Write for God

Two of our children have graduated from public schools in Florida and the two youngest will be entering high school in the fall. In all the years that our children have been enrolled in various schools, I’ve signed permission slips for everything from approvals to use their photos in promotional materials to okays to watch PG-13 movies in class.

Last week, our 13-year-old son wrote a cryptic note on his daily planner that read “Navy.” When we asked him what that meant, he told us that recruiters from the Navy and Marines had visited his eighth-grade class. Eighth grade. My son doesn’t shave, he won’t drive for several years and he’s more interested in rec-league basketball than in career choices right now. He was given a hard-sell pitch to join the military in the eighth grade.

Our son said that the message from the recruiters was that “they did fun things.” They brought a Junior ROTC candidate who had graduated from eighth grade the previous year to speak to his peers about all the fun he was having in the kiddie military.

Not one permission slip came home for our approval to have our son listen to propaganda about the hijinks he can expect  in the military. In our area of Florida, a group called Veterans for Peace has been protesting how the school system allows military recruiters free access to our kids while the nonviolent, anti-war message isn’t given the same platform or respect. Veterans for Peace would not tell my son that the military is fun and neither would we.

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 gives the military the right to pursue our children. Technically, parents can “opt out” of having their children’s names and contact information given to the military. My husband and I sent notes to the principal at our oldest children’s high schools when the law went into effect, but we still received calls and direct-mail pitches from all branches of the service. The Do Not Call list does not apply to them. We didn’t expect them to start hounding our kids in the eighth grade.

I never served in the military, but my husband did. He enjoyed certain parts of his Navy service, especially being aboard a ship working as part of a crew that ran things smoothly. Now, he is a “waging peace” warrior who supports antiwar causes and issues. Since my husband was a young man pushing helicopters off the decks of Navy ships during the evacuation of Vietnam in 1975, he has seen soldiers used by hawks in government to do their bidding overseas. My husband is a staunch antiwar advocate who lives according to the principles of nonviolence learned from Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Franz Jagerstatter and countless other war resisters in history.

At home, we have plowshares, not swords. As it says in Isaiah 2:4:

And he shall judge between the nations, and shall reprove many peoples: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

The fiascos of Vietnam, Gulf War I, Iraq and Afghanistan have marked generations since the 1960s with blood that was shed for gain, ideology and politics. We’ve seen soldiers not cared for when they come back maimed. We’ve heard  lies being used to justify the deaths of their friends and the loss of their limbs.

As a friend of mine says, we’re good at building body armor that protects areas where soldiers might get killed instantly, but we’re not good at protecting the ones where you live maimed. Another friend told me that her brother, a Vietnam veteran, has still never spoken about his experiences there. He wants to forget what he saw and what he did.

An elderly Korean War vet told me a horrible story about how he buried his war memories by being a workaholic at a Fortune 500 company. After he retired, he turned on the TV one morning and saw the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11/01. The sight of the panicked people covered in dust and screaming for help brought back scenes that reminded him of Korea. After much torment, he finally went to a counselor to help him deal with his war experiences he had tried for decades to forget.

A year to the day before he was assassinated, Dr. King delivered a powerful speech he titled Beyond Vietnam:

We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

We are living through immoral wars created by those in the Bush administration who had power, but no compassion, and might without morality, as Dr. King observed about Vietnam. President Obama’s recent decision to escalate the conflict in Afghanistan will not mean fun and games for anyone in the military, their families back home or the people of that battered nation.

Our sons already know what “conscientious objector” means and how military spending is burying our nation in trillion-dollar debt. They’re been raised to know that there’s no fun in killing. Between a PG-13 film in class and a propaganda presentation that equates war with fun, I’d choose the film for my son. But, of course, the school system never gave me the option when they subjected him to military recruiters before he’s ever stepped foot in high school.

Veterans for Peace will have to start picketing at middle schools now. Let’s hope the military doesn’t begin grabbing our kids in elementary schools soon if the madness of war continues to require fresh recruits shedding fresh blood.

Political theorist Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” during Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann’s trial for his role in the Holocaust. Arendt was struck by Eichmann’s demeanor during the trial: He wasn’t a psychopath, a rabid anti-Semite or a lunatic. He seemed an ordinary, not particularly bright, little man who claimed he was only following orders and doing his job when he committed genocide, in much the same way that an accountant might add a row of numbers or a barber might trim a little off the top. It was just another day at the office when Jews were gassed and beaten by kapos in concentration camps.

Eichmann provided the most banal of excuses for his role in the systematic murder of millions of Jews, Poles, Russians, Romany, Jevohah’s Witnesses, homosexuals–the list of the Third Reich’s victims is long and not very selective–but Arendt could see beyond his blind reasoning.

While there were “good Germans” who insisted their war crimes were just a case of following orders, there were other nations that didn’t support the Nazi regime. She points to Denmark as an example of non-cooperation with Hitler’s murderous intent:

One is tempted to recommend the [Danish] story as required reading in political science for all students who wish to learn something about the enormous power potential inherent in non-violent action and in resistance to an opponent possessing vastly superior means of violence.

The Danes refused to allow the Nazi regime to implement the Final Solution where other nations became collaborators. In fact, their efforts to save Jews are the stuff of legends. Vichy France and the people of the Anschluss certainly bought into Hitler’s plan with enthusiasm or an eye toward being on what they thought would be the winning side.

Nonviolent action and resistance to an enemy that resorts to violence is much more difficult than fighting back or merely “doing one’s job,” as in Eichmann’s case. When the Nazis murdered conscientous objector Franz Jagersttater for refusing to serve, when they beheaded Hans and Sophie Scholl for urging resistance, when they killed St. Maximilian Kolbe and Blessed Titus Brandsma by lethal injection for standing up for Christ against Hitler and when they gassed St. Edith Stein for being born a Jew, they came up against the superior, immovable, nonviolent force of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Banal little men like Eichmann and the petty tyrants that have come before and after him can always claim they were doing their jobs by cooperating with evil. We remember them with disdain or forget about them entirely, but we celebrate the heroes whose revolution and resistance coupled with their love of Christ allowed them to see the difference between doing one’s job and taking the hard road to what is good and right.

Evil may sometimes be banal, but nonviolent resistance is always heroic.