Penn's Woods (November 2016)

November 13, 2016: “Penn’s Woods”

In East of Eden, John Steinbeck gives us a magnificent, grand telling of the American story--of the human story--of family, of the land, of the promise, of goodness, of evil, and of goodness again.  In one of the most important scenes, Samuel Hamilton, Adam Trask, and Lee, stumble into a deep discussion of scripture.  Lee, Trask’s servant, becomes the wise exegete:  

...this was the gold from our mining: 'Thou mayest.' The American Standard translation orders men to triumph over sin, and you can call sin ignorance. The King James translation makes a promise in 'Thou shalt,' meaning that men will surely triumph over sin. But the Hebrew word timshel—'Thou mayest'—that gives a choice. For if 'Thou mayest'—it is also true that 'Thou mayest not.' That makes a man great and that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and win.

The story goes on through many hopes and follies, and in dramatic fashion ends with a dying Adam, who gives his guilt-ridden son Cal a blessing and a final word: Timshel.

It may be fitting to reflect on the life-blood of a state as if it were the life-blood of a single living, breathing human being. State as macrocosm of a person and as microcosm for an entire country.  In particular, Pennsylvania.

While in the fourth grade at Saint Jude’s Catholic School, I fell in love with my home state, and for good reason.  Social studies that year focused specifically on Pennsylvania history and geography.  I naively thought that every other fourth-grader in the U.S. had the same textbooks and likewise studied Pennsylvania history.  And, what a rosy history it was!  William Penn and the Quakers having been persecuted in England and landing there in “Penn’s Woods,” playing nice with the Lenni-Lenape and allowing settlers of other religions--including us Catholics--to stay there.  The grand old men gathering in Philadelphia in 1776 and declaring independence from cruel England.  Betsy Ross dutifully sewing Old Glory.  Washington and his men wintering in Valley Forge.  Washington and his men crossing the Delaware on Christmas day.  In 1787, the grand old men gathering again and founding and fathering some more--this time, the Constitution.  In between and after, Ben Franklin flying a kite and thereby inventing electricity and establishing fire departments and post offices on the side.  Almost eighty years of peace, prosperity, and enlightenment.  Then, slave-free and egalitarian Pennsylvania repelling General Lee’s rebellious and slavery-loving army at the Battle of Gettysburg and Lincoln later coming to consecrate the land with his address.  Then, followed another 120 years of peace, prosperity, and enlightenment.  We were the “Keystone State.”  Without the keystone, the whole project--all the colonies--would have collapsed.  

Yet, as I grew into a young man--a microcosm of my state and of my country--the stories from those grade school lessons became more fable than gospel.  The deconstruction of historical myths ensued, thanks to good high school teachers and college political science courses.  Studying abroad in Cairo while the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 hastened that deconstruction.  Then, my time in the US Navy serving under my own Captain Ahab further decimated the old faith, and I became addicted to critical history, which became the new faith.  Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States became gospel, for instance.  Part of it was the search for truth, but part of it was admittedly the search for an identity.  I now knew that this nation was founded on the extermination of the native population and its wealth built on the enslavement of blacks, and its continued power stemmed from imperialism and neo-imperialism.  End of story.  As for Pennsylvania, I now knew that the true spirit of Independence Hall was in denying certain groups rights and privileges.  I now knew that the Underground Railroad did not lead runaway slaves to the promised land of Pennsylvania but rather through the state and well North so that self-serving Pennsylvanians would not catch and send back fugitive slaves.  And, it felt good to know that and say that and judge others who didn’t know that or believe that.

In the process of cementing this new faith, I threw out many proverbial babies with much proverbial bathwater.  One incidental casualty of that house-cleaning was the white suburban town where I grew up: Chalfont.  My logic was shaky, but as the Iraq war unfolded and many people at home cheer-led that war, I blamed them.  And it fit nicely with the new faith that I had gained.  In my mind, the Chalfonts of the world--and the Saint Jude Catholic Churches and Schools of the world--had rubber-stamped the invasion of Iraq along with all the previous imperial wars and institutionalized racism.  And that, to me, was unforgivable.  Thus, even though I had a happy home and upbringing, I swore I would never live in Chalfont or any place like it.  

As life progresses, however, I have slowly come to learn that no town, no state, no country, no institution, no person, including myself, is wholly bad.  Nor is any wholly good.  Having already thrown out the original dogmatism, I’ve now begun to move away from the new dogmatism that I had replaced it with.  The truth is somewhere in between.  For this movement, I credit marriage and family; I credit good literature and, yes, good television; and I credit contemplation and silence.  That is, in silence, we dig through the shadow impulses deep within, which coexist next to the beauty inside of us.  In good fiction and well-written history, we see both darkness and light--both genuine yearning and then utter stupidity or even meanness--in our favorite characters, and it is like looking into a mirror.  And, nothing, thankfully, is unforgivable.  

One final contributor to this latest movement has been Chalfont, ironically.  Eleven years ago, my parents moved away to another suburb of Philadelphia.  But, in an interesting convergence of circumstances several years ago, my then-future in-laws moved to Chalfont of all places.  And so, in the past two years, my wife and I have been making regular trips there.  I didn’t really notice it growing up, and during my hasty and deliberate shedding of my suburban upbringing, I would never have admitted it: it is beautiful.  Most of the drive there, leaving the concrete jungle of Newark, New Jersey, is beautiful, too, especially when we cross the bridge from Frenchtown to Pennsylvania and drive south along the Delaware.  

