made it illegal for Japanese citizens to own any pictures of the aftermath of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. In Japan, Akbar would have been locked up by General MacArthur.

Excerpt from The Drone and the Bomb by Ed Kinane

“The lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki belong always before us. The agony of those two cities must remain our dark beacon.

Hiroshima/Nagasaki wasn’t so much about targets as about audiences. We---or rather, the very highest reaches of the U.S. government---annihilated a couple hundred thousand nameless, unarmed, undefended human beings to warn the world: “Don’t mess with us; we run things now…”

Afghanistan/Pakistan/Yemen echo Hiroshima/Nagasaki. With its new cutting edge technology, the Pentagon still trots out the old myth: the Reaper drone is all about “saving our boys’ lives.”

And Bomb-like, the Reaper proclaims: “If you defy us, wherever you are, we will hunt you down and kill you.” Déjà vu.

Like Japan’s hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties, the Reaper’s civilian casualties in Afghanistan/Pakistan/Yemen fail to matter. Few ask: What’s the human cost? What’s the blowback?”

Excerpt from Twilight of the Bomb a speech prepared by Jay Kvale

“This week an international conference on nuclear disarmament is being held in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to promote reductions in arsenals, given impetus by the stories of some of the last survivors of the bombings.

In addition to actual warheads, the problem of securing loose nuclear materials is also being addressed since 1,600 tons of enriched uranium and 500 tons of plutonium, enough to make tens of thousands of bombs, are still scattered around, mostly in the former Soviet Union…

Teams of specialists expect to have more than 80% of loose nuclear material from the world’s 129 research reactors secured by 2014…The Non-Proliferation Treaty has limited the number of nations with nuclear weapons to nine.”

Song: Lead Us From Death to Life (World Peace Prayer)

Litany of Remembrance

We remember each child born since the dawn of the Nuclear Age, the miracle and sacredness of each living being.

We remember the image of the first mushroom cloud of the Trinity atomic test rising above the earth in New Mexico.

We remember the words of Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Manhattan Project, “I have become death, the Destroyer of Worlds.”

We will remember “ Little Boy” and “Fat Man”---the bombs that destroyed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th and August 9th, 1945.

We remember the 300,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki who died as a result of the atomic bombs. May they rest in peace.

Sixty-seven years, the people of the earth remember the terrible destructive power and violence latent within us and made manifest in the bomb.

We will meet this power of destruction by drawing on the rich sources of our human and spiritual traditions and the deep wells of faith, beauty, humor, and creativity of the human spirit in order to nourish a culture of nonviolence and peace.

We will remember the cost to all life of our commitment to death.

We will remember the indigenous people, on whose land we mined for uranium, tested our nuclear weapons, and now fill our nuclear waste.

We will remember the plants and animals of the earth, whose waters, soil, and air we contaminate in the name of “security.”

We will remember our children and grandchildren and all beings of the future whose toxic radioactive inheritance we cannot keep from them.

We will remember our nuclear history so that we will not repeat it.


Closing Ritual

Children at the Yamazato elementary school in Nagasaki gather to commemorate the 1,300 students who were killed when the atomic bomb fell on their city. As part of their ceremony, they pour water on a stone monument symbolically quenching the thirst of the bomb’s victims and offering a prayer for their souls.

Tonight, we gather at this fountain in front of Chicago’s Water Tower, to remember not only those students but also all the people killed by these atomic bombs, all the civilians killed by our new drone weapons; we remember and pray for all their souls. You are invited to put your hands in the water---let it pour through your fingers in memory of all those whose thirst could not be quenched. In the fountain, you will also find some stones. You are invited to take one as a remembrance of these lives, of this day and your commitment to work for a nuclear free world and peace.


Liturgy for First Annual Prayer Vigil for Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Our Dark Beacon was created by Rev. Loren McGrail and Joe Scarry.

For more information on this service or other anti-war or militarism information or events contact:

Rev. Loren McGrail at lorenmcgrail [at] gmail.com or visit Protest Chaplains of Chicago on Facebook or go to Awake to Drones for writings on drone warfare and surveillance by area faith leaders.

Joe Scarry at jtscarry [at] yahoo.com for information on the No Drones Network.



WORSHIP RESOURCES

Cover Image by Laurence Hyde: woodcut print from the novel Southern Cross, a book about atomic testing in the Pacific

from Christian Prayer by Rev. Loey Powell, Justice and Witness Ministries of the United Church of Christ.

Excerpts from Mayor Matsui Kazumi’s Peace Declaration (2011).

Message from Hiroshima: Kazashi Nobuo, Director, International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons (ICBUW) Hiroshima Office.

Excerpts from The Drone Summit, the Lunchbox and the Invisibility of Charred Children by Hugh Gusterson at Truthout | Op-Ed.

