Notes From The Editor

On August 23,1952, A.J. Muste, in his closing address to the Pacific Northwest FOR – AFSC Family Camp meeting, said “The enemy is yourself.  Your other self. Your aggressiveness arouses your enemy’s defensiveness.  Your defensiveness arouses his aggressiveness.   If you arm yourself, you arm your enemy.”  Recently I was at Home Depot buying some gardening supplies.  When I went out to the parking lot, I noticed a man whose very large red pickup which was parked in front of mine looking at the bumper stickers I have and shaking his head.  When I approached he said, “You probably didn’t serve , did you?”  When I told him I had been in the Infantry in Viet Nam, he questioned me closely about what unit I had been in.  He then said, Well, why don’t you support the troops then?”  I said I support the troops by trying to keep them from getting killed.  He then went on a rant about “money grubbing socialists”.  It wasn’t clear to me where that came from.  When I left the parking lot he followed me for about a mile.  I stopped to liberate some discarded cardboard for garden mulch and after he watched me for a few minutes he drove off.

I thought about Muste’s words.  How do we interact with those who are passionately enraged against our positions?  How do we make our stance without creating the very aggressiveness that we wish to defuse?

A few days later, word came out that Osama bin Laden had been killed by U.S. Special Ops forces in Pakistan.  The news showed scenes of people standing in the streets outside the White House cheering as though their team had just won an important sports match.  I’m sure this came out of a mix of blood lust and a belief that justice had been done.  It occurred to me that this is exactly the same mixture of reasoning of the radical jihadists.  Both sides claim righteousness and justice in the process of killing innocents thus creating the perceived necessity for more righteous killing.  We need to start with ourselves and recognize the enemy within.  Only then can we seek to find a place to begin standing for peace.