I would never have predicted it, but we got married at Saint Jude’s.  We held the reception at a Mennonite-owned farm that my mom and I used to run by when I was in high school.  I now occasionally walk to the subdivision where we lived, and I pass my old house.  Instead of hating the spoiled and sheltered and naive me that grew up there, I am filled with joy and nostalgia.  There’s Peace Valley Park.  Tabora Farms.  Rolling hills and stone houses and old farms in between, some having disappeared by new subdivisions but some still holding on.  People lived there then.  People live there now.  While my Pennsylvania perspective has an eastern bias, the same goes true for the rest of the state.  A train ride on Amtrak’s “Pennsylvanian” route reveals how beautiful this land is and how rich its history is with both triumph and struggle: heading out from 30th Street Station in Philly, later the farms of Amish country, then the mighty Susquehanna cutting through the state capital, the old mill towns of Altoona, Johnstown, and Latrobe, the trees of the Allegheny mountains, and finally to the hills and bridges of resurrected Pittsburgh.  A ride across I-80, especially in the fall, will do similar good things for the soul.  The land is central.  Place matters.  People live there.  And, while none of those people is wholly good, none of them is wholly bad either.  Everything is life, and all of that is ok.          

While my very early history lessons of Pennsylvania were too good to be wholly true, there was truth in them.  While the Lenni-Lenape would probably tell a different version of the story, the Quakers were relatively tolerant.  Quakers would later become some of the first whites to fight for the abolition of slavery, while most other Christians either spread slavery or ignored it.  Quaker men and women would undergird the Seneca Falls convention for women’s rights in New York.  And, while the Declaration of Independence did call Native Americans “savages,” it did at the same time contain some of history’s most inspiring words.  While the Constitution enshrined that black slaves were only three-fifths of a person, it left a window for us to amend and remedy that, albeit embarrassingly many years too late.  And while the Union army contained no saints and its cause was not necessarily abolition, it defeated an army at Gettysburg whose cause was secession and who seceded necessarily to continue the institution of slavery.  Despite our best efforts to block them, “the better angels of our nature” do occasionally triumph.  This is true of men and women, of Pennsylvania and other states, of the U.S. and other countries.

On Tuesday, November 8, 2016, the majority of Pennsylvania voters cast their ballots for Donald J. Trump for President of the United States. Donald Trump: A bigot.  A xenophobe.  A swindler.  A buffoon.  A demagogue.  A misogynist.  A bully.  A reality television star.  A high school sophomore.  Someone who bragged about sexual assault.  Someone who is entirely unfit to hold the office.  Someone who denies that climate change is happening.  Someone who would like to see more nuclear weapons in the world.  Or, even worse, perhaps someone so maniacal that he would just say those things to get elected.  

Pennsylvania’s twenty electoral votes landed in Trump’s final tally.  Majorities in other states--although not the majority of the country, mind you--voted for Trump as well.  As a result, he will be our next president.  The other states, I expected.  It’s always the other to blame.  But, I did not expect my Pennsylvania.  

We all have prejudice inside us.  We all have racism, sexism, pettiness, lust, fear, and meanness inside us.  We almost always do certain things because our ego is in charge, and we want to inflate that ego.  But, as humanity’s evolution requires, we are supposed to name those things, hold them in the light, and let them pass away.  They do not define us.  They do not own us.  We should die daily to our daily pettiness.  None of us is wholly bad, and none of us is wholly good.  We have the ability to choose the good.  Timshel.  And, forgiveness is always an option.          

Donald Trump amplified the worst in ourselves.  He, too, the microcosm for a state and for a country.  By rallying the dark impulses inside each of us and thus comforting us for a short while--like drugs do, like pornography does--he made many of us feel good.  In particular, the “white working class” of Pennsylvania voted for a man who made his fortunes cheating the likes of them.  But, it wasn’t just the white working class in the middle of the state.  Many middle class whites in beautiful Bucks County and even non-whites voted for him too.    

And so, the election returns trickled in, and I watched with shock as the Keystone State turned red for Trump.  And then, the rest of the swing states.  I slipped back into that dogmatic perspective of my lost state in my broken country.  There was anger, judgment, and defeatism: “This is predictable.  We get what we deserve.  Stupid, f_____g racist president for a stupid, f_____g racist country.”  

Now, five days later, despite all evidence, I’m moving towards hope.  Not a naive optimism, but a dark trust.  Post-election, we still have the choice.  Timshel, Pennsylvania.  Timshel, America.  We did not have to do this.  Still, we do not have to do this.  Nothing was or is inevitable.  We have the choice.  Perhaps the better angels of our nature will break through.  We are not destined either way.  

And Donald.  Even though he’s given us little proof that any wisdom or enlightenment or goodness might shine through in his presidency, we say in a great act of faith: Timshel, Donald.  Timshel.  The fate of our most vulnerable, and the fate of our shared home depends on his understanding this and our commitment to it.  We will try to force his hand.  History will judge him and us.

Willow Grove: Drones from Home (Easter 2018)

Willow Grove Park opened in 1896 on 130 idyllic acres, just fifteen miles north of Center City Philadelphia in the small town of Willow Grove.  In the similar spirit of Coney Island, it offered Philadelphians an opportunity to get out of the city, via trolley car, and enjoy amusements, rides, food, and music—most famously, John Philip Sousa’s band would play there every year.  As middle class and suburban life evolved outside of Philadelphia in the early 1900s, so did Willow Grove Park.  Cars replaced trolleys as the means of transportation, and Easton Road became more built up and developed.  Still, "Life [was] a lark in Willow Grove Park," as its slogan attested.  As an early teen in the 1960s, my mom walked to Willow Grove Park two or three times a year.  She and her best friend Kathy would get unlimited rides on “Abington Hospital Day.”  Pop Pop’s company had its picnics there every summer.  Now though, the amusement park and most of the willows and groves are gone.  It closed in 1975, and seven years later, the Willow Grove Park Mall opened in its place.  A 1991 low-budget local history documentary about the park proclaimed of the shopping mall:  “A vast, glittering monument to modern times rises on the site of old Willow Grove Park.”