Excerpts from Blessing the Bombs, a speech by Father George Zabelka, Catholic Chaplain for the 509th Composite Group, the atomic crew. Speech was given at Pax Christi conference in August 1985.

Excerpts from The Drone and the Bomb by Ed Kinane, an anti-militarism activist on Fellowship of Reconciliation’s website July 28, 2012.

Excerpts from Twilight of the Bomb a speech prepared by Jay Kvale for Hiroshima Commemoration ceremony at Lake Harriet Peace Garden in Minneapolis, August 6, 2012. Published on War is Crime.org.

Litany of Remembrance adapted from Pax Christi, St. Joseph’s Watford way, Hendon, London

Photograph of the Closing Ritual at the Chicago Water Tower, August 5, 2012, by Meghan Trimm, Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), Chicago

A Ceremony to Commemorate Hiroshima: "People Will Find the Way to Eliminate Nuclear Injury"

(Originally published in February, 2015, as "Good Friday 2015: People Will Find the Way to Eliminate Nuclear Injury" on the Chicago Nuclear Injury Action Group blog.)


Good Friday 2015 Walk for Justice in downtown Chicago:
Remembering the 70th anniversary year of the atomic
bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States.
(Image courtesy FJJ.)


Our new group participated in the April 3, 2015, Good Friday Justice Walk sponsored every year by the 8th Day Center for Justice in Chicago.

This year's theme was "Give Light and People Will Find the Way." We hosted Station 6: "Falling."

Below is our prayer, followed by references about the sources we used.


Reader 1: The 70th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki falls this year. Despite the facts of nuclear injury -- which are undisputed and taught in every school – we allow our government to maintain an arsenal of nuclear weapons on alert, capable of destroying the world at the flip of a switch.

Why do we allow this?

Is it that we don't know? Or that we are unwilling to see?

Response (all): Awaken our hearts. Give us hearts capable of seeing.

from Hiroshima No Pika
Reader 1: The testimony of thousands of people about the reality of atomic bombing is preserved in books, art, and film. These materials are available in every library in the United States. Listen to these words from popular children's books . . . .

Reader 2: "There were crowds of people fleeing the fire. Mii saw children with their clothes burned away, lips and eyelids swollen. They were like ghosts, wandering about, crying in weak voices. Some people, all their strength gone, fell face down on the ground, and others fell on top of them. There were heaps of people everywhere."
[p. 14, Hiroshima No Pika [The Flash of Hiroshima], by Toshi Maruki]

Response (all): We see you have fallen. We don't have the strength to lift you up. But we will not turn our backs on you.

Reader 3: "Every school became a hospital for the badly injured. I heard people screaming and moaning in pain, and there was a horrible smell of burnt skin."

[p. 24, My Hiroshima, by Junko Morimoto]

Response (all): We can hear you are in pain. We can smell your injuries. We don't have the power to restore your health. But we will NOT forget you.

Shin's Tricycle
Reader 4: "I stumbled over our fallen house and found Mother digging in the rubble. There was Shin, pinned under a big beam. He was too weak to talk but his hand still held the red handlebar grip from his tricycle. That night he died, ten days before his fourth birthday."
[p. 15-20, Shin's Tricycle, by Tatsuharu Kodama; Noriyuki Ando, ill. ]

Response (all): We will keep Shin's tricycle. We will remember Shin.

Reader 2: "Mii watched as her mother examined her father. 'He's hurt badly,' she said. She untied the sash from her kimono and wrapped it around her husband's body as a bandage. Then she did something amazing. She lifted him onto her back and, taking Mii by the hand, started running."


Response (people on the right): Who will lift us up?
Response (people on the left): We are living in the dust of the nuclear threat.
Response (all): Help us lift each other up, for we cannot rise alone from the dust.

Response (people on the right): How will we see the way?
Response (people on the left): The truth has been hidden by smoke and ash.
Response (all): Give light and people will find the way.

Reader 4: "Maybe if enough people could see Shin's tricycle, they would remember that the world should be a peaceful place where children can play and laugh."

[p. 30, Shin's Tricycle]

Response (all): Thank you, Tatsuharu Kodama, for giving light. The people will find the way.

Junko Morimoto
Reader 3: "War, the atomic bomb . . . They are the crimes of adults who forget the precious value of life. I believe it is the duty and the responsibility of adults to teach our children the importance of not repeating these mistakes and to give them the heart to care for and value all life on earth."

[afterward, My Hiroshima]

Response (all): Thank you, Junko Morimoto, for giving light. The people will find the way.

Reader 2: "Every year on August 6 the people of Hiroshima inscribe the names of loved ones who died because of the bomb on lanterns. The lanterns are lit and set adrift on the seven rivers that flow through Hiroshima. The rivers flow slowly to the sea, carrying the lanterns in memory of those who died."


