[Peace-discuss] Daniel Berrigan and the costs of war and peace.

[Morton K. Brussel]

 From someone who has already sacrificed for peace. This note is  
taken from the UFPJ discuss list.  --mkb

We have assumed the name of peacemakers, but we have been, by and  
large, unwilling to pay any significant price.  And because we want  
peace with half a heart and half a life and will, the war, of course,  
continues, because the waging of war, by its nature, is total - but  
the waging of peace, by our own cowardice, is partial.  So a whole  
will and a whole heart and a whole national life bent toward war  
prevail over the velleities of peace.  In every national war since  
the founding of the republic we have taken for granted that war shall  
exact the most rigorous cost, and that the cost shall be paid with a  
cheerful heart.  We take it for granted that in wartime families will  
be separated for long periods, that men will be imprisoned, wounded,  
driven insane, killed on foreign shores.  In favor of such wars, we  
declare a moratorium on every normal human hope -- for marriage, for  
community, for friendship, for moral conduct toward strangers and the  
innocent.  We are instructed that deprivation and discipline, private  
grief and public obedience are to be our lot.  And we obey.  And we  
bear with it - because bear we must - because war is war, and good  
war or bad, we are stuck with it and its cost.

      But what of the price of peace?  I think of the good, decent,  
peace-loving people I have known by the thousands and I wonder.  How  
many of them are so afflicted with the wasting disease of normalcy  
that, even as they declare for the peace, their hands reach out with  
an instinctive spasm in the direction of their loved ones, in the  
direction of their comforts, their home, their security, their  
income, their future, their plans - that five-year plan of studies,  
that ten-year plan of professional status, that twenty-year plan of  
family growth and unity, that fifty-year plan of decent life and  
honorable natural demise.  'Of course, let us have peace,' we cry,  
'but at the same let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our  
lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor  
disruption of ties.'  And because we must encompass this and protect  
that, and because at all costs - at all costs - our hopes must march  
on schedule, and because it is unheard of that in the name of peace a  
sword should fall, disjoining that fine and cunning web that our  
lives have woven, because it is unheard of that good men should  
suffer injustice or families be sundered or good repute be lost -  
because of this we cry peace and cry peace, and there is no peace.   
There is no peace because there are no peacemakers.  There are no  
makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as  
the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at  
least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake."
        -Daniel Berrigan



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