            Six miles north on Easton Road, before reaching the Bucks county line, sat the Naval Air Station-Joint Reserve Base, which shared a name with the park/mall/town: “Willow Grove.”  Technically in Horsham Township, Willow Grove was a fixture in Bucks-Montgomery life.   Before my lifetime, my mom and her other best friend Edna drove onto the base when they were seventeen—security was more lax then—looking for jobs.  (They did not get hired—they weren’t even sure what type of jobs they were looking for.)  None of my mom’s family or my nearby dad’s family worked at the base, but plenty of local residents did.  Finally, there was a large parking lot off Easton Road adjacent to the base, where local teenagers would go to “watch the submarine races,” i.e. make out in cars.  Everyone had his/her way of supporting the troops. 

            In my childhood in the early 1990s, trips from the hinterlands of Chalfont to Mom Mom’s in Hatboro or Nana’s in Warrington meant driving along the edge of the Willow Grove base.  A few people we grew up with worked there.  Mr. Ganter did for a time.  Mr. Armstrong completed some of his reservist duties there, and his connection landed us the base pool for our 8th-grade graduation party, which was pretty cool.  My family never attended the annual air shows, but we heard them and appreciated them from afar.  We had as much respect and knowledge that most non-military families had, both towards Willow Grove and the military in general.

            In eighth grade, when I started to hear the call of Uncle Sam to serve and, in particular, to serve in the navy, I took slightly more interest in Willow Grove.  But for the most part, I didn’t think much of it: it was the base we drove by; occasionally, we’d see a plane; we, the U.S., probably needed it; and we, the U.S., probably used it for good.  Life simply went on, on the way to Mom Mom’s house and, later, on the way to what I thought would be an illustrious naval career.

March of my senior year of college, I chose the USS Cardinal in Manama, Bahrain as my first duty station.  The day before graduation, I was commissioned an Ensign.  Therefore, I was officially in the navy and on the navy payroll.  So, I had to find “stashed Ensign” duty to keep me occupied and accountable until I reported to the Cardinal in June.  I called up our neighbor Mr. Witowski, who was a Lieutenant Commander at the P-3 squadron at Willow Grove, and he helped stash me there.  

Willow Grove, then, holds a special, odd place in my heart.  It was my first duty station of sorts.  My responsibilities in those three weeks there involved sitting by a phone that maybe rang once, organizing some paperwork into accordion file folders, retrieving squadron hoagies from Silvio’s Deli, slowly making my way through The Brothers Karamazov (to be finished three months later), working out, and playing basketball.  That P-3 squadron seemed to play a lot of basketball.  In those three weeks, my mom actually started working at Willow Grove, in Mr. Ganter’s office.  Forty-seven years later, she finally landed that job on the base.  We were a very cute and very green navy-mother-son duo: she the new civilian, I the freshly minted Ensign, getting lunch together at Lancers’ Diner across the street.  

I reported to the Cardinal in Bahrain to start my less than illustrious naval career.  Several months later, the navy moved our crew to Ingleside, Texas to take over the USS Pelican instead.  In 2005, the same Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) commission that recommended closing Naval Station Ingleside recommended that Willow Grove be closed as well.  Local residents near both stations reacted with similar sentiment to the closure announcements: roadside signs, petitions, and town hall hearings to “save the station; save the jobs; our nation needs it to be safe (particularly post-9/11).”  (In reality, the BRAC commission, comprised of no doves, was probably right.  President Eisenhower, no dove himself, warned against this type of civilian economic dependency on military bases and industry, but that is another story for another blog entry).  In September of 2011, Willow Grove did shut down as a joint Navy-Marine-Air Force base, but the Pennsylvania Air National Guard soon took it over, and it is formally called the Horsham Air Guard Station today.  Most folks still refer to it as Willow Grove.

In 2016, Willow Grove become one of the country’s twelve drone command centers.  The command center remotely flies unmanned MQ-9 Reaper Drones, which themselves are based in and fly across the Middle East (the particular locations, missions, and any potential strikes directly connected to Willow Grove are not disclosed).  In addition to the pilot and the sensor operator, these drones—made by General Atomics at $14 million apiece—require a large support team at Willow Grove:   

A mission commander, a mission intelligence coordinator, an intelligence supervisor, and a weather specialist make up the rest of the team's key members. It takes 140 people to deliver "actionable information" for each [combat air patrol]….

The MQ-9 Reapers, typically armed with four Hellfire missiles, can gather intelligence and provide surveillance for the better part of 24 hours, hovering over a targeted area from up to 50,000 feet. When directed, the drone can strike a target with the weapons. Each drone has a range of 600 miles to 800 miles.

Drones from Willow Grove?  Yes, the other, deadlier “captive flying machines.”    

I was surprised and upset when I heard this news.  My surprise, however, was admittedly irrational.  It was an operating base after all, despite BRAC.  Willow Grove had supported combat operations and wars in the past, while I rode by it on the way to extended family holidays and dinners.  Now, drones happen to be the weapon of choice.  That’s what militaries and national guards do—fly them, shoot them.  All those hoagies and all that basketball does eventually, sometimes lead to a “kill.”  Furthermore, I had spent eighteen months on the USS Cowpens—a ship that had fired 37 missiles during "shock and awe" over Baghdad in 2003.  I played in the war games with South Korea practicing for the invasion of North Korea.  I was in the Persian Gulf for a brief time.  In short, while I was not in combat, I was much more directly, morally entwined in the questions of the war machine at that navy stage in my life.  And as a participant, an officer no less.  But County Line Road?  Across from (the short-lived and now gone) Happy Times go-karts and arcade games?  Catty-corner from Saint Joseph’s Church and Saint Joseph-Saint Robert School?  On the way to (now gone, but longer-lived) Nana and Poppi?  This drones news hit close to home.  All that other stuff I did was on those gray ships in that past, non-illustrious life.  On southern or foreign bases.  And drone bases—they’re supposed to be in Nevada or upstate New York, or if you had to put one in Pennsylvania, somewhere in the middle or out west.  But here?  On the way to (now gone) Mom Mom and Pop Pop?  From where (now gone) Mr. Armstrong worked?      

