Daniel Berrigan at
87To win peace, restore the Peace Corps
Arthur S. Obermayer and Kevin F.F. Quigley
The United States ... [is] losing the fight to win over the people we are trying to help. But there is a way to right our course for the future — by looking to our past. Overwhelming military superiority is not the key because its use wreaks havoc and destroys lives. Moreover, our traditional public diplomacy efforts have not worked ... The decline of the United States in world opinion demands that we find more effective ways to regain a leadership role. Primarily, we should aim to help people achieve better health, education, housing and jobs in countries that need it the most.On that front, our nation has achieved some successes: the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after World War II, recovery efforts following the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, and aid in the wake of Pakistan’s devastating earthquake three years ago (making Pakistan one of the very few nations where approval of the United States has risen in recent years). Now, however, only our military has the means to such ends.
U.S. foreign aid is primarily structured along impersonal, government-to-government lines, and most government agencies have proved ineffective working on a people-to-people level. The one government entity with a positive record in this area is the Peace Corps. But despite the Peace Corps’ success since its inception in 1961, its budget has remained small.
President Kennedy wanted 100,000 volunteers overseas within 10 years. Today, although 20 additional nations are seeking Peace Corps help and three times as many volunteers apply as can be accommodated, budgetary limitations have kept the number of volunteers down to 8,000. However, there are 190,000 alumni, represented by the National Peace Corps Association. They yearn for continuing involvement in a mission that has transformed not only their lives and those of people they have helped but also their perspectives on the world.
Among the alumni is Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, who served as a volunteer in the Dominican Republic. Based on that experience, he is sponsoring a bill to double the size of the Peace Corps. ...
Like Dodd, other alumni want to help now, and their expertise is invaluable. Most are mature leaders in business, education, government and the nonprofit world. Many are primed for a new career challenge that a managerial role in the Peace Corps could offer. They have the motivation to resist outside influences and to distinguish an expanded role for the Peace Corps from the political and bureaucratic vagaries of government agencies.
To have a significant impact, the Peace Corps needs to be at least ten times larger. But even with renewed alumni participation, it cannot grow quickly enough on its own. Through its separate, distinct operation, it must enlist the vast array of nonprofits doing grass-roots work abroad. They fall into three major categories: nongovernmental organizations, non-proselytizing faith-based groups, and universities.
In addition to growing its own operations, the Peace Corps could also help fund these nonprofit efforts. There are thousands of American philanthropic initiatives from which it could select programs for expansion grants.
The time is right politically to broaden the scope and impact of the Peace Corps. The millions who donate to such charities represent a powerful constituency who would back the move. Its objectives are nonpartisan and should be supported by Republicans and Democrats.
In the media every day, everywhere, we are witness to suffering. As we see the conventional, military-based approach to conflict resolution failing, we must seek alternative means to ending wars and winning the peace.
The cost of an expanded Peace Corps would be roughly 1 percent of our current military budget. Can we afford not to act promptly?
Arthur S. Obermayer is president of the Obermayer Foundation, which focuses on social justice issues. Kevin F.F. Quigley is president of the National Peace Corps Association. Their article appeared in The Sacramento Bee, Dec. 1, 2007, and was reprinted in PeaceMeal, Nov/December 2008
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
by Jim Wallis
People often ask me, “Where have you found the strength to stay involved for so long?” or “How have you stuck with it and not burned out?” I’ve asked those questions of myself. But more often I’ve asked myself how I can make the most difference in the world. For me, the answer to both questions is the difference that faith makes.
What do I mean by faith? I like the definition used by the biblical writer of Hebrews: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Simply put, faith makes hope possible. And hope is the single most important ingredient for changing the world.
Many people today would like to find some way to practice their faith or spirituality, despite the excesses, corruption, or narrow regulations of religion that have turned them away. I believe the making of the modern Christian, Jew, or Muslim will be through action.
When put into action, faith has the capacity to bring people together, to motivate, and to inspire, even across former dividing lines. We demonstrate our faith by putting it into practice and, conversely, if we don’t keep the power of faith in the actions we undertake, our efforts can easily lead to burnout, bitterness, and despair. The call to action can preserve the authenticity of faith, while the power of faith can save the integrity of our actions. As the biblical apostle James put it many years ago, “Faith without works is dead.” Indeed, faith shows itself in works. Faith works.
Jim Wallis, editor-in-chief of Sojourners magazine, has been an activist, preacher, and organizer for four decades. This is an excerpt from his book, “Faith Works: Lessons from the Life of an Activist Preacher,” which shows us how we can enrich our own lives by putting our beliefs to work in serving our communities. It was reprinted in PeaceMeal, Nov/December 2008.
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Forty years ago this May, Father Daniel Berrigan walked into a draft board in Catonsville, Maryland, with eight other activists, including his brother, Father Philip Berrigan, and removed draft files of young men who were about to be sent to Vietnam. The group carted the files outside and burned them in two garbage cans with homemade napalm. Father Berrigan was tried, found guilty, spent four months as a fugitive from the FBI, was apprehended and sent to prison for eighteen months.
