Peace is more than no war
Anti-war movement doesn't need hostility to thrive
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Lori Shontz
April 20, 2003
Elizabeth Donahue saw the television footage: Iraqis celebrating in the streets, pulling down a statue of Saddam Hussein and hugging U.S. soldiers, symbols that the United States has won a war that she spent the past several months protesting.
Undeterred, she made a new sign for the lawn of her Forest Hills home: "Mr. Bush, No More War."
Local peace activists don't say their movement failed because the war with Iraq happened, or because the United States won so quickly. Many define themselves not by being against war but by being for peace and justice.
Nonetheless, leaders have recognized that the movement is at a crossroads. They realize that they must refocus the movement's energy.
"There's two kinds of questions," said Saleh Waziruddin of the peace activist group Zi, started by Carnegie Mellon University students, and a Thomas Merton Center co-president. "On the one hand, it's just a question of people becoming radicalized and then doing something about it. In general, Do they have hope? Are they angry enough to do something about it? Then, within that, is the future question of what kind of tactics do they use."
Activists are still thrilled by the sheer numbers of people around the world who protested in the streets. They argue that during the Vietnam War, protests didn't attract appreciable numbers until the conflict was a few years old. This time, hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated before a single bomb had been dropped.
"It says to me that the ideas of nonviolence and peace are spreading," veteran activist Molly Rush said. "They haven't succeeded yet. They haven't succeeded in stopping a war that was a matter of choice by George Bush. But I think for certain it has raised a huge debate."
For activists, the list of issues is long:
The Bush administration's doctrine of pre-emptive war. The Patriot Act. Restrictions on civil liberties, particularly on Arabs. Tax cuts. Budget crises at the state and local level, forcing cuts for funding of everything from mass transit to education. The fact that the United States still has more children without health insurance than any other industrialized nation. The perception of the United States abroad.
Tim Vining, executive director of the Thomas Merton Center, says "peace movement" is a better description of what activists are doing than antiwar movement.
"It's what you say if you think we need to look at how we are using our privileged position in the world and our wealth to end poverty and resolve some of the world's problems."
Many of the most visible anti-war protesters are linked with the anti-globalization movement. They believe that one of the world's biggest problems is the unequal distribution of wealth, and they think that the United States' policies keep people in developing countries from bettering themselves.
"It would be inconsistent to oppose globalization and not oppose the situation with Iraq," said John Billingsly, who often protests.
Rush has similar concerns. But she has focused her efforts closer to home, with the Citizens Budget Committee of Western Pennsylvania, because she believes the U.S. government has a responsibility to all of its citizens, not only its most wealthy ones.
She said she was appalled that, on the first day of the war, the Senate passed a bill to accelerate the demise of the estate taxand that the House of Representatives followed it up, on day two of the war, by passing President Bush's tax-cut bill, which included cuts in benefits for military veterans. She was even more appalled that coverage of the war buried newspaper and television accounts of those events.
Rush believes the Bush administration is in the midst of what she calls a "stealth revolution," reducing funding for social programs.
"It's a whole approach to government in which government is not meant to be serving the people," she said. "The extremely dangerous issues that face people -- health issues, issues of poverty, the environment -- all these have been undermined under this government. The idea of the tax cuts is not just to make billionaires rich, but to make it impossible for the government to deal with the huge issues that face working people and middle-class people and the poor in particular."
Other subgroups in the peace movement believe that a focus on labor is the next step; still others that the important thing is to break into smaller groups and continue speaking about the same issues.
The tactical question, too, has become important in a movement that has attracted a wide variety of people, from mothers who had never before protested to people who were arrested at the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle. It has triggered a discussion, Waziruddin said, that shows the peace movement in Pittsburgh is healthy and looking toward the future.
Most people who choose to engage in nonviolent, direct action can trace their beliefs and inspirations back to the giants of the movement -- Henry David Thoreau, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi. And everyone agrees that in a nonviolent action, neither humans nor animals are harmed.
There is, however, disagreement over whether property damage can be appropriate.
Locally, the discussion centers on the actions of a handful of demonstrators who pushed newspaper boxes onto the Smithfield Street Bridge during a March 20 protest march. During hearings for the adult protesters arrested March 20, District Justice Cathleen Bubash spoke for many when she called such actions "a slap in the face to everyone who ever thought that they might consider nonviolence."
But Alex Bradley of the Pittsburgh Organizing Group, who was not arrested, said after the march that he wasn't bothered by people moving newspaper boxes.
"It's just the issue of making a point," he said. "We do need to disrupt things. Newspaper boxes are not damaged, they're easily moved back. It's just the idea. To me, it's more symbolic. There's lots of things you can think of that would actually shut down a roadway for a long time, and that's definitely not one of them."
Other protesters say the focus on the newspaper boxes, along with touching cars and blocking traffic, hurt the movement because it took attention from the rest of the long march, which had proceeded peacefully for two hours, and the message of nonviolence.
"Strategically, if you give the media and others a chance to discredit you easily, you just don't do it because it doesn't help the cause," Rush said. "That doesn't mean I think that smashing a window or overturning a newspaper box is the equivalent of policies that cause people to starve."
Vining, too, tries to put such events in another perspective: "I always remind people, worse things happen in a parking lot after a football game."
Billingsly, 28, of Uptown, believes that the more sensational events of the March 20 march -- the newspaper boxes, the 122 arrests -- brought more attention to the cause, just as the property damage by anarchists in Seattle in 1999 put the entire anti-globalization movement into the spotlight.
"As vilified as the anarchists in Seattle were, they allowed more moderate voices to come forward and talk about the problems they were talking about," Billingsly said. "Those moderate voices got attention they probably would not have gotten."
Some of the more moderate voices, however, reject such an interpretation.
Donahue, for instance, has been frustrated that the unpermitted marches and arrests have overshadowed less flashy nonviolent actions, such as PEACEburg's painting for peace and the six local Saturday street-corner vigils, which she considers more reflective of a majority of peace activists.
For now, actions will continue.
Building on the success of January's Regional Convergence Against the War, the Thomas Merton Center is sponsoring a Regional Peace Re-Convergence Saturday. In addition to the attention-getting marches, the re-convergence will include a critical mass bike ride through Oakland, two poetry events, a sit-in at Starbucks and a forum on national health care.
Membership at the Thomas Merton Center has doubled since Sept. 11, Rush said. Donahue believes that more people are questioning what they see on television and read in the newspapers and searching for different interpretations. Like many activists, they are hoping that such activity indicates an interest in understanding the root causes.
"That's the hope -- with any anti-war movement," Waziruddin said. "That it'll be broader than just anti-war, or broader than one war."