*

In a hypothetical situation, perhaps the drone is the most appropriate weapon.  “Bad actors” do exist.  I believe people can do evil things.  If the drone can stop an evil or harmful act, without putting a pilot or a foot soldier (or in the potential civilian context, a cop on the beat) at risk, should not then the drone be the weapon of choice, albeit a last resort?  Is not that even better than P-3’s, than guided-missile cruisers (like the Cowpens), and than infantrymen?  What is the big deal with drones then?

*

Through one fictional mission, the British film Eye in the Sky (2015), starring Helen Mirren and (the now gone) Alan Rickman, brilliantly and sharply explores the morality of drone warfare and of air warfare and targeted killings in general.  While certainly not pro-drone, the film to my surprise was not explicitly anti-drone either.  It makes the viewer wrestle with the moral quandary, and viewers may leave with different judgments on the film’s outcome.  

The movie thus does a very a good job of delving into the morality of the moment.  In a similar way, my ROTC leadership classes presented particular film clips and case studies that made us think.  For example, "Should Samuel L. Jackson's character in Rules of Engagement have killed the unarmed POW in order to get the North Vietnamese commander to call off the ambush on Tommy Lee Jones' platoon?"”  It is a worthy question, and my ROTC classmates landed on different sides of the debate.  What Eye in the Sky and my ROTC classes did not do, though, was provide historical context leading up to the moment.  There is the morality of the moment, but not much discussion of the morality of the historical context leading up to it.  That is not a knock on the film—that wasn’t Eye in the Sky’s job.  However, that might be a knock on my ROTC classes—I think that was supposed to be their job.  If you zoom out and ask the morality questions of U.S. involvement in Vietnam in the first place, does not that then necessarily color our response to the Samuel L. Jackson moment?  We did not do too much zooming out in ROTC.  We tend not to zoom out much in the general public discussion either.

Take Syria, for example.  In the news, you are presented with two bad options, if you are even paying attention: a, take out Bashar al-Assad and go for regime change, or b, let him continue to kill thousands in Syria.  You are then either a “hawk” or an “Assad-apologist” depending on your answer.  There is little to no context.  True, policy makers have to make hard decisions between bad choices at the end of some days, but context matters.  The fierce journalist Mehdi Hasan, known for his interviews on Al Jazeera’s Up Front and now with The Intercept and his new podcast Deconstructed, gave the best summation I’ve seen of the debate over Syria.  While good people of conscience may disagree here and lose sleep over Syria, it is the mad fools without consciences and emperors without clothes who call for missile strikes while eating "the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake you've ever seen" and who sleep all too easily afterwards.   In another Intercepted podcast on war and historical context, Jeremy Scahill and historian Nikhil Singh have a conversation that’s worth quoting at length:

JS: And in this country, there’s a media culture that dictates that you have to accept two primary factors in order to talk in a reasonable or responsible way about war. The one hand, you have that the U.S. motive is always based on some benign interest — that it’s a humanitarian intervention or it’s to stop a despot or a dictator from threatening world stability or it’s that a particular country is pursuing a weapons of mass destruction program, and then the other factor that I’ve noticed that needs to be present is you have to agree, if it’s not already natural to you, to a self-induced amnesia about how we ended up where we are, like in Syria today, in Iraq today, in Iran, in Somali, all these countries — Pakistan — around the world that the United States has played an active role in creating the conditions we see today. It’s like you erase all of that and only talk about the narrow question that officials in the U.S. pose: Is it right or wrong to try to stop country x from pursuing weapons of mass destruction?....

NS:To any way challenge the notion that the U.S. is a benign, world-ordering power is to break from a kind of a ideological sort of monolith. I mean it’s not even just a consensus, it’s kind of a, it’s really the equivalent of what we used to condemn as you know, Soviet, ideology….

JS: This is part of the point I’m getting at, we can have that [moral debate] conversation about World War II if you don’t start the history of World War II at ’39. Is there a such entity, as al Qaeda, that does want to kill Americans, Westerners et cetera? Yeah, there is.  I would love to have the conversation about: How do we take away the motive or the justifications that these people use to their own base to justify their acts of violence. But it requires a real reckoning with American history. And that’s what’s not allowed.

     

We then arrive at fictional or actual just war scenarios where we side with Helen Mirren (fire) or with Alan Rickman (don’t fire), but we only should get to make those decisions if we have considered all the facts, including the facts of history.  That requires homework, which we haven’t done.  Citizens could debate the merits of these drone strikes, but that requires knowledge and awareness, which we don’t have. 

Much of the latter is by design: Our drones operate in a semi-secret, quasi-legal arrangement between the military and the CIA.  The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has exhaustively tracked our drone attacks in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Afghanistan—the last being the only country that we are actually at war with, albeit not constitutionally-congressionally declared.  The Bureau reports that, since 2004, there have been 4,737 strikes, killing between 7,361 and 10,677 (between 737 and 1,551 of them civilians, and between 242 and 335 of them children).  Many of us critics on the left side of things were quieter in the eight years with Obama at the helm.  The case for a just war or at least more just actions seemed more feasible sans Bush and Cheney, but under Obama’s watch, we launched a total of 542 strikes.  Many of us unfortunately outsourced our critical thinking and democratic dissent and trusted the hitherto shoddy legal framework with our favorite constitutional lawyer president.  In some "double tap" operations after the initial strike, the drone comes back to fire upon those who have come in to help the injured.  Any military-aged male in a strike zone was considered a combatant. Now, that already shoddy legal framework and moral slippage is in the small hands of the small-minded reality-show host president, ripe to continue on with the strikes and even let the CIA run looser on their end of the deal.

 In that clean hypothetical, history-began-yesterday drone strike debate, the drone would be the weapon of choice, so as not to put one’s own soldiers at risk.  But that is also precisely the problem with drones.  I would not argue for U.S. military boots on the ground in any of the countries we are or are not at war with.  I certainly would not argue for the merit of one U.S. military or civilian death.  But in a democracy, the potential loss of life of any of our citizens is supposed to give us pause and cause for reflection in any war or action: Is it just? Is it worth the risk of life?  Without that check on the powers that be, they go on with the drone strikes, moral slippage slides even more, missions “creep,” and we drive right by the base on County Line Road, going on with our lives without having to give much thought.  With these new weapons, there is the new luxury, or danger, that the military members themselves don’t have to give it much moral thought either.  The targets are thousands of miles away from Willow Grove, and the screens are reminiscent of video games.  The military even admits that younger people of the "video game generation" are targeted for recruitment.  Perhaps even straight out of the defunct arcades at Happy Times.

