New Quaker Notebook

It's Spring Break season and President Bush is just frolicking about as he follows the violence in Basra and parts of Baghdad. He would splash beer on himself if he could convince Laura to unlock the White House cooler.

Why, just today he said that it was "a defining moment in the history of Iraq." Or maybe he was thinking about the US airstrikes and the "collateral damage." In any case, it was all good and a must-do affair. He said:

"Any government that presumes to represent the majority of people must confront criminal elements or people who think they can live outside the law."

Was he talking about al-Maliki's government in Iraq, or about the US Congress? I can't wait for that War Crimes Tribunal. If I were a drinking man, I would be splashing beer all over myself too.

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Everyone, please, get out of the street. If there's anything worth fighting, it's the urge to start marching up and down in opposition to the war—any war, really. Not only does it not work, but it serves only as an effective distraction from real tactics we have to embrace in order to change the hearts and minds of Americans, away from violence as a first solution, toward a myriad of other strategies for resolving conflicts.

When we talk about peace and war (as opposed to war and peace), we tend, I think, to cast these large, opposing categories into false abstractions: war as conflicts among nations, peace as the cessation of these conflicts. Such is the depiction of the tension between the two in any street march by members of any generation in American history. Marching are those typically rallying for peace; opposing them, usually quite angrily, are those who typically want the opposite. (I know we've also had the occasional marches in support of war, but that isn't our norm.) We can pick any generation in American history because there isn't an American generation that has not lived through at least one national/international war/conflict.

Violence in America, as with the American penchant for perpetrating violence in neighboring countries, is a social problem. As a social problem, it is a problem of education. If we are going to make any headway toward alternatives to violence (as opposed to the false hope called "solutions to violence"), we first have to recognize that there really are alternatives to violence, that there are alternative ways of resolving conflicts that do not require physical contact, let alone a violent end. This means acknowledging that plans to militarize our high schools will succeed in embracing violence as a favored strategy without at the same time edifying nonviolent alternatives to the very conflicts that have attracted the military solutions. If we teach only one way, surely we will get very good at doing it one way. Our soldiers may be more lethal, and more so at a younger age, but not at all possessed of a greater wisdom. If we want to have our students learn to think for themselves, we ought also to give them the thoughts that have worked in resolving conflicts without violence, without war, without torture, without failing to see our enemies as humans from another of life's many perspectives.

Forget the silly battles over teaching evolution in public schools. I don't mean that the controversy over the teaching of evolution is silly in itself, but it is silly in relation to our finding strategies for promoting nonviolent conflict-resolution and for the worthy preservation of human life that would result if we put our energies into ensuring that our students are taught thoughtful cultural studies, history, and studying conflicts that have been concluded as a consequence of diplomacy, discussion, debate, and reasonable argumentation.

Flipping through the TV last week, I happened to start with a dreadful contemporary motion picture that featured an argument which ended in the usual bloody fist-fight, and then I moved to a PBS channel that was playing a 1940-ish black-and-white movie in which the main characters had a dispute that ended with the actual use of words (actually, some really sprightly dialogue). I realized that it was a long time since I'd watched a movie with good conflict-dialogue, in which the characters go back and forth verbally and yet end up resolving their issues without recourse to punching each other out (or shooting each other, or blowing up cars). I know Hollywood has a long history of offering fisticuffs movies (featuring gangsters, cowboys, soldiers, Robocops, etc.), but I suspect there was a preponderance of good conflict dialog in earlier films, and it is less so today. I look forward to the day when we can revive the verbal dispute, if only so we can remember that disputes don't have to end with the disputants rolling around on the ground.

I know I've told this story before, but it's a good one and I like to share. When I was a drinking man in New Orleans, I was at dinner with friends one evening and a doctor friend of mine and I were drinking Scotch and a couple of his friends came over and sat down with us to drink. They were retired Hollywood actors, now living in the same upscale subdivision we lived in. One of the men introduced himself as a "why-you" character in Westerns. I asked him what a "why-you" guy was and he explained that his character was the one standing at the bar in a saloon and as soon as he was insulted, he would snarl "Why, you!" as he drew his six-gun. His character was usually shot dead, but it was a living.

As Christians, the end of violence should be our first choice if we're going to pick our controversies, as our first choice for contentious disputation. This is something that will take us from the medieval mind-set, such as we find in the Cheney-Bush administration, toward real civilization, realizing at least the kind of love for our neighbors required by our Lord Jesus. We can watch the Middle East joust with rocket launchers, but we're watching a pageant that isn't going to end, or it will end badly. Revenge and counter-revenge don't work. Humans should learn from the mistakes of other humans (and even from the mistakes animals make); doing what we know doesn't work has a name—we call it stupidity. Maybe it's true that you can't fix stupid, but you can at least prevent it.

Perhaps we should be ashamed to be learning this from the martial arts, but British fighter and teacher Geoff Thompson promotes just that very thing. In his book, The Art of Fighting Without Fighting (Summersdale, 2000), Thompson tells the story of a famous Japanese Aikido martial artist who spent his entire life studying his art but never had the chance to test it in a real fight:

The more he trained, the more his obsession for validation grew until one day, travelling home from work on a local commuter train, a potential situation did present itself—an overtly drunk and aggressive man boarded his train and almost immediately started verbally abusing the other passengers. "This is it," the Aikido man thought to himself, "this is my chance to test my art." He sat waiting for the abusive passenger to reach him. It was inevitable that he would: he was making his way down the carriage abusing everyone in his path. The drunk got closer and closer to the Aikido man, and the closer he got the louder and more aggressive he became. Most of the other passengers recoiled in fear of being attacked by the drunk. However, the Aikido man couldn't wait for his turn, so that he could prove to himself and everyone else, the effectiveness of his art. The drunk got closer and louder. The Aikido man made ready for the seemingly inevitable assault—he readied himself for a bloody encounter.

As the drunk was almost upon him he prepared to demonstrate his art in the ultimate arena, but before he could rise from his seat the passenger in front of him stood up and engaged the drunk jovially. "Hey man, what's up with you? I bet you've been drinking in the bar all day, haven't you? You look like a man with problems. Here, come and sit down with me, there?s no need to be abusive. No one on this train wants to fight with you." The Aikido man watched in awe as the passenger skilfully talked the drunken man down from his rage. Within minutes the drunk was pouring his heart out to the passenger about how his life had taken a downward turn and how he had fallen on hard times. It wasn't long before the drunk had tears streaming down his face. The Aikido man, somewhat ashamed thought to himself "That's Aikido!". He realised in that instant that the passenger with a comforting arm around the sobbing drunk was demonstrating Aikido, and all martial art, in it highest form.

Thompson has a short video of his innovation called The Fence, a pre-fight technique allowing the person to control the distance between himself and a potential adversary. This is a very different sort of pre-emptive strike.

Busheviks Gone Wild

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