Response (all): Thank you, people of Hiroshima, for giving light. The people will find the way.



Annual commemoration of the bombing of Hiroshima.


About Hiroshima No Pika [The Flash of Hiroshima], by Toshi Maruki

Hiroshima No Pika on Amazon

Maruki Toshi (1912-2000) and Maruki Iri (1901-1995)

Maruki Gallery for the Hiroshima Panels

About Shin's Tricycle, by Tatsuharu Kodama (Noriyuki Ando, ill.)

Shin's Tricycle on Amazon

Shin's tricycle in the Hiroshima Peace Museum

About My Hiroshima, by Junko Morimoto

My Hiroshima on Amazon

"80 year old artist paints the horror of atomic bombing live"

Sunday, December 22, 2019

A Response to "The Wall" (a.k.a "the Separation Barrier")

During my time in Chicago, an annual tradition was the Good Friday Justice Walk.

In 2014, the group of Palestine solidarity activists I worked with did a project to help people learn about and imagine the impact of the Wall (also known as the Separation Barrier) in Israel.

Palestinians and visitors from throughout the world have added their own street art, graffiti, and public art to the Wall, as a sign of protest, an invitation to peace, and a critique of the lack of global intervention. Our project consisted of making a series of posters that replicate the art on the Wall. Here's an example:





(I first became sensitized to the importance of wall-art-that-protests-the-wall -- the power of art to demand a new, liberated reality -- in an essay my sister wrote about the Berlin Wall in the late 1980s.)

I have posted photos of the other wall boards we created below.

When placed side-by-side, the boards created a replica (in miniature) of the barrier wall:


"The Women Weep" in the shadow of the containment wall
34th Annual 8th Day Good Friday Justice Walk in Chicago


You can read about the project on the blog of the ELCA Metro Chicago Synod Working Group on the the Middle East.

The project had important "before" and "after" aspects, too.

Making the boards was half the fun. Check out these photos of the "Wall" sign board painting workshops - March and April 2014

. . . and . . . several months after the event, Chicago area readers of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) publication The Lutheran got to read about the project in that publication (see image at right).

In 2015, I had a chance to see the barrier wall in person. It left me with an ineradicable determination that every Christian needs to become devote to the in-this-world work of liberation.


Resistance art on the wall -- Aida refugee camp, Palestine


Full set of photos
The Wall: posters created by the ELCA Metro Chicago Synod Working Group on the the Middle East for the Good Friday Justice Walk in Chicago in 2014.



"Now that I've seen it I'm responsible for it."


"U.S. aid: injustice anywhere is a threat
to justice everywhere. (MLK Jr.)"







"The wall is lame."






"An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind."


Hope





"ctrl + alt + del ... Forgive what you have done? ... ICAHD 2008"










"A country is not only what it does. It is also
what it tolerates. Kurt Tucholsky 1933"


"War is not the answer."


"Your heart is a weapon the size of your fist.
Keep fighting.
Keep loving."


"I am not a terrorist."

Saturday, December 21, 2019

Drones: Am I Responsible?


His slowly scanning magnifying lens,
A blurry, glistening circle he suspends
Above the word 'Carnation'. Then he bends

So near his eyes are magnified and blurred,
One finger on the miniature word,
As if he touched a single key and heard

A distant, plucked, infinitesimal string,
"The obligation due to every thing
That' s smaller than the universe." ...


- from "Supernatural Love" by Gjertrud Schnackenberg

I think that the most important question in any conversation about drones is, "What is my responsibility to think and care about this?" Until we address the question of responsibility, we haven't begun to establish a frame for the conversation. Are we talking about drones out of passing curiosity? Or because it's in the newspaper, so we're "supposed to" talk about it? Or out of some of true sense of obligation and responsibility?

In the past, I have found it appropriate to feel responsibility for U.S. warmaking on the grounds that the killing and injury are being done "in my name." In other words, I am required to act as a matter of "citizen responsibility."

As I have reflected on the words of the Apostle's Creed, it has become clear to me that the real response-ability that we should be talking about is that which comes in response to God's affirming relationship toward us. If, indeed, I believe that "my Lord ... has redeemed me, a lost and condemned creature, purchased and won [delivered] me from all sins, from death, and from the power of the devil, not with gold or silver, but with His holy, precious blood and with His innocent suffering and death ...." then the parameters of what I am responsive to -- and responsible for -- must transcend a legalistic notion of what accrues to me as a U.S. citizen.