As the article above from the local Intelligencer says, “It takes 140 people to deliver ‘actionable information’ for each [Combat Air Patrol].”  But in a purported democracy, it takes millions of more people—sometimes deluded, often distracted, and usually in the dark—to consent to these operations.  To return to my question: that’s the big deal with drones. We take them for granted. 

There are courageous people, however, who are making sure we do not take this warfare for granted.  They are the "drone whistleblowers," and at great risk to themselves, they wrote to the Obama administration:

We came to the realization that the innocent civilians we were killing only fueled the feelings of hatred that ignited terrorism and groups like ISIS, while also serving as a fundamental recruitment tool similar to Guantanamo Bay. This administration and its predecessors have built a drone program that is one of the most devastating driving forces for terrorism and destabilization around the world.

And despite the video game feel, post-traumatic stress disorder is real.  One of these whistleblowers, Brandon Bryant, describes a particular strike as seen from the operators’ booth:

Yeah, it’s pixelated, but, I mean, you could—you could see that it was a human being, and you could see that—what he was doing, and you could see the crater from the drone—from the Hellfire missile, and you could see probably the body pieces that were around this guy….You know, it’s the femoral artery, so he could have bled out really fast. It was cold outside, you know, wintertime. It seemed like forever to me, but we—as the Predator drone can stay in the air for like 18 to 32 hours, and so they just had us watch and do battle damage assessment to make sure that—to see if anyone would come and pick up the body parts or anyone really cared who these people were. And we watched long enough that the body cooled on the ground, and they called us off target….Well, you know, the clinical definition of PTSD is an anxiety disorder associated with witnessing or experiencing a traumatic event. And it’s such a blanket term that so many people are like, “Oh, you can’t get PTSD from this or that.” And it’s a widely—it’s a wider phenomenon than I think a lot of people realize.  And my deal is more moral injury, like think of it—think how you would feel when—if you were part of something that you felt violated the Constitution. And, I mean, I swore an oath, you know? I swore to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. And how do you feel if, like—you can’t use “I obeyed orders” as an excuse. It’s “I obeyed the Constitution, regardless of lawful or unlawful orders.” And lawful orders follow the Constitution. And that, that’s the hardest part.  And I was really unprepared for—for it. I tried to get out multiple times and do a different job, and I was consistently told that it’s the needs of the Air Force come first, and so I did it. I buckled down, and I did it. I did the job. I did it as best as I could, because I was scared that someone would come in, and they wouldn’t do it very well. And I—I mean, I paid a spiritual and mental price for that. And I think that’s something that people really discount, because I didn’t take any physical injury through it.

*         

In time, we remember the things and people in our land—from our home—that are now gone: the forests, the Lenni-Lenape, the farmland, the amusement parks, our (perceived) innocence, John Philip Sousa and “Stars and Stripes Forever” (songs of our (perceived) innocence), the willows, the groves, the willow groves, the larks, the strip malls on County Line and Easton Roads, the navy base, the jobs on the navy base, probably soon the Willow Grove Park Mall, Pop Pop, Mom Mom, Mr. Armstrong, Nana, Poppi.  Some of these we simply remember, fondly or less fondly.  Some we mourn.  Some we reclaim and redeem.

(Datta Khel, Pakistan, October 28, 2010)

In time, we also should remember, mourn, redeem, and reclaim the things and people that are now gone “over there.”  Especially because we have consented to their destruction.  In fact, before we even do that, we have to at least name the dead and recognize that this warfare is happening in the first place, in our name.  Whole bodies and homes and communities destroyed.  Willow Grove and the towns that surround and support it are forever linked to the towns and villages in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Afghanistan.   

“In a free society,” Rabbi Heschel reminds us, “some are guilty, but all are responsible.”

This Saturday—Holy Saturday, the day before Easter—Brandywine Peace Community will resume its demonstrations in front of the Willow Grove base from 12 noon to 2pm.  (Speaking of Eisenhower and the military industrial complex earlier, Brandywine also resumes its “IGNITE PEACE...Prayer for the Love of Humanity” in front of the King of Prussia’s Lockheed Martin on Good Friday from 12 noon to 3pm.)
Certainly, there are many other ways to dissent and to repent.  But, on the way to get an early seat across the street at Saint Joseph’s Easter Vigil mass in this, the "United States of Pontius Pilate", give a stop, or a honk, or a moment of reflection for Willow Grove. 

It will indeed require all types in this peace movement.  Veterans and non-veterans.  Even active-military resisters and active-military thinkers.  Workers at the Willow Grove base and (lower-wage) workers at the Willow Grove mall.  We on this side of the Atlantic and they "over there" in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Afghanistan.  Pacifists in principle and pacifists in effect.  The religious and the secular.  People against all war and drones and people against endless war.  People who, at the least, want fewer drones and less war.  Libertarians who, at the least, want constitutionally limited war and drones.  In general, fans of this democratic experiment who, at the least, want to shed light on and then debate the merits of these drones.  People who, at the least, don’t want drones in the hands of Trump and now John Bolton.  We can come together like Mike Lee on the right and Bernie Sanders and Chris Murphy on the left did when they almost stopped fueling the Saudi war in Yemen.  People who aren’t sure what they think and who just want to learn more.  

It will take all these companions together—no longer strangers and sojourners.    

   

Remembering Saint Patrick's Day 2003

On March 17, 2003, I was studying abroad at the American University in Cairo when I watched President Bush give Saddam Hussein forty-eight hours to leave Iraq.  Afterwards, I read a friend’s AOL IM away message: “Saint Patrick’s Day 2003: What do the Irish and the Iraqis have in common? We’re all getting bombed tonight!”

