The Peace Elders Are Hiring

Howard Zinn’s death lights up the lives of peace elders, the ones who bring a rush of memory with their strong lives: Edward Said and The Hopi elders and Martin Luther King and Dorothy Day and Oscar Romero and Kurt Vonnegut and Sojourner Truth and Thomas Merton and Abbie Hoffman. Dr. Zinn’s spirit crosses the stage with these heroes, whose actions started from an on-the-ground moral honesty. Their bravery, which dazzles the rest of us – seemed beside the point to them. To them, peace was the job that had to be done.

That kind of life – as John Lennon put it – “is something to be.” My god, you look at Dr. Zinn’s life and there are bold risking-all moves at every turn – off to Viet Nam with Daniel Berrigan, editing the Pentagon Papers with Noam Chomsky, storming the modern media with Amy Goodman and Matt Damon. He can even question the good wars, even the Revolutionary War and WW-2, and give us a primer on how very uprooting our questions need to be, to re-conjure peace.

When we come away from marveling at his obituary, back to our own everyday jobs, the down-shift of gravitas is so extreme we’re in danger of getting the bends. So many of us have jobs opposed to our most basic beliefs. (So many of us shop and pay taxes in an economy that makes permanent war.) And beyond making a living, there’s just – living. We have to face the virulent environment of today’s consumerized life, which is the political and economic support structure for militarism .

We consumers can be getting nothing done at all – and yet have the sensation of much busyness. The thousands of marketing hits we get daily, square in our eyes and ears, cut us off on the way to any hoped-for activism. We have to deal with the assault on our ability to sustain our own attention. Capital must expand profits on all levels, and a key market is our psyches. In fact, the corporations are completing their transition to becoming human beings themselves. It is so hard to fight bizarro-land when you also have to live in it.

Of the famous peace elders in the world, we knew one: Kurt Vonnegut. And Kurt was a friend of Howard Zinn. He signed posters that featured the Zinn phrase, WAR IS THE ENEMY – and he would mail them out as a gift. I remember one afternoon I started wailing like I’m wailing here – bemoaning the activists’ difficulties. Kurt would have none of it. He made it clear that I was feeling terribly sorry for myself. I said, “In the peace movement and the civil rights movement – you had clear lines to cross that were inherently dramatic. With have nothing like that now. We’re floating, we’re dizzy - it’s all a fog!”

Then I went too far, venting my frustration. “Will we ever have a good story-line for peace? Will we ever have anything as convincing as your imprisonment in an underground locker while Dresden burned?” He said in a way that was both gruff and mischievous, “That’s a job that might be available. Want it?”

We look at these extraordinary, almost impossible lives. We see the arrests and mockery and martyrdom. To the people who pursued peace memorably, who re-issued peace as something real - it was a solid job they did every day. The ego’s fears, the danger, and the angst about the strange hopelessness of it all – we need to get over it. Peace is a job, and the elders are hiring.