If one doesn't believe God's entry into the world is literal and in-the-flesh -- but rather some kind of abstract relationship -- much less if one has no conception of any kind to tie one to the the rest of humanity -- it becomes very hard to get beyond a concept of responsibility that is narrow and legalistic: "Well, how much, REALLY, did anything I did contribute to this situation? Isn't my responsibility, if any, infinitesimal?"

On the other hand, however, to say that we are responsible for EVERYTHING is not terribly helpful, either -- in effect, it conveys no information.

I would suggest, therefore that effective criteria of what I am to be responsive to and responsible for might include:
* Does something need to be done?

* CAN I do something?

* Am I uniquely situated to do something?
With respect to the last of these, Rabbi Alissa Wise points to an important concept in helping us think about when it is that we are well-situated to make a difference. "Tochecha [sacred rebuke] is about our obligation to tell someone when they have done or are currently straying and behaving wrongly – whether to us, or to another. What’s more, tochecha requires us also to engage with those we are rebuking and assist them and support them in the repair of the wrong you are calling out." (See Israel Palestine Mission Network, God Is In This Place.)

In a pre-modern world, the answers to these questions could be expected to be quite close at hand. (It had to do with physical proximity and a relatively limited set of possible social relationships.)

Corpus of Christ, Spanish, Catalonia (Banyoles),
13th century Art Institute of Chicago.
Today, the field of action is much larger: it is global. Let's face it: "today" can be thought of as having started once we began having empires, i.e. from Rome onward. The question, in effect, becomes "Where are they crucifying people?" and then, "Mustn't I be there?"

It was in the imperial context that, as Pastor Erik Christensen has pointed out, we can see "the early Church’s emerging understanding of who Jesus was in relation to God." Thus, Paul wrote to the church in Philippi, "Jesus Christ ... though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death -- even death on a cross" (Philippians 2:6-8). We see this crystallized in places such as Mark's gospel: "For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many" (Mark 10:45).

(I found echoes of this in Rabbi Wise's statement of faith in "God Is In This Place": "God is the impulse in me to serve the Other out of a sense of responsibility that stems from the Source of redemption.")

Does theology (e.g. the Creed) help make choices about responsibility? Does it move us effectively from the "something oughta be done" stage ... through the "I can do something" stage ... up to and including the "I am doing something" stage?

A possible way to test whether this particular theological way of thinking is helpful is to consider some other situations of killing and injury, not just the killing and injury being done with drones. For instance, what if one were to consider suicide attacks, such as those reported September 2 in the New York Times?

For both drone attacks and suicide attacks, one might ask:
* Does something need to be done?

* CAN I do something?

* Am I uniquely situated to do something?
As we think about and discuss issues such as distancing ... authority, collateral damage, and pre-emptive violence ... surveillance ... and technology in the days and weeks ahead, perhaps we can compare and contrast these two distinct types of killing and injury to help us clarify our thinking.




Read all the posts in this series:

Drones: Am I Responsible? (this post)
Drones vs. Up-Close-and-Personal Reality
Confronting Drone Killing: Is God Urging Us to "Risk It"?
Ending Drone Killing: The Spirit Is Moving
Series intro: Do You Know What You Believe? (The Apostle's Creed as a Focus for Thinking About Drones)

(Originally published in September, 2012, as "Drones: Am I Responsible?" on the Awake to Drones blog.


Related post

"Because of the intensified division of labor," the narrator explains, "many technicians and scientists can no longer recognize the contribution the have made to weapons of destruction." "Our department extracts lareic, oleic, and naptha acids . . . . "  "I'm a chemist. What should I do? If I develop a substance, it can be good for humanity . . . ."  "Besides napalm, Dow Chemical produces 800 other products . . . ." Does this familiar to you?

(See American Fire: Still Spreading, Still Inextinguishable)

Drones vs. Up-Close-and-Personal Reality

My sewing needle close enough that I
Can watch my father through the needle's eye,
As through a lens ground for a butterfly


- from "Supernatural Love" by Gjertrud Schnackenberg

Obtaining "distance" from where war and injury is happening seems like a desirable objective, and drones have been championed precisely because they put members of the U.S. military (and, all the moreso, the rest of us) at the greatest possible distance from where the actually injury is taking place. What does a confession of faith suggest about this view?

Having gained some clarity on responsibility ... and knowing the right question to ask ("Where are they crucifying people?") ... it becomes very important to ask "What obstructs our understanding?"

As Jack Lawlor has written, "Drone warfare is the apex of misperception," and overcoming misperception is central to a Buddhist approach to the question of how to live.

I see tremendous resonance with this view within Christianity, particularly with the idea that, yes, there are aspects of our world that are "out of joint" -- we call this phenomenon sin -- but that our response to this out-of-jointness is not to flee, but instead to get up close and personal, and see what's really going on there.