Unbowed at 87, time and age have not blunted this Jesuit priest’s fierce critique of the American empire or his radical interpretation of the Gospels. There would be many more “actions” and jail time after his release from prison, including a sentence for his illegal entry into a General Electric Co. nuclear missile plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, on September 9, 1980, with seven other activists, where they poured blood and hammered on Mark 12A nuclear warheads.
The trial of the Catonsville Nine altered resistance to the Vietnam War, moving activists from street protests to repeated acts of civil disobedience. It also signaled a seismic shift within the Catholic Church, propelling radical priests and nuns led by the Berrigans, Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day to the center of a religiously inspired social movement that challenged not only church and state authority but the myths Americans used to define themselves.
Berrigan’s relationship with Day, founder of the pacifist Catholic Worker Movement, led to a close friendship with the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton. Merton’s “great contribution to the religious left,” he says, “was to gather us for days of prayer and discussion of the sacramental life. He told us, ‘Stay with these, stay with these, these are your tools and discipline and these are your strengths.’”
“He could be very tough,” Berrigan says of Merton. “He said you are not going to survive America unless you are faithful to your discipline and tradition.” Merton’s death at 53, a few weeks after the Catonsville trial, left Berrigan bereft.
The current election campaign does not preoccupy Berrigan, and he quotes his brother, Philip, who said that “if voting made any difference, it would be illegal.”
“This is the worst time of my long life,” he said with a sigh. “I have never had such meager expectations of the system. I find those expectations verified in the paucity and shallowness every day I live.”
He despairs of universities, especially Boston College’s decision last year to give an honorary degree to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and this year to invite the new Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, to address the law school. “It is a portrayal of shabby lives as exemplary and to be honored,” he says.
And he has little time for secular radicals who stood with him 40 years ago but who have now “disappeared into the matrix of money and regular jobs or gave up on their initial discipline.” He says, “It is very rare to sustain a movement in recognizable form without a spiritual base.”
All empires, Berrigan cautions, rise and fall. It is the religious and moral values of compassion, simplicity and justice that endure and alone demand allegiance. The current decline of American power is part of the cycle of human existence, although he says ruefully, “the tragedy across the globe is that we are pulling down so many others. We are not falling gracefully. Many, many people are paying with their lives for this.”
“The fall of the towers [on 9/11] was symbolic as well as actual,” he adds. “We are bringing ourselves down by a willful blindness that is astonishing.”
Berrigan argues that those who seek a just society, who seek to defy war and violence, who decry the assault of globalization and degradation of the environment, who care about the plight of the poor, should stop worrying about the practical, short-term effects of their resistance. “The good is to be done because it is good, not because it goes somewhere,” he says. “I believe, if it is done in that spirit, it will go somewhere, but I don’t know where. I don’t think the Bible grants us to know where goodness goes, what direction, what force. I have never been seriously interested in the outcome. I was interested in trying to do it humanly and carefully and nonviolently and let it go.”
“The reason we are celebrating 40 years of Catonsville and we are still at it, those of us who are still living — the reason people went through all this and came out on their feet — was due to a spiritual discipline that went on for months before these actions took place,” he says. “We went into situations in court and in prison and in the underground that could easily have destroyed us and that did destroy others who did not have our preparation.”
– edited from an
article by Chris Hedges in The Nation, May 20, 2008. Hedges, former Middle East bureau
chief for the New York Times and
a senior fellow at The Nation Institute, is the author of “American Fascists: The
Christian Right and the War on America” (2007, Free Press).
Peacemeal, May/June 2008
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Blind SOA activist chooses jail time
When asked by U.S. Magistrate Mallon Faircloth whether he wanted a sentence of 90 days under house arrest or 90 days in prison, 78-year-old Edwin Lewiston, who has been legally blind since birth, asked, “Do I have a choice?” “Yes,” Faircloth replied. “I’ll take prison,” said Lewiston, a retired professor of American history at Seton Hall University, South Orange, N.J.
Lewiston had joined protests four times at the U.S. Army’s Fort Benning near Columbus, Ga. Fort Benning hosts a training school for Latin American military officers, formerly called the School of Americas (SOA), now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. Graduates of the school, dubbed by protestors the “School of Assassins,” have been implicated in gross human rights abuses and atrocities in their home countries.
The group, SOA Watch, has been trying to close the school for nearly 20 years. It holds massive annual rallies on the weekend before Thanksgiving at Fort Benning that include acts of civil disobedience.
Lewiston trespassed at Fort Benning four times, but unlike his fellow activists, he never got jail time before. In previous years, the U.S. attorney, without explanation, declined to pursue charges against Lewiston, who said he felt he was being discriminated against because of his blindness. The fourth time was the charm, however. Lewiston and 10 others were sentenced January 28 for their November 18 “crossing the line” at the Army. Lewiston received one of the longest sentences. The others received sentences from 30 days to 90 days.
“He [Faircloth] did what I needed done,” Lewiston said in a telephone interview after court. He said the civil disobedience at Fort Benning was “a way of making more people know about [the training school] ... and the more people that learn about it the better” because it would take a mass movement to close the school.
– edited from the
National Catholic Reporter, February 8, 2008
Peacemeal, May/June 2008
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)