            Fifteen years ago this week, the United States went to war in Iraq.  While that war is by some accounts over, the devastation continues.  It continues for a minority U.S. families, for it is a minority—disproportionately working class—who fights our wars of choice for us.  Their sons and daughters have been killed or permanently maimed, both physically and psychologically.  And the devastation continues for a majority of Iraqis, who died in the hundreds of thousands and who live with the chaos today even after the war is officially over.  

Fifteen years on: Was the Iraq war a crime, or was it a mistake?  

Some very distasteful people built and sold that war.  Tragically, many better people fell for it.  Our indifference, ignorance, and distance, for the most part, allowed the "masters of war" to carry out their "project for the new American century."   The speech from Colin Powell—“one of the good ones” among that neocon troupe—at the United Nations had sealed the deal.

In Cairo, I was still a thousand miles and one time zone away from Iraq, but I fancied myself in the middle of the war and of the drama. There in the self-proclaimed center of the Arab world, millions of impassioned Arabs incensed over what appeared inevitable.  President Mubarak had given the wink and nod to Bush and left the Suez open to navy warships gulf-ward for a little “shock and awe.”  Protests with signs in Arabic, like I had seen in the news before (usually presented eerily), marched right there in Tahrir Square in front of our campus, and the police cracked down—sometimes on skulls.     

A night or two later, on the eve of the invasion, the legendary Edward Said arrived at AUC to give a blistering speech on U.S. foreign policy, as Operation Iraqi Freedom (or, OIF for short) loomed on the horizon.  After Said spoke, a well-known Iraqi oud player, Naseer Shama, gave an intimate concert.  AUC didn’t book Shama purposely for the eve of his country’s invasion, but the drama couldn’t have been scripted better—or worse.                     

            In such a setting, already in Cairo for two months, I could not help but be against the war.   I hope that if I was in South Bend that semester—among my ROTC classmates, among American TV news outlets—I still would have had that same opinion.  As I emailed, IM’ed, called, and read the news from home during the war lead-up, it seemed that I was living in a different world.  I was, in fact.  

There might be very well be, as the Book of Ecclesiastes and later the Byrds said "a time of war".  People in good conscience, I believe, can disagree about a particular fight in a particular time and place.  "Deciders" can arrive at hard or different "decision points.".  And maybe in the end, after fifteen years, people can admit mistakes, and these admissions could be the marks of any healthy-yet-fallible citizenry.  Although, people are less likely to admit crimes.      

People in good conscience can disagree.  We have the duty after all to follow our consciences.  But, and here is the crux, we have the duty first to form our consciences.  And, we don’t do too much conscience formation in this land.  Neither at the individual nor the collective level.  

One of Just War Theory’s prerequisites is a presumption against war.  Yet, here in the United States and probably most other countries, we have a presumption towards war.  War is our default.  We can’t imagine other options.  Maslow famously quipped, “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”  Therefore, when an impending conflict looms and thoughtful people try to debate, the war drums beat louder and the self-serving and jingoistic tropes get repeated: “If you can’t stand behind our troops, then you should stand in front of them,” I remember from a bumper sticker in Texas.  Or, as I recall reading in several Notre Dame Observer columns, “Your protest gives help to the ‘enemy.’”  A false yet convenient logic.

A deeply embedded militarism and a whitewashed history, from an early age, had greased the skids for the Iraq war.  It is difficult to form a conscience amidst this type of noise.  And, that easy, demand-nothing-from-you patriotism has greased the skids for the next war.  Conscience formation involves truth seeking, but our major news outlets hardly ever present context in any war, and our history books do not adequately teach our atrocities.  We celebrate King, for example, but we leave out his “Beyond Vietnam” speech when he said we were the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”  At the most, if we’re lucky, Vietnam is taught as a mistake.  It’s certainly never taught as a crime, despite criminal activity.  There was no serious national reckoning with both the mistakes and the crimes of that war. (Yesterday, March 16, was the fiftieth anniversary of the My Lai massacre.)  Thus, upon defeating Iraq in the first Gulf War in 1991, the elder President Bush made it clear that we actually learned the wrong lesson from Vietnam: “We promised this would not be another Vietnam. And we kept that promise. The specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian Peninsula.”  

And so, twelve years and one Bush later, when we went to war in Iraq again, we were ripe to answer that war cry.  True, many of us did not build or fight or support that war.  If you’re young enough, you probably didn’t even know about it.  But, none of us is blameless.  Today, we remain only "half awake in a fake empire" and readily greased to answer the next war cry.  The other two members of the “Axis of Evil” remain on the chopping block: Iran and North Korea.

My Saint Patrick’s Day, almost-spring, almost-Easter, fifty-years-after-the-My-Lai-massacre, fifteen-years-after-shock-and-awe wish is that we get in the way of the next war.  That we imagine and build something different.  That we learn, for instance, that we are supporting a war in Yemen but that we have the power to stop it.   That we wake up and "practice resurrection."

Lent 2018: "First they came for the Muslims...."

            After being stymied the past two years by Islamophobic-Trumpist forces thinly veiled as zoning concerns, the Muslims of Bayonne, New Jersey will finally be able to build their mosque and community center.

            Bayonne, the self-described “Peninsula City,” lies just south of Jersey City in Hudson County.  Surrounded by Newark Bay and Upper New York Bay and separated from Staten Island by the Kill Van Kull to the South, Bayonne used to be a mostly white immigrant working-class town.  Many of those Jewish and Irish-, Polish-, and Italian-descended families still reside there.  So does much of the port-industrial base that originally made the town thrive—now with a light rail that connects commuters to Manhattan and a cruise terminal.  Bayonne contains the grit, the diners, the traffic, the population density, the ethnic melting pot and lack of actual melting, the industrial and post-industrial landscapes, the chip on its shoulder in Manhattan’s shadow, and the unforgettable characters that make it both the stuff of epic Springsteen backdrop and the butt of jokes.  