Sadao Watanabe, "Jesus Washing St. Peters Feet"
 

It has always been somewhat perplexing to me what Luther meant when he said, "my Lord ... has redeemed me, a lost and condemned creature, purchased and won [delivered] me from all sins, from death, and from the power of the devil, not with gold or silver, but with His holy, precious blood and with His innocent suffering and death ...." What exactly does "redeeming" mean here? I can (sort of) understand a kind of exchange -- symbolically -- but what exchange, what transaction is really understood to have taken place?

For me, this discussion gives clarity to the notion that "getting up close and personal" is necessary if there is to be any hope of getting a right understanding of others -- of not just abandoning ourselves to an acceptance of the sinfulness and unknowableness of others. And, of course, that "getting up close and personal" carries risk at all times, and, ultimately, results in in-this-world death.

Redemption. At a price.

Lest anyone think that I have become too detached from the here-and-now of the conflicts in which drones are used, consider two recent articles from the New York Times.

In an op-ed entitled, "A Pointless Blacklisting," Alex Strick van Linschoten discusses the recent designation of the Haqqani network as a "terrorist" organization, pointing out that this prevents us from talking to them -- the one thing that would offer any hope of moving away from a relationship based on nothing but conflict and death. In fact, "[t]he head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Michael T. Flynn, said in 2010 that the group’s leader, Jalaluddin Haqqani, was “absolutely salvageable” and open to reconciliation." But defining him as a "terrorist" makes dialog off limits. Thus "[t]he current war effort relies heavily on drones and night raids in Afghanistan and Pakistan." The result? "[T]hese tactics often increase radicalization and enmity."


Carl Dix, "Ecce Homo"


I see these ideas being explicitly adopted by at least some thinkers in the government and military. As discussed in "How Resilient Is Post-9/11 America?", there is growing interest in the idea that real-world effectiveness -- especially including in military conflict -- depends on a characteristic called "resilience" in the face of hard-to-understand behavior and phenomena. "The best weapon against terror is refusing to be terrorized." When we encounter sin, do we retreat and become "brittle and clumsy and counterproductive"? Or do we find the inner resources to move closer and find hope in humanity?

I disagree with the notion that the military framework can be made a resounding success through greater "resiliency," but I do agree that we need to recognize and work against our natural, sinful tendency to turn everyone into the enemy. For instance: "The Homeland Security Department is trying to enlist the public’s help with a program called 'If You See Something, Say Something,' which urges citizens to report unusual behavior to authorities. Well-meaning, perhaps, but officials must offer more practical guidance to avoid creating “a climate of spying,” homeland security specialists say."

By now, we have all been exposed to stories of how military pilots and drone operators begin to see people as less than human. (I talked about this in a blog post called Drone Victims: Just Dots? Just Dirt?) But isn't drone use having the same effect on all of us? Nick Mottern, director of Know Drones, a program of public education about drone surveillance and drone killing, has said that drone use is the linchpin of an effort by our government to "systematically deprive us of empathy." I can think of no better way to sum up why the distancing that is brought about by drones is unacceptable - to a confessing Christian, or to anybody else.


Read all the posts in this series:

Drones: Am I Responsible?
Drones vs. Up-Close-and-Personal Reality (this post)
Confronting Drone Killing: Is God Urging Us to "Risk It"?
Ending Drone Killing: The Spirit Is MovingSeries intro: Do You Know What You Believe? (The Apostle's Creed as a Focus for Thinking About Drones)

(Originally published in September, 2012, as "Drones vs. Up-Close-and-Personal Reality" on the Awake to Drones blog.


Note on Ecce Homo by Carl Dix: Dix’s works were based on religious allegories or depictions of post-war suffering. A veteran himself of WWI, Dix was latter drafted into Hitler’s Volkssturm during WWII and was eventually captured by the French and later released. Most of his latter works had a religious basis. Ecce Homo is one of thirty-three images Dix created in a suite called Matthaüs Evangelium, which accompanied the Martin Luther New Testament. Ecce Homo are the Latin words used by Pontius Pilate in the Vulgate translation of the John 19:5, when he presents a scourged Jesus Christ, bound and crowned with thorns, to a hostile crowd shortly before his Crucifixion. The King James Version of the Bible translates the phrase into English as “behold the man.”

Confronting Drone Killing: Is God Urging Us to "Risk It"?

To read what's buried there, he bends to pore
Over the Latin blossom. I am four,
I spill my pins and needles on the floor

Trying to stitch "Beloved" X by X.
My dangerous, bright needle's point connects
Myself illiterate to this perfect text


- from "Supernatural Love" by Gjertrud Schnackenberg

Before she left for Pakistan to participate in the Code Pink delegation, my friend JoAnne Lingle, from Indianapolis, told me, "We want to reach out to the people there to show that we care about their lives; we want to show the American public how civilians are being targeted by drones; we want to come back to the US and tell the stories of drone victims. Our larger goal is to stop the drone strikes." (Read more at My visits to Pakistan and Kurdistan.)

