[Peace-discuss] [Fwd: Futility remembered...]

[C. G. Estabrook]

[A note from a friend of mine, a student draft resister when I first knew him 
thirty-seven years ago.  There may be a clue here as to why the anti-war 
movement now seems so attenuated in comparison with the one then.  --CGE]

28 Jun 2008

Various and sundry folk,

Thirty-seven years ago today, if my math is correct (never a certainty),
I was instantly, after a quick trial, convicted of the intolerably
dangerous crime of refusing to participate in a war of which I could
make neither ethical nor pragmatic sense.  Those of you who were present
may remember that, though the curtain of the Temple may not have been
rent in two,  the sun (around 4:00 p.m.) was indeed blackened-over and
the earth (or at least, the chandeliers in the courtroom) indeed quaked,
as the skies opened and "threw down their spears"; the thunderstorm was
so massive that several times, while on the witness stand, I simply had
to stop speaking until I could be heard again.

Nonetheless, I felt less like Jeremiah than like someone who, never
(yet) having had so much as a parking ticket, finally felt compelled to
say, It may be the law, but it stops here.  (Well, OK, I'd had a prior
arrest, for the equally heinous crime of joining two Anglican bishops in
full vestments, with acolytes croziers and incense and quite a few other
people, in a prayer-for-peace service inside the Pentagon...but it was
later held that that hadn't been a crime, so the several-hundred-odd of
us weren't guilty of one.)

I survived a week each in the Richmond City Jail and Lewisburg Prison,
complete with getting beaten up in a rape attempt (declining on pacifist
grounds to defend myself physically, while at the same time declining to
submit to rape).  The rest of the time (which was going to be four
years, until the once-honorable-but-now-late Judge Merhige had a change
of heart and reduced it to two) I spent at the Allenwood Prison Camp.
There, while definitely on my own as regards survival, I didn't feel
quite alone in this doubtless-lunatic-seeming stance: there were enough
other war resisters, there and in other "joints", that we could actually
deceive ourselves into thinking, or at least hoping, that we might be
making some small contribution to the national consciousness on subjects
like atrocity and a national temptation to pound our collective chest
and play King of the Hill.

Fools, yes we were.  /Damned /fools.  Fast forward 37 years, and we have
a government which stands accused, in unambiguous terms (by a general,
no less), of war crimes, and yet there isn't the slightest indication
anywhere on the horizon that any policy-maker will ever be called to
account.  What we would forcefully call atrocity, were it done by an
adversary, is here /entre nous/ considered just one policy option among
others, options about which reasonable people can disagree.  (Well, as
long as they come to the conclusion that anything (/anything/) goes, as
long as someone -- anyone -- has accused a person of being a
Terrorist...otherwise, they're not reasonable people, but pro-enemy
haters of America.)

Some incredibly smug person has said that all that's necessary for the
triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing (a statement that has
been wildly variously attributed).  Forgive me for suspecting aloud that
it seems much closer to say that, even if every good person embraced
total asceticism and spent every waking moment in rigorously attempting
to counteract evil, evil would still be the odds-on favorite to win the
contest.

To say that this has been something of a wistful day is to understate
just a bit.  I wish it were a different world that my daughters were
inheriting (or being saddled with).

Lances at the ready, yonder comes a windmill.

TK