REFLECTIONS

...H Stop U.S...

...But to me the concept has even greater potential as an alternative strategy for bringing about political change in the United States...

...Most Americans view it as lurching frantically from event to event, as too negative (stop this, stop that, stop the other thing), and as unpatriotic in its propensity to blame the United States as the source of all evil...

...Lynne Lewis's contribution as a peacemaker in this remote corner of Central America was clear to all of us...

...Tax resistance and civil disobedience can come at a high price...

...Be Your Own Peacemaker In the pile of newly arrived mail on my desk is an invitation to a march and rally in Washington, D.C.—one of many such invitations I have received over the years...

...The authors coin the term Citizen Peacemaking Initiatives (CPIs) to embody the concept of citizens assuming direct responsibility for peacemaking instead of imploring others to make peace...

...We can work actively to instill such personal codes in others...

...By undertaking Citizen Peacemaking Initiatives, we can model the very behavior we want our Government to adopt...

...Equally futile, if this analysis holds true, are current efforts to get the Government to stop nuclear-weapons testing, Star Wars, Midgetman, and the Trident D-4 missile, as were past efforts to get the Government to stop the neutron bomb, the cruise missile, and the overthrow of independent regimes in Guatemala, Chile, and Grenada, as will be future efforts to get the Government to stop whatever else may follow from the imperative of being a nuclear superpower...

...In doing so, they have also rejected the empty consumerist standards that provide a justification for this nation's privileged position in the world...

...We must recognize that there are sources of power outside the higher levels of government," say Ayvazian and Klare...

...H Stop U.S...

...As we listened to Lynne Lewis and reflected on what we had seen of the dirt-poor but proud coffee pickers elsewhere in Nicaragua, I thought of the deep despair, the feeling of helplessness, that has come to grip the farms and industrial workplaces of the United States...

...others have worked as cowhands in the Rocky Mountain West...

...The letter calls for "a united witness by tens of thousands of citizens" to express public outrage over U.S...

...I know of citizens all across America who have, in effect, declared their independence from the Federal Government...

...Many are engaged in self-crafted full-time Citizen Peacemaking Initiatives...

...The letter lists a set of policy demands with which I am in sympathy: H Stop the U.S...

...Navy pilot shot down over Lebanon, what Solidarity did in declaring itself an independent labor movement in Poland, what Witness for Peace is doing in interposing itself between the contras and their victims in Nicaragua...

...It is our belief," they write, "that the peace movement's current strategic approach is conceptually flawed because it incorrectly views the American Government as both the problem and the solution—that is, we tend to regard the U.S...

...How do you make a revolution in a country of 240 million...

...With other members of a tour group, I visited an agricultural cooperative in the town of Sebaco, where I met an American woman, Lynne Lewis, who came to Nicaragua with Witness for Peace and then stayed on at the co-op...

...Lately, I've come to doubt that peace and justice can be secured anywhere by attempting to persuade government to mend its ways...

...Government as the principal engine of the arms race, and at the same time we devote most of our energies to trying to persuade that Government (through lobbying, demonstrations, petitioning, and prayer) to change its ways...

...Government and corporate support for apartheid...

...That's not a task that can be accomplished in Washington...

...CPIs are what Jesse Jackson relied on when he negotiated the release of a U.S...

...My reluctance stems partly from a sense that, however noble the cause and deep the feeling, tens of thousands of marchers would not make much of an impression on a city accustomed to political turnouts many times that size...

...The peace movement is going nowhere because it lacks a mass base, Ayvazian and Klare say...

...If the Sandinista revolution has brought hope to the poor and the exploited in Nicaragua and elsewhere in Central America, perhaps it has something to offer us...

...others just scale down their income below the taxable level...

...She told us how the breakup of large estates after the Sandinista revolution in 1979 had transformed itinerant laborers into small farmers, thereby boosting spirits as well as agricultural production...

...Ayvazian and Klare propose that instead of attempting to persuade or coerce the Federal Government into enacting it as law or adopting it as policy—a futile undertaking—Americans simply do it themselves...

...aid to the contra mercenary forces in Nicaragua...

...You bet I have," she replied...

...I see signs that the revolution is already under way...

...Lynne Lewis comes from a migrant farm family in the United States...

...The Nuclear Resister, a publication that keeps careful track, estimates there were 3,200 arrests in the United States last year in connection with nuclear protests...

...You just start doing it yourself...

...But how do you launch a Citizen Peacemaking Initiative in the United States...

...Having thus redefined itself, the peace movement would be in a position to offer Americans "a choice that stands in sharp contrast to the militaristic agenda of the Right: the life-centered, democratic paradigm that gives human well-being—physIf the Sandinista revolution has brought hope to the poor and the exploited in Nicaragua, perhaps it has something to offer us...