Map of U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan
I find this in stark contrast to the attitude implicit in the official U.S. approach to much of the Mideast and South Asia: "We're going to go over there and get them before they come here and get us."

And, in fact, in the last week the newspaper has seemed to be especially filled with stories about people "getting" each other - "getting" people who were too liberal, "getting" people who were suppressing liberation, "getting" people who were acting suspicious . . . and on and on . . . .

Each of these accounts or characterizations is steeped in violence, and corresponding to each of these accounts or characterizations, there is a worldview that explains the utility, justification, and/or desirability -- indeed, the extreme praiseworthiness -- of that violence.

I believe the significant feature of the faith that Christians confess when they recite the Apostle's Creed is that it forces us to confront the question: why doesn't God deal with us violently? If ever there was a utility or justification for destroying someone or something, it is the implacable, stubborn imperfection present in people. Why doesn't God just get rid of the lot of us? Why, instead, does God choose to get "up close and personal" with us, meeting us where we are, in our own sinful, mortal bodies?

In other words, I believe that God sees another way forward for us, even when all we can imagine is "going over there and getting them before they come here and get us." Even when, in our desperation, all we can imagine is throwing our own life away in order to offer a glint of hope to comrades combating a brutal regime. Even when all we can imagine is venting our rage on people who threaten us with painful social change: them, their families, and anyone who helps them. Even when we build a towering military establishment dedicated to destroying entire other cultures, as long as it keeps "them" over "there" where they can't possibly ever bring harm "here" to "us."

God shows us that other way, and it involves trying to walk together, and eschewing violence.


During the Code Pink peace delegation to Pakistan:
A sunset march through Jinnah Market with the student
group of PTI in Islamabad followed by a candlelight vigil.


What God is strangely silent about, by the way, is death! Often, we make an idol of life itself. We become trapped in the worship of our own guaranteed well-being. Think about it: extreme aversion to being harmed inherently translates into measures to pre-empt harm, at any cost, and no matter if they are marginally effective (or even counterproductive!).

Conversely, if you believe in a God who accepts the reality of the human experience, even death, then it suddenly seems ridiculous to hold as a value the prevention of harm at any cost. It's immediately apparent that God wants us to take the risk to get near our fellow humans and interact with them, hear them, negotiate with them, engage in diplomacy with them .... even if we're not 100% guaranteed of success!


Read all the posts in this series:

Drones: Am I Responsible?
Drones vs. Up-Close-and-Personal RealityConfronting Drone Killing: Is God Urging Us to "Risk It"? (this post)
Ending Drone Killing: The Spirit Is Moving
Series intro: Do You Know What You Believe? (The Apostle's Creed as a Focus for Thinking About Drones)

(Originally published in October, 2012, as "Ending Drone Killing: The Spirit Is Moving" on the Awake to Drones blog.)


For more photos from Pakistan, see the Code Pink delegation photo site. And be sure to read JoAnne Lingle's full account of her trip!

Ending Drone Killing: The Spirit Is Moving

Carnatio, the Latin, meaning flesh."
As if the bud's essential oils brush
Christ's fragrance through the room, the iron-fresh

Odor carnations have floats up to me,
A drifted, secret, bitter ecstasy,
The stems squeak in my scissors, Child, it's me,

- from "Supernatural Love" by Gjertrud Schnackenberg
We are inevitably asked to accept injury to innocents as an unavoidable consequence of a goal that is considered very important. Assuming for the moment that we accept the "very important goal" ... what does a confession of faith clarify about such "collateral damage"?

People who absolutely reject violence, in general, and/or reject drone killing, specifically, find the problem of collateral damage to have an obvious solution: it's wrong and the actions leading to it should be stopped.

The solution to the problem is much less obvious to those who think there are ends that can and should be attained using violence. A recent exchange on the "Morning Joe" about drone strikes between Joe Scarborough and Time columnist Joe Klein put a fine point on this difficulty:
"This is offensive to me, though," Scarborough said. "It seems so antiseptic. It seems so clean. And yet you have four-year-old girls being blown to bits ... this is going to cause the U.S. problems in the future."

"The bottom line in the end is whose four-year-old gets killed?" Klein responded.

"Does that matter?" Scarborough said.

"What we're doing is limiting the possibility that four-year-olds here will get killed by indiscriminate acts of terror," Klein concluded.
Note: "limiting the possibility that four-year-olds here will get killed"!

