Puzzle
Why we seized the hammer Philip Berrigan They will hammer their swords into plowshares. —Isaiah 2:4 The instrument we employed at General Electric's Re-entry Division Plant in King of Prussia,...
...Such a time was the Vietnam era, the geno-cidal adventure in Indochina—the "undeclared" war, the war by proxy (especially at the end...
...went unerringly to a huge room marked "non-destructible testing...
...Will Americans—we led the lockstep to the nuclear precipice...
...Isaiah and Micah used it as a metaphor for the authority of God—for spiritual rebirth, for conversion to compassion and justice, for a new face toward God, sister and brother, above all for the outlawing of war...
...Friends formed the Pacific Life Community (an anti-Trident coalition) in Washington, and it spread to California and Oregon...
...on September 9, 1980, we strode into GE's squat, cost-efficient matrix of the Mark 12A (a first-strike re-entry vehicle deployed currently on Minuteman III, and planned for Trident II and MX...
...and by means of their respect for it, even the well disposed are daily made the agents of injustice...
...The American experience reveals in almost cyclic fashion— Jefferson thought a revolution every twenty-five years necessary to check the plutocrats—a widespread outcry from the downtrodden, and from the few who stood with them...
...At the Pentagon, we sustained a five-year campaign—thousands of arrests (a thousand in 1980 alone...
...Isaiah 2:4 The instrument we employed at General Electric's Re-entry Division Plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, was traditionally a peaceful tool for building—fabricating homes, making toys, shaping metal, repairing, and mending...
...we must lead the retreat from it—settle for a "freedom" defined by declining life expectancy, by a questionable future for our children, and by a right to life eroded by technicians, war profiteers, generals, and politicians...
...The Community for Creative Nonviolence began in Washington in 1972, and Jonah House in Baltimore in 1973...
...With little notice and less media coverage, we took up resistance to the war again—tons of rubble dumped on Pentagon approaches, civil disobedience at the White House over violations of the Paris Peace Accords, two raids on the Vietnamese Overseas Procurement ^lfice, several sit-ins against President Ford's "amnesty" program, arrests at the National Security Agency, a whole summer (1974) of tiger cages outside the Rotunda of the Capitol...
...Who expects politicians, generals, and bomb makers to disarm...
...Official propaganda peddles the Bomb as guarantor of our freedoms...
...People must disarm the bombs...
...Political duty because government, then as now, was unrepresentative, was the slaveholders, the exploiters, the devious and ruthless enemy of the people...
...So at 6:50 a.m...
...That is a stupefying lie: It is, to the contrary, a symbol of moral and physical slavery, of mass suicide, and, perhaps, of omnicide (the killing of all things...
...The keepers of that vision are too many to enumerate here, for America can claim more than its share—native Americans, slaves, indentured servants, poor artisans, radical farmers, women, labor organizers, students, people of the "cloth," political prisoners, philosophers, and poets...
...Our action defined us as conservatives—obviously not Tories or Reaganites, but modest custodians of a tradition that,honors life and defends the wretched of the Earth— poor people, the weak, victims...
...If overlords, with a terrible ease, can deprive a whole people of their "inalienable" right to life, what does "freedom" mean...
...The intention to use the Bomb)—most Americans would use it, in one circumstance or another—evidences a moral paralysis, a militarization of soul, a submission to violence as necessity, a bankruptcy of ethical option that amounts to slavishness...
...That war was a Church-State boot camp for my wife, Elizabeth McAlister, and for Dan and myself...
...found nose cones and components, and began their conversion...
...And, perhaps, our own...
...No more genocide in our name, no suicide by Mark 12A, Trident, MX, cruise...
...Resistance communities sprouted and slowly grew—out of vision, pain, and necessity...
...No more political agitation on campuses...
...That's the only way it will happen...
...The logic of nuclear weaponry is nihilistic and despairing—if one can conceive a weapon, it must be built...
...Our answer—it is by no means the only one—was to form the nonviolent community of resistance...
...To put it another way, given corporate capitalism's appetite for war, given the Bomb as diplomatic bargaining chip, what is the meaning and price of discipleship...
...In answering him I wrote, "Why do you say 'futile...
...Second, the State is invincible unless such legalizing is rendered null and void by non-violent civil disobedience...
...no more huge marches on Washington...
...From those times when the first European colonizers claimed the continent's land, the oppressed have produced the justice fighters, whereas the privileged were, at best, interpreters of the vision and, at worst, parasites...
...In his classic essay, Thoreau called civil disobedience a "duty"— personal and political...
...Thoreau's grasp of the law was incisive: "It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right...
...We lost our milk teeth in civil rights classrooms—in the black ghettos, at Selma, New Orleans, Atlanta, Washington, Harlem—and cut our molars at Fort Myer, Virginia (1966), the March on the Pentagon (1967), Baltimore's Customs House (1967), Catonsville (1968), andHar-risburg (1971...
...One question nagged at us: How does one survive sanely, non-violently, faithfully in a society mobilized against such survival...
...It hasn't changed public opinion...
...Others collected East Coast resisters into the Atlantic Life Community, concentrating on the Pentagon, Electric Boat in Groton, Connecticut (producer of the new Trident), United Technologies in Hartford, GE in the Philadelphia area, Rockwell in Pittsburgh, and assorted war-making think tanks...
...slipped by security...
...Hammers and blood...
...We cannot leave the State invincible in its determination to initiate (or provoke) nuclear war...
...The logic of hope runs counter— what is made can be unmade...
...the war that turned the empire downhill from its apex—on greased skids, as we've discovered since...
...if one can build it, it must be used...
...The struggle to prevent nuclear war is, in an altogether unprecedented way, a struggle for spirit, heart, and mind...
...The Church greeted our voices and non-violent resistance with silencing, exile, and ostracism...
...the State with arrest, interminable trials, conviction, imprisonment...
...The blood a reminder of common parenthood, common nature, purpose, destiny...
...the laboratory war...
...A few hung in there in 1973,1974, and early 1975, stubbornly insisting that our blunders^—infighting, egotism, and sexism—had not obviated the vision, nor relieved us of the responsibility of opposing the bloody plague of imperial, corporate America...
...When the Paris Peace Accords were signed in 1973, some of us encountered a vision grown tired...
...Small actions, but something during a disillusioned and jaded time...
...He attends a Catholic high school and studies justice and peace in one of his classes...
...Personal duty because enslavement of blacks and exploitation of Mexicans enslaved and exploited every American...
...Perhaps that's a key, however imperfect...
...A student wrote recently, "Your protest was futile...
...only then is the murderous intention destroyed...
...Two convictions support our civilly disobedient attitude toward the law: First, the State has perverted law to the point of legalizing its nuclear psychosis...
...Civil disobedience offers the hope of liberation, the hope of survival...
...Our action is making you think, isn't it...
...it hasn't reduced nuclear arms...
...not many resisters in prison to keep consciences honest and minds re-minded...
...no more disruption of war-making bureaucracy or technology...
...Law never made men a whit more just...
...the war of human beings against overwhelming technology...
Vol. 45 • May 1981 • No. 5