            I first started my daily trek to Bayonne, across Newark Bay, three and a half years ago as a student-teacher at Marist High School, a little Catholic school at the north edge of town founded by the Marist Brothers.  First opened in 1954, Marist was all boys and almost all white.  As the demographics of Bayonne and nearby cities changed, so did the demographics of the school (also, it is now co-ed).  The brothers whom I befriended in my three years there impressed me in their dedication to their mission, even as fewer and fewer students were Catholic.  Their job, in the spirit of their founder Marcellin, was to serve their kids, no matter their race or their denomination or their socioeconomic status.  A handful of those students were Arab and Muslim.      

**

The Bayonne Muslims had begun renting the basement of St. Henry’s school in 2008 and after seven years, all the while growing in numbers and raising funds, they had purchased their own property—a vacant industrial lot—to build their eventual mosque and community center.  That plan ran into push-back from certain corners of Bayonne.

In February 2016, I received an email from my Veterans for Peace chapter that called on us to support the Bayonne Muslims.  There was to be a zoning board meeting later that week at City Hall on their proposed mosque, and anti-mosque, anti-Muslim forces were going to protest outside.  The Muslim community put out a call to friends in the area to counter-rally.  I told my principal about it, and she encouraged me to wear Marist gear and told me that if anyone asked, “Don’t be afraid to say you work at Marist.”  She got it.  

Muslims and non-Muslims, teachers and students from Bayonne High School, Arab, Indian, Pakistani, white, black, young and old, and a couple veterans all together, we outnumbered the anti-mosque side at least three-to-one.  The air was frigid, but the solidarity warmed hearts and bones, and I figured we would—we shall—overcome.  After all, the mayor and other local representatives were all purportedly behind the mosque.    

The next day at Marist, I broke two rules of the work lunch table: never talk religion and never talk politics.  I did both at the same time.

 **

Eleanor, our beloved long-time secretary, was like a grandmother to our students, mostly students of color.  She listened to them, she looked out for them, she gave them extra bus tickets, and she stored and handed out extra ties and belts.  As a non-adversarial figure, she let students who were in trouble sit in the main office and vent.  She loved them, but it was a tough love.  She challenged them, often with a good joke or zinger as they headed out.  She became a sort-of-grandmother to me as well.  I always had a full lunch, but she often brought extra food for me.  Our school didn’t have much money, but she made sure I had all the supplies I needed.  She gave me, an outsider, the inside intel.  She was the gate and first face of our school, laughing, welcoming, and dishing out wit.  She loved us, and we loved her.

            Which is why the day after the mosque rally upset me so much.

            “I heard you were down at City Hall last night?” she asked.

            “Yes, I was,” I replied.

            “What were you doing down there?”

            “I was down there to support...to stand with...to support our Muslim community.”

            “So, you were on their side?  You like them?”

            “Well...uhh...yes, I think…”

            “What business do you have being down there?  You don’t live in Bayonne.  Why do you care?”

            “Well, I work here.”

            “But you don’t live here.  Why do you support them?”

            “Well, I think they’re being discriminated against in a similar way that the Fitzgibbons’, and then later the Romanos, the Witowskis, and the Cohens were when they moved to Bayonne many years ago.”

            “Well, I don’t like them…(wait for it) what they did on 9/11….”

            I was caught off guard by the turn of the conversation and then the 9/11 bomb.  I felt frustrated.  Blood rushed to my cheeks, and I got small-mouthed.  I tried to reason, but I lost my cool.  I tried for a quick slice of Arab/Muslim/Middle Eastern politics and history with the starter, “Well, fifteen of those particular nineteen Muslims were from Saudi Arabia…” but reason proved no match for the years of pent-up Hannity-ism (presumably) that was to follow: “those people get everything...a stabbing by one of them near that mosque...the noise...the parking...sharia law...9/11 (again)...after what they did….”  Then, it was a segue into the larger O’Reilly narrative: “And, black people—they get everything these days.  Why isn’t there anything for white people?”

Somehow, we got to black people.  The dog-whistle was thrown away—just a whistle now.  This was all with our black and Latino students in the backdrop in the cafeteria, twenty feet away.  And Mo and Souhail, too—two of our Muslim students.    

“I don’t understand why so many people not from Bayonne were there,” she closed.

Finally and angrily, I dropped my v-card: “Well, I joined the navy and this isn’t the type of country that I fought for!”

True, I was (am) a veteran.  But, I didn’t really do any fighting, unless you count the war games and weeks of driving in circles in the middle of the Pacific.  No enemy there, or anywhere else in the globe for that matter, threatened our religious freedom and plurality.  And so, I may not have employed strict logic in that heat of the moment, but the veteran card ended the conversation.  

            The next day, Eleanor brought me in zucchini bread.  She apologized for getting angry and arguing, and so did I.  We hugged, and we never talked about the mosque again.

            Furthermore, I didn’t think too much about the mosque afterwards.  It apparently had the support of the board and city council and the powers-that-be.  Eleanor’s criticism of my outside-agitating did have one grain of truth in it: since the Bayonne mosque was neither my geographic nor my religious home, my privileged activism could afford to be just a flash in the pan and I could go on with my life.  But meanwhile, the mosque was delayed for a year.  

In March 2017, the mosque debate came to a head at a five-hour zoning board meeting that had to take place in the high school auditorium due to the number of attendees.  The board did not have enough votes to approve the requisite variances for the mosque to go ahead.  It seemed like the Trumpist forces had won.  The Muslims lost.    

In January of this year, I took a small group of Notre Dame undergraduates (staying with us during their “Urban Plunge”) to meet with two members of the Bayonne Muslim community at the Broadway Diner.  Without major resentment but with an honest combination of sadness and optimism, Yaser and Ibrahim told us their story.  They updated us on the case.  They informed us that the community was suing the city.  Ibrahim told us how he met some old high school classmates before that five-hour meeting and then was surprised to see them get up and speak against the mosque.  A latent fear not unlike Eleanor’s.