Though the assertion that "the bottom line in the end is whose four-year-old gets killed" is abhorrent to me, I must recognize that it neatly sums up the point on which a great many people experience a failure of understanding. To some people -- Joe Klein, for instance, in the example above -- it is as obvious that some four-year-olds matter as it is that some others do not.

I came back from a conference on drones in April, 2012, determined to increase people's understanding of drone killing. I believed that they didn't know that young children were being killed, and I assumed that I could arouse their awareness by providing visceral images. As I worked at this, I came to recognize that there are many possible pathways to understanding, and many different obstacles, and that different kinds of information and different levels of stimulus are required for different people.

Do Christian beliefs help us to find a way to address this?

When I think about the difficulties that people experience in understanding -- in understanding the world around them, and notions like justice, and ultimately in discerning God's will -- and the hope of surmounting those difficulties, I think about the meaning of the expression "the Holy Spirit." The Apostles' Creed includes the words, "I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Christian church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting." My understanding of the Apostle's Creed is that the Holy Spirit includes all those ways that God becomes known to us -- through the Bible, for instance, and but also through people - including Christian people ("the holy Christian church," which I understand to be cognate with "the communion of saints") but, perhaps more importantly, simply through people in general.

Consider, for instance, the witness provided by Nick Mottern, director of the Know Drones project, describing an encounter during one of his presentations during a tour of Ohio and Pennyslvania.
In the late afternoon of September 20, 2012, in Room 101 of Maginnes Hall at Leigh University, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, a young woman student from Yemen touched off a blast of reality that startled and sobered 50 or so of her fellow students and townspeople attending a talk I was giving about US drone attacks and surveillance. Paraphrased, she said:

“I get the feeling that there are those in this room who value American lives much more than the lives of other people in the world. I am from Yemen. I am a city girl, but I live not far from a village where I have family members and where US drones killed 40 people who were doing nothing but minding their daily business. The people in the village have no idea why this happened, they know nothing of al-Qaeda; they are trying to sue the United States.”

After she spoke, there were other comments and questions, but her words hung in the air, a stark personal, undeniable witness to the fact that yes, US drone attacks are killing people and creating great suffering. For all of us there, drone killing now had a face, and the United States stood convicted. At the end of the Q & A, people went up to her to talk and to say they were sorry for what is happening; several, including me, gave her a hug and more thanked her for speaking out.

The woman, with a sweet, friendly disposition, speaking in a soft, direct but extremely firm way, crystallized what appears to be the main reason that the American public is so accepting of drone wars – that is, the widely-held feeling that Americans are exceptional.
(Excerpted from Challenging Dronotopia, available soon on the Know Drones website.)

Why does it take someone from the country affected in order for these killings to become understandable. Why do we only begin to understand when the killings "have a face"?


""Absence" by Jane Norling


This helps remind me of one of the meanings of "sin" -- of human frailty: that, for all our pretensions, we are beings who are capable of only very limited amounts of abstraction. To relate this to the Apostles' Creed: we are not capable of clearly discerning God's will through our belief in God the Father alone. The meaning of Jesus Christ is that humans needed something more "up close and personal" to shake their consciousness'. And -- dare I say it? -- Jesus Christ (narrowly defined as that man who lived in Palestine 2000 years ago) isn't enough unless we open ourselves to the continual and every-present impact of God and Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit, acting to continuously break through the human fog.


"At a local school"
(from the Code Pink Pakistan delegation)


The Holy Spirit is moving in the testimony of people like Nick Mottern and the woman from Yemen at Lehigh.

The Holy Spirit is moving in the testimony of people like JoAnne Lingle and her colleagues in the Code Pink peace delegation that went to Pakistan, and the stories of the people they met there.

The Holy Spirit is moving in the work of the many artists who contributed to the exhibit Windows and Mirrors: Reflections on the War in Afghanistan.

And our awareness of the movement of the Holy Spirit is only just beginning.

I predict that when we finally extract ourselves from the hell that we have waded into with drones, we will look back and realize that we didn't "think" our way out of this problem, but that we "opened" our way out of it -- and that God met us in our opening up.


Read all the posts in this series:

Drones: Am I Responsible?
Drones vs. Up-Close-and-Personal Reality
Confronting Drone Killing: Is God Urging Us to "Risk It"?Ending Drone Killing: The Spirit Is Moving (this post)
Series intro: Do You Know What You Believe? (The Apostle's Creed as a Focus for Thinking About Drones)

(Originally published in October, 2012, as "Ending Drone Killing: The Spirit Is Moving" on the Awake to Drones blog.)

Steven Spielberg's "Munich" and My Munich ... and the Ring Road to Hell

(Originally published in July, 2010, as "Munich and the Ring Road to Hell" on the Compassionate Nation blog.)

They kill one of ours. So we kill one of theirs. That's the way it works -- isn't it?




