What follows are my remarks to the Pax Christi Annual Assembly at USM in Portland, Maine on Saturday, May 5, 2012.
-->
THE
CHALLENGES OF PEACEMAKING
IN VIOLENT TIMES
Welcome,
everyone, and thank you for being here. Special thanks to the
organizers for bringing us together to reflect on our proper roles in
this troubled world. I appreciate being invited to share my thoughts
about the challenges of peacemaking in our day.
I
was born the year that Pres. Eisenhower gave his famous warning about
the impending power of the military-industrial complex. For the last
20 years I've been a public school teacher, but before that I worked
as a journalist, and for a few years in marketing and advertising.
These experiences have informed the way that I understand the
peacemaking job before us, because I approach it from a
communications perspective. I'll return to this theme, but for the
moment I would like to briefly discuss the conditions we find
ourselves in midway through the year 2012.
The
critical mass of federal spending is and has been dedicated to
military purposes, as was predicted by Eisenhower. No matter how you
slice up the federal pie, and allocate spending to various
categories, it is an enormous slice. It is symptomatic of the fact
that all three branches of government in Washington DC have been
effectively “captured” by moneyed interests. Congress fails to
represent the will of the people; as just one example, 69% of those
polled by the NYT said they no longer thought the U.S. was doing the
right thing in Afghanistan.
The Executive branch showed very little
change in its foreign policy following the 2003 electiion; if
anything, it has become even more warlike, especially in the use of
drones and extrajudicial killing. The Supreme Court has also
indicated that it stands with the corporations, by ruling in Citizens
United that they are people and thus entitled to first amendment
protections. Meanwhile, a citizen detained for anything at all –
including a dog off the leash, or an unpaid parking ticket – can be
strip searched according to the highest court in the land.
State
governments are in the process of being captured systematically in a
similar fashion. In our own state big money brought in a third party
candidate to split the vote and elect our Tea Party governor. This
has brought us laws authorizing the capture of public school funds
into taxpayer supported charter schools, and a public-private
partnership where taxpayers pony up $300,000 for a feasability study
of an east-west corridor to truck LP gas from one site in Canada to
another to use for fracking, a private toll road whose profits will
go to the Cianbro Corp. (Great reporting here by Lance Tapley in the Portland Phoenix.)
How
did this happen? Well, for starters, we're the only democracy in the
world whose citizen rely solely on commercial media outlets for news.
In other words, we have no public information services such as exist
in other countries. We do have a vibrant independent media and some
vigorous citizen journalists at work, but they are battling uphill
for attention in the glut of sensationalized entertainment that
passes for news in our day. Just this week I ran across this article in Yes! Magazine, one of the positive forces in the new media
landscape. It reports that the IRS is holding up approval of tax
exempt status for non profit media outlets – for months, sometimes
for years. Meanwhile, the US military has a recruiting budget of $12
billion a year.
So
– depressing no? But there may be some game changers on the
horizon, and we may be looking at opportunities that did not exist
before.
One
of the big changes is killing by remote control. This is
qualitatively different from the aerial bombing that has
characterized U.S. foreign policy in my lifetime, because there is no
pilot in the sky, just a guy with a joystick and a video monitor far,
far away. I believe this change will have a profound effect on the
warrior ethos, and on how our military is perceived by the citizens
who pay for it. It certainly has already had a profound change on how
the US is perceived by others. It is also astronomically expensive,
and has enormous implications for surveillance, including domestic
spying.
 |
| Tireless peace worker, the late Tom Sturtevant, at the protest he organized calling attention to the environmental degradation caused by the recruiting tool of the Blue Angels Air Show, at Brunswick Naval Air Station last summer. |
Another
inescapable game changer is the environmental chaos that we've been
warned about for decades. The chickens of greenhouse gas emissions,
of offshore oil drilling, of fracking and last but certainly not
least of nuclear weapons and energy sourcing are coming home to roost
quite rapidly now. The Fukushima disaster in Japan continues to
unfold and will likely affect the whole world in due time.
How
much does the public know about any of these things? Precious little,
unless they do quite a lot of their own information gathering, and
are paying attention.
Depressingly,
the majority of those polled about US military use of drones think
its a good idea. If you've been watching the propaganda stream around
the anniversary of Osama bin Laden's assassination, it's easy to
understand how ill-informed your fellow citizens could be on this
topic. Manufactured consent is not a new problem – George Orwell
wrote about it brilliantly nearly a century ago, as has many others.
That
is why I see communication as job #1.
