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I recently did a couple of public debates with a professor from the U.S. Army’s West Point Academy. The question was whether war can ever be justified. He argued yes. I argued no. Like many people who argue his side, he spent a fair amount of time talking not about wars but about finding yourself confronted in a dark alleyway, the idea being that everyone must simply agree that they would be violent if confronted in a dark alleyway, and therefore war is justifiable. I responded by asking him not to change the subject, and by claiming that what one person does in a dark alleyway, whether violent or not, has very little in common with the collective enterprise of constructing massive equipment and preparing massive forces and making the calm and deliberate choice to drop explosives on distant people’s homes rather than negotiate or cooperate or make use of courts or arbitration or aid or disarmament agreements.
But if you’ve read this excellent book that’s being given to these outstanding students today, Sweet Fruit from a Bitter Tree, then you know that it simply is not true that a person alone in a dark alleyway never has any better option than violence. For some people in some cases in dark alleyways and other similar locations, violence could prove the best option, a fact that would tell us nothing about the institution of war. But in this book we read numerous stories — and there are many, no doubt millions, more just like them — of people who chose a different course.
It sounds not just uncomfortable but ridiculous to the dominant culture we live in to suggest starting a conversation with a would-be rapist, making friends with burglars, asking an attacker about his troubles or inviting him to dinner. How can such an approach, documented to have worked over and over again in practice ever be made to work in theory? (If anyone here is planning to attend college, you can expect to encounter just that question quite often.)
Well, here’s a different theory. Very often, not always, but very often people have a need for respect and friendship that is much stronger than their desire to inflict pain. A friend of mine named David Hartsough was part of a nonviolent action in Arlington trying to integrate a segregated lunch counter, and an angry man put a knife up to him and threatened to kill him. David calmly looked him in the eye and said words to the effect of “You do what you have to do, my brother, and I am going to love you anyway.” The hand holding the knife began to shake, and then the knife fell to the floor.
Also, the lunch counter was integrated.
Humans are a very peculiar species. We don’t actually need a knife to the throat to feel uncomfortable. I may say things in a speech like this one that don’t threaten anyone in any way, but nonetheless make some people pretty darn uncomfortable. I wish they didn’t, but I think they have to be said even if they do.
A little over a year ago there was a mass shooting at a high school in Florida. Many people have, quite rightly I think, asked the people just up the street here at the NRA to consider what role their corruption of government may play in the endless epidemic of gun violence in the United States. Thank you to Congressman Connolly for having voted for background checks, by the way. But almost nobody mentions that our tax dollars paid to train that young man in Florida to kill, trained him right in the cafeteria of the high school where he did it, and that he was wearing a t-shirt advertising that training program when he murdered his classmates. Why wouldn’t that upset us? Why wouldn’t we all feel some responsibility? Why would we avoid the subject?
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