I just watched Steven Speilberg's movie Munich again. It's the film about a group of Israeli assassins taking revenge on the people (ostensibly) behind the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich.

The first time I saw the film, when it first came out, I found it exciting, poignant, and at the same time troubling. Watching it again, now with the benefit of recent efforts to think about how justice is administered, I felt sickened.

The film is a 2 hour plus meditation on a topic I discussed in a previous blog post -- the nearly insurmountable human impulse to say "They've hurt us so now we're going to hurt them." It is noteworthy that the film contains many references to the moral and legal obstacles to non-judicial retribution. For instance, at one point in the film, a member of the team of assassins points out that, "In Israel, we do not have the death penalty!" In other words, how can it make sense to carry out extrajudicial executions (assassinations) when your community's well-reasoned position is that execution (judicially killing) is unacceptable?

Another moment that jumped out at me is the point immediately after the events in Munich, when a member of the Israeli military argues for a different approach: "We've sent in the jets to bomb their military positions. That's a response!" It reminded me the degree to which the fundamental question we face is "Events have occurred ... without question, we must respond ... but what should our response be?" (viz. "The Response")

People can differ about whether Speilberg struck the right balance between thriller and morality tale in this film. The more important fact is that he made the film and it holds lessons for us today.

For instance: how are the actions of the team of assassins in "Munich," carrying out extrajudicial assassinations, different than the United States government's use of drone strikes to remotely kill our nation's enemies?

Violence is viral . . . violence begets violence.




Some years ago, I had the opportunity to visit Munich. I was driving while my friend navigated from a very simple map I had photocopied from a book. We managed to get on the ring road around the city, from which one of the main sights that can be seen is the Olympic Stadium. We had trouble figuring out where to exit to get into the city proper -- can't you read a map? you call this a map? -- and by the time we passed the Olympic Stadium the second time, tempers started to flare. We eventually made it to our hotel . . . but Munich and the Olympic Stadium have forever after, for me, stood for the proposition that going around in circles, stuck in the same rut and fighting about it, is a peculiar Hell that only humans could be capable of contriving.

Is the Opposite of Violence Non-Violence? Or Is It Compassion?

(Originally published in July, 2010, as "The Opposite of Violence Is . . . ?" on the Compassionate Nation blog.)

If you embrace the proposition that might doesn't make right, you are led to the question, "What, exactly, is our idea of how to govern?" Or, more broadly, "What is the way that we want our nation to conduct itself -- to "be" in the world?"

I found some provocative thoughts on this subject in a book by Mark Kurlansky, Nonviolence: Twenty-five Lessons from the History of a Dangerous Idea. The entire book is well-worth reading and thinking about. (A lesson a day for a month . . . ?) However, the lesson that stopped me in my tracks was Lesson #23.




Lesson #23 says "Violence is a virus that infects and takes over." This struck me as a very powerful truth; indeed, the peculiar characteristic of violence is that it always "infects" the victim with the desire to retaliate. Hence the tendency for violence to lead to more violence.

Perhaps the viral nature of violence is a remnant of our primordial nature, an impulse to telegraph the message, "Don't mess with me!!!" Certainly, when you think of it in terms of signaling, it becomes apparent why violence is so contagious -- it is far less important that retaliation or revenge be specific to the act or actor that provoked it; all that matters is that the message "Don't mess with me!!!" gets broadcast widely. Moreover, there is a degree to which we are inclined to engage in "scary" violence more than "lethal" violence. Like a true virus, violence evolves successfully when it avoids killing its host.

When I thought about Lesson #23, the viral nature of violence, I was forced to confront a problem: I wonder if "non-violence" per se -- that is, measured restraint -- has the same viral power as violence itself. Are we impelled by our inner instincts to emulate non-violent behavior in the same way that we are impelled to retaliate in the face of violence?

As I cast about for an alternative that has some of the psychological power of violence, I landed on "compassion." It seems to me that compassion is something that, once experienced, tends to become contagious. The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that compassion has a gentle viral power on both the person exercising compassion, as well as on the receiver of compassion. To be sure, it is an impulse with different characteristics than the violence impulse. Nonetheless, there is no disputing that there are large numbers of people in the world who have felt the inner sensations generated by the practice of intentional compassion take over their lives, and those around them, in a viral way.

So . . . perhaps in the intentional practice of compassion we have a viable alternative to "might makes right" and violence. Can a government be "compassionate"? What might the differences be between the way individuals experience compassion, and the way compassion is enacted by governments?


Related post

A virus is able to be so successful precisely because it (most of the time) doesn't kill its host. I can't help thinking that we simply are not being intelligent about how to respond to violence. How might recognizing the "viral" nature of violence help us to respond to it more intelligently?

(See Violence: Taking Over Like a Virus)