And
with that in mind I'd like to discuss and offer some examples of what
I see as the basics of effective communication.
Both
CODEPINK (the name) and the Bring Our War $$ Home campaign are essentially
communication strategies. After 9/11 as the so-called “War on
Terror” kicked into high gear we got Homeland Security and a bunch
of color coded alert levels: Red, Orange, Yellow and so on. Women
peacemakers asked themselves as they circled the White House: What
could we call ourselves that would refer to and at the same time
defuse the fear mongering of the alerts? Thus Code Pink was born.
Bring
Our War $$ Home speaks directly to the most fundamental principle of
communication : Know They Audience. In education we call this “the
teachable moment” as in, what are these listeners ready to hear?
What have their background knowledge and experiences prepared them to
understand?
 |
| Bring Our War $$ Home rally in Hall of Flags, State House, Augusta, Maine 2011. |
As
the U.S. economy tanked and the banks were bailed out – while
health care bankrupted millions and foreclosures and student debt
soared – budgets for basic human needs were slashed in our
communities. Most all of us in the coalition of a couple dozen peace
groups had vigiled and protested and met for years, often feeling
that we were mostly “preaching to the choir.” We wanted to reach
out to our neighbors and co-workers, not with a message about how war
is morally wrong – which I know it is – but with a direct appeal
to their own circumstances.
People
can be easily fooled about largely invisible wars happening on the
other side of the planet, less so about their household finances. The
debt party that masked our insolvency is just about over now,and
that is one of the reasons that the Occupy movement broke out when it
did. The 99% had finally run out of cheap credit.
Prior
to that our campaign saw the opportunity to connect with the concerns
of people that cannot afford to take their child to the dentist, or
who get laid off and never are able to find a comparable job. Such
people are consistently amazed by the outlandish scale of guns vs.
butter. A minute of the war in Afghanistan would, for instance, pay
for a full four year degree with all the trimmings from USM. $230,000+. One drone could plug the gap in your local school budget and
re-hire the teachers and other staff who were laid off. Or buy health
care for thousands. And so on.
So
how did we get the message out there? We used every medium we could
think of. Some were of the type associated with CODEPINK as a
national organization: connect with events or persons who do get
covered in mainstream, corporate owned media, and be eye catching –
sometimes you can even make it look fun. Getting the US Conference of
Mayors to pass their first antiwar resolution since Vietnam was an
example – all major press outlets were on hand to cover the annual
urban policy conference, and the controversy created by a floor
debate on the resolution – which passed handily – led every
story. This momentum had been started right here in Portland when its
city council became the first to pass a war dollars home resolution.
Such reslutions were debated, and reported on, in many twons where
they did not pass. But our goal was always to create a space for the
conversation.
Alternatively,
create local news. When Bruce or my husband Mark Roman and others
carried the BOW$H banner in a peace walk led by Buddhist monks and
nuns, the newspapers in every town where they stopped to hold an
event gave the campaign some coverage.
 |
| "Military, defense issues top list of people's concerns" by Dieter Bradbury | Portland Press Herald | March 11, 2010 |
I've
been told by some that my cotton candy pink wig “trivializes our
message” but it, too, is a communication strategy. When I first
wore it to speak at a town hall meeting here at USM, I was in good
company with many informed and articulate speakers. But guess whose
picture they put on the front page of the Portland Press Herald?
Collaboration
with the Union of Maine Visual Artists on a series of Draw-a-thons
and Print-a-thons not only produced images of what our war dollars
could better be spent on, but were a platform for the public to
interact with artists who helped them envision such a change. The
posters, t-shirts and other image carriers have spread far beyond
Maine with the bring our war $$ home message, a slogan by the way
which was deliberately crafted from simple short words that even a
youngster can read.
There
are many other mediums that have carried the message: press releases,
slideshows, blogs, songs, books, leaflets, parade entries, radio ads,
local access tv programs, YouTube videos, tweets, and facebook
events.
Could
you feel us getting younger in that list?
I'd
like to end with just a few notes about what works with a young
audience. Young people care deeply about the environment, and about
fairness, but moralizing bores them. They are visually literate, they
love music and digital forms of entertainment, and chunks of discrete
content – so-called “memes” – will spread like wildfire if
they are sufficiently entertaining.
Young people willingly join in
work that is serious yet fun, important yet playful.
Well
I am a school teacher after all and in my marketing mind I'm always
aiming at a young audience. They shall inherit the Earth and it will
be up to them to make the difference.
You never really know how someone's learning has changed them. If you
do find out it's often long after the fact. Communication, and education, are acts of faith.