...That's not what it's like where I come from...

...We can declare our communities "nuclear-free zones," signifying a willingness not to be defended by the use or threatened use of nuclear weapons...

...Even more to the point, if we are trying to bring peace and justice to the people of Nicaragua and other countries victimized by the foreign policy of the United States, perhaps the best way to change that policy is to work for peace and justice here at home...

...This is logically inconsistent...

...policies in Central America and southern Africa...

...Much as I admire the motivation behind this latest effort to bring peace and justice to Central America and southern Africa, I won't be joining the march in Washington...

...To Ayvazian and Klare, citizen peacemaking seems mainly an instrument for conflict resolution in such far-off hot spots as Central America, southern Africa, and the Middle East...

...There are also less painful forms of citizen peacemaking that could, in time, produce a life-centered, globally cooperative America...

...Our agenda is to articulate the choice before all Americans between the two basic models for the future of our country: the Fortress America choice, or the Life-Centered/Global Cooperation choice...

...This possibility was brought home to me during a recent trip to Nicaragua...

...Eventually, we may find that the Government is reacting to us (rather than the reverse, as is now the case...

...These policies must be changed," the letter says...

...My guess is that hundreds of thousands of Americans already have chosen this most direct and effective way of resisting war and oppression by turning off the cash spigot...

...H Stop U.S...

...Her people have no sense of control over their lives, she told us, and don't expect that they'll ever have any...

...We can refuse to work for companies that hold military contracts or to buy their goods and services...

...The authors propose less attention to peace and justice issues which come and go, and a greater emphasis on enduring values, such as the value of every human life, the right of every person to have basic needs met and to live in dignity, and the right to an equal sharing of life's resources and opportunities for all people...

...Some of her relatives have spent a lifetime in stoop labor in the truck gardens of eastern Maryland...

...If you would be a peacemaker in the United States, if you would embark on a Citizen Peacemaking Initiative, find a way of enlisting Americans in the struggle for their own liberation...

...Some deliberately withhold payment of their taxes...

...Rather than relinquish to the Right exclusive control over the interpretation of American values, goals, and history, the peace movement should project an image of America rooted in the best of the nation's past, such as the people's struggles for independence, against slavery, and for women's rights...

...We can refrain from investing our savings in such firms...

...war in Central America...

...That job begins at home...

...These thoughts have been helped along by two peace activists, Andrea Ayvazian and Michael T. Klare, writing mainly about the nuclear-arms race in a recent series in Fellowship, the magazine of the Fellowship of Reconciliation...

...The revolution to which many Americans already have committed themselves has yet to take organized form beyond a few alternative communities here and there—Catholic Worker houses, inner-city shelters, rural communes, and the like...

...Peacemaking of an equally direct sort takes place almost every day in the form of actions challenging laws that sanction militarism...

...We cannot be in continuous struggle with the Government over basic policies and, at the same time, expect it to participate in the repudiation of its basic identity as the guardian of the 'national security.' " The New York Mobilization's march for peace and justice reflects a generic problem...

...aid to UNITA, the South Africa-backed rebel force in Angola...

...is a member of The Progressive's Editorial Advisory Board...

...Be your own peacemaker: "Instead of viewing ourselves solely as agents of petition and protest, perpetually doomed to hurling our pleas against the walls of an unresponsive (but power-monopolizing) state apparatus, we should begin to view ourselves as the agents of peace, capable of playing an active and meaningful role in the global effort to prevent and diminish military conflict...

...This one is from an organization called the New York Mobilization for Justice & Peace in Central America and Southern Africa...

...How could this alternative vision of a life-centered, globally cooperative America become a reality...

...And that is where peace activists have their work cut out: Their strategy must be patterned on the realization that the primary targets of Fortress America are Americans themselves—growing numbers of farmers, workers, and other groups held in thrall by the quest for profits, high technology, and military strength...

...It's hard here, but the people have a chance to change things for the better...

...Citizen peacemaking in one of its purest forms is conscientious refusal to pay Federal income taxes because so large a portion—60 per cent or more—goes to militarism in one form or another...

...The answer, as Ayvazian and Klare suggest, is that you don't ask the Government to do it for you...

...In campaigning for these human values, the peace movement should respect the best of American history and tradition, argue Ayvazian and Klare...

...Its growth as a political force will depend on how well Americans can come to recognize themselves as victims of the same forces that oppress the peoples of the Third World...

...But what impressed me even more was her response when asked whether she had learned anything in Sebaco that might apply in North America...

...But these policies will be changed only if our policy-makers in Washington know the depth of our opposition to them...

...ical, emotional, and spiritual—the highest priority, not profits, technology, or military strength...