The good news is that the Bayonne mosque is now moving forward.  So is the mosque in the more affluent and suburban Basking Ridge thirty miles west.  The bad news is that the fear and hate continues, both in its latent and active forms.  

**

Sadly, Eleanor died last year of cancer.  Despite her no-longer-secret Limbaugh-ism, I loved her.  She was grandmotherly.  And, her fear was a window into the common, yet unjust fear in most of us white people.  I never did go back to talk to Eleanor about the mosque, about “those people,” or about those other, black people.  About why she felt so threatened.  "Where does it hurt?" Ruby Sales asks.  I probably wouldn’t have changed her mind, but in an inviting way, I could have listened and perhaps pricked and piqued.  I could have perhaps learned more about myself and “my people.”  I could have given her space and felt discomfort for a time, while still not accepting outright falsehoods.  But those are uncomfortable conversations, and I tend to shy away from them and any type of confrontation.  

White supremacy lives on.  It, unfortunately, dies hard.  Not just in the Alabama that almost elected Roy Moore.  But in Eleanor’s New Jersey and my Pennsylvania, too: the Northeast, often Catholic, often Democratic (the insular-peninsular Bayonne is only 8% Republican by the way) version.  “As long as you're south of the Canadian border, you're South,” so said Malcolm X.         

Whiteness is a lie, both historically and psychologically.  White supremacy’s most devastating form has certainly been anti-black racism—blacks by far its most devastated victims.  It has morphed to include anti-Latino xenophobia and, especially since 9/11, Islamophobia.  White supremacy has, for the most part, always resided in the White House, but now it resides there quite proudly.  And sometimes in Bedminster, New Jersey and Mar-a-Lago too.  Its chief law enforcement officer is the "Anglo" Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions.     

  White supremacy has existed from the founding of this country, but how and why does it rear its head now, in its current fashion, enabled by its highest office-holders?  I do not excuse it, but I seek to understand it (in the same way that I do not excuse Islamic-inspired violence but seek to understand it).

Ruby Sales reflects:  

I really think that one of the things that we’ve got to deal with is that how is it that we develop a theology or theologies in a 21st-century capitalist technocracy where only a few lives matter? How do we raise people up from disposability to essentiality? And this goes beyond the question of race. What is it that public theology can say to the white person in Massachusetts who’s heroin-addicted because they feel that their lives have no meaning, because of the trickle-down impact of whiteness in the world today? What do you say to someone who has been told that their whole essence is whiteness and power and domination? And when that no longer exists, then they feel as if they are dying or they get caught up in the throes of death.

Alienation.  Dislocation.  Loss of place in this rigged political, economic system.   White supremacy then becomes the drug itself—historically much deadlier than heroin.  The crude trick of this drug encourages many of its users to support the conman Trump, a chief beneficiary himself of the rigged system.    

It is important to both fight against racism-Islamophobia as it exists and understand the conditions that enable it to flourish.  I just finished teaching a unit on the World Wars.  It is trite but true: alongside Hitler’s vile theories and policies, we must look at the post-Versailles world that proved fertile ground for fascism.  Godwin’s law be damned: just as we fight Trumpism, we fight the deep causes in this long-sickening democracy.  And we the somewhat-winners (for now) in this world order—not as winning as the hedge-fund managers—should reflect on how we have created this fertile ground.  Or if not created, at the least, how we have been too asleep or distracted to recognize this alienation, dislocation, and despair.  In response to this world order, some people shoot themselves in front of City Hall, some blame immigrants, and some (too many) fall for the Trump scam—not the university or the casinos this time but the presidency.  This is not an apology for Eleanor or for white supremacy; nor is this an attempt to reduce the current celebration of racist ignorance to merely economic problems.  To be sure, people of color across the board have suffered even more under the prevailing economic system, and many destitute people the world over do not turn to hate.  But, whether it be the Muslim or the black or the Salvadoran bogeyman, we have to look inside to understand why we need that "other" in the first place.

**

In a beautiful conversation with Rabbi Sarah Bassin and hosted by Krista Tippett, Imam Abdullah Antepli said:

If anybody tells you, “Islam is” whatever; “Christianity says…”; “Judaism believes…”—shy away from these people.  At its best, they are just naïve and uninformed.  At its worst, they are just lying.  No religion of 1.6 billion people, 1,400 years of history, says one thing or believes in one thing or strongly condemns or endorses one thing.  That’s just not—and Christianity is not what New Testament says, only.  Judaism is not what Tanakh says, only.  Islam is not what Qur’an and Muhammad said 1,400 years ago.  Islam is what Muslims do.  You have to see the human manifestation of that text over time, and not just one community, one episode, one time period, but over centuries….

It is so easy and cheap and quick to say, “ISIS is not Muslim.  Hezbollah is not Muslim.  Hamas is not Muslim.” You can’t say that.  As much as they turn my stomach upside-down, as much as I am disgusted, what they represent, I cannot disown it….

Solution is not to divorce ourselves from our moral responsibility.  We have to own this cancer, and we have to defeat it in its theological, ideological ground, and we have to defeat it in its social, political, and cultural ground….

You have to face the ugliness in yourself and in your community.  Most of the moral conversation is this: hitting the chest on the other side, what moral failures that you see.  But the real moral conversation is to put an honest mirror, put yourself into a CT scan, CAT scan, and see what the report is.  What is in you, in your community? How much moral energy and commitment and drive is behind what you do, and how much of this is shallow politics?  That’s why it’s very difficult, but we should absolutely shake the moral imagination of our communities.  We have to improve the level of self-critical moral awakening, moral courage, in our communities.

            At the same time that we fight for the Bayonne Muslims’ right to their mosque and against Muslim bans, we must face the ugliness in our communities and in ourselves.  Righteous indignation at the state of the world, and humble repentance for our role in creating it, at the same time.  This is our perennial, Lenten calling.