Musings on March 20: War and peace

For most of my middle daughters life we have waged war in Iraq. At the earliest protests against the war, I remember holding her tiny hand as a small group of us marched through downtown Medford and tried to demonstrate the discontent we felt. I was all too aware of the mothers in the Middle East and I knew what "shock and awe" really meant. The US media was glaringly careful to keep us from seeing the glossy pictures of the bodies of the dead, but I saw them in my nightmares anyway. I knew they were someone else's son, someone else's daughter, someone else's child and sometimes I would study my daughters little hand and silently acknowledge my good fortune.

The thing about trying to be an activist is that most of the time, even when you are doing something, it never feels like you are doing enough. Standing with like minded people, friends and neighbors is therapeutic but most of the time you still feel pretty powerless over world affairs. Not doing anything would be worse, so we make protest signs, sing chants for peace, hang up fliers and hope that at the end of the day we did what we could when we could. Even so, it's easy to get burned out doing peace activism. It all seems so huge and it is hard not to wonder if what you are doing is making any difference at all. It's doing something, but it never feels satisfying. Satisfaction would come from not having to be there at all.

This year is our seventh year in Iraq and on Saturday we had our annual gathering in Medford, Oregon. One of the underlying themes of the day was "building peace stone by stone" and how small things can add up to something significant. One of the speakers, the Reverand Kurt Katzmar of the Congregational United Church of Christ in Medford said something about the need to look internally for the answers we are searching for. He got me thinking about how my own life has been aligned with war and peace.

For several decades my father worked for a company that makes "precision tactical weapon systems". Actually what they do is kept fairly secret, but every day my dad went off to work and one of those evenings he came home with a flier from "Grandmothers for Peace" and he talked about how they had been protesting outside the plant that day. Since his employer had told him to accept whatever the women offered, he had rolled down the car window and accepted the paper flier. He left it on our kitchen table and as "stuff" seems to want to do, it must have sat there for a couple of weeks because I remember that it sometimes penetrated my world and I would stop thinking about whatever schoolyard issue I was probably stewing over and I studied that flier as I ate my cheerios and night after night as we sat down for dinner and do you know that those grandmothers were able to plant a seed? It is no mistake that I became an activist. What else could I be? I imagine the grandmothers felt powerless too and sometimes they must have wondered if it was all worth it. If standing outside that plant made any sort of a difference at all. I wish they knew.

Stone by stone, kindness by kindness, flier by flier, tiny little things become powerful.

Maybe we never get to see the seeds germinate, but as long as we keep moving forward in positive ways, I think it counts for something in the bigger picture. It must.