Authors: Medea Benjamin

Stop the Next War Now (13 page)

BOOK: Stop the Next War Now

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• Remember that sometimes we win. Not even Bush could persuade the American people to accept more arsenic in our water. And the Senate has successfully filibustered the administration’s most extreme federal judicial nominees. Don’t forget that meaningful universal enfranchisement in this country was won just forty years ago. Big changes can happen in our lifetimes.

• Bring a friend. If we want to become the majority we think we are, more people will simply have to show up.

• Seek out people who share your values and who have a sense of humor. Politics is depressing enough. The work of stopping wars is hard, and it takes time. We won’t make it if we can’t have some fun along the way.

There is a joke going around that the difference between Vietnam and Iraq is that George W. Bush had a plan for getting out of Vietnam. For people who oppose preemptive invasions as a foreign-policy tool, the difference between stopping the Iraq invasion and stopping the next wars, may mean helping less on left politics as usual and more on creating and executing a plausible play for peace.

Chapter 4

STRENGTHENING

WOMEN’S

VOICES

A NEW

COUNTERTERRORISM

STRATEGY: FEMINISM

BARBARA EHRENREICH

Barbara Ehrenreich has written more than ten books, including
Blood Rites
and
Nickel and Dimed
. She is a frequent contributor to
Esquire, Harper’s Magazine, Mirabella
, the
Nation
, the
New Republic
, the
New York Times
, and
Time
. Ehrenreich became involved in political activism during the Vietnam War and has been an activist and feminist ever since.

I’ve been reading Bin Ladin—Carmen, that is, not her brother-in-law Osama (she spells the last name with an “i”)—and I’d like to present a brand-new approach to terrorism, one that turns out to be more consistent with traditional American values. First, let’s stop calling the enemy “terrorism,” which is like saying we’re fighting “bombings.” Terrorism is only a method; the enemy is an extremist Islamic insurgency whose appeal lies in its claim to represent the Muslim masses against a bullying superpower.

But as Carmen Bin Ladin urgently reminds us in her book
Inside the Kingdom
, one glaring moral flaw of this insurgency, quite apart from its methods, is that it aims to push one-half of those masses down to a status only slightly above that of domestic animals. While Osama was getting pumped up for jihad, Carmen was getting up her nerve to walk across the street in a residential neighborhood in Jeddah—fully veiled but unescorted by a male, something that is an illegal act for a woman in Saudi Arabia. Eventually she left the kingdom and got a divorce because she didn’t want her daughters to grow up in a place where women are kept “locked in and breeding.”

So here in one word is my new counterterrorism strategy: feminism. Or, if that’s too incendiary, try the phrase “human rights for women.” I don’t mean just a few opportunistic references to women, like those that accompanied the war on the Taliban and were quietly dropped by the Bush administration when that war was abandoned and Afghan women were locked back into their burqas. I’m talking about a sustained and serious effort.

We should announce plans to pour U.S. tax dollars into girls’ education in places like Pakistan, where the high-end estimate for female literacy is 26 percent, and into scholarships for women seeking higher education in nations that typically discourage it. (Secular education for the boys wouldn’t hurt, either.) Expand the grounds for asylum to all women fleeing gender totalitarianism, wherever it springs up. Reverse the Bush policies on global family planning, which condemn seventy-eight thousand women to death each year in makeshift abortions. Lead the global battle against the trafficking of women.

Los Angeles women speak out just days after the Iraq invasion.

Photo by Jodie Evans

I’m not expecting such measures alone to incite a feminist insurgency within the Islamist one. Carmen Bin Ladin found her rich Saudi sisters-in-law sunk in bovine passivity, and some of the more spirited young women in the Muslim world have been adopting the head scarf as a gesture of defiance toward American imperialism. We’re going to need a thorough foreign policy makeover—from Afghanistan to Israel—before we have the credibility to stand up for anyone’s human rights. You can’t play the gender card with dirty hands.

If this country were to embrace a feminist strategy against the insurgency, we’d have to start by addressing our own dismal record on women’s rights. We’d be pushing for the immediate ratification of the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, which has been ratified by 169 countries but remains stalled in the U.S. Senate. We’d be threatening to break off relations with Saudi Arabia until it acknowledged the humanity of women. And we’d be thundering about the shortage of women in the U.S. Senate and House, an internationally embarrassing 14 percent. We should be aiming for a representation of at least 25 percent, the same target the Transitional Administrative Law of Iraq has set for the federal assembly there.

If we want to beat Osama, we’ve got to start by listening to Carmen.

“Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age.”

—Gloria Steinem

MOTHERS

OF ALL THE

WORLD’S CHILDREN

BETH OSNES

Beth Osnes is the author of
Twice Alive
, a spiritual guide to mothering. She is a theater teacher, a mother of three, and a founding member of Mothers Acting Up.

Once my kids could walk and tie their own shoes, I took a good look at the world and saw it with new eyes. The glaring discrepancy between the conditions under which I was able to raise my children and the conditions under which so many other mothers were forced to raise
their
children— without access to clean water, health care, education, or safety—awakened within me a feeling of solidarity with mothers across economic and national boundaries. I knew I wanted to connect with them in some meaningful way, but at the time I lacked the means. As my kids started to grow and I found a little freedom in my schedule, I began to be a little more active in my community, attending political events and helping a struggling single mother with child care. I kept looking for avenues to make a difference.

Within my community of other mother friends in Boulder, Colorado, many of us had these same restless feelings, accompanied by newfound reserves of energy (now that our kids were mostly sleeping through the night) and a yearning for some outlet that matched our concerns. After a few attempts to get others to join us (don’t ask us about the time we organized an outdoor rally in December and only loyal friends showed up, shivering in support), we created Mothers Acting Up (mau). mau is a movement to mobilize the gigantic political strength of mothers to ensure the health, education, and safety of every child, not just a privileged few.

To launch our movement, we hosted a Mothers Acting Up Mother’s Day parade in May 2002. Amid audacious costumes of every sort—many of us donned stilts in the parade to show motherhood as a large, impressive force to be reckoned with—we launched mau as a tool for mothers moving from concern to action. We created a Web site, www.mothersactingup.org, with suggestions for easy actions that women could take to address specific issues facing children. The Web site provides contact information for congressional representatives, advice on how to write powerful appeals to the government, and sample letters to the editor that a revved-up mama can send to her newspaper.

One of our early inspirations for this movement came from a “first wave” feminist and suffragist, Julia Ward Howe, best known as the author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” In 1870 she called for women to rise up and oppose war in all its forms and declared a Mother’s Day for Peace. She asked the women of her nation, “Why do not the mothers of mankind interfere in these matters, to prevent the waste of that human life of which they alone bear and know the cost?” She attempted to organize an international council of women to determine the means “whereby the great human family could live in peace.” Sadly, she was never able to achieve those dreams. Mother’s Day became a national holiday after her death but only as a watered-down version of her original vision, without any hint of activism.

Nearly a century later, Howe’s words are gaining an ever-increasing audience, thanks to the advent of the Internet and the ripeness of the moment for mothers to assert their values. In 2003, just one year after mau’s inception, eleven cities throughout the country hosted Mothers Acting Up Mother’s Day events, celebrating the desire of mothers to speak out for the rights of children. In 2004, there were twenty-five events across the country, and in 2005, mau’s goal is to hold mau Mother’s Day celebrations in every state of the country.

For me, this movement feels like a true fit for my passions and abilities. I trust and love the women I work with, and I feel a lifelong commitment to our goals. I also like the fact that this work feels constructive rather than reactionary, unlike much political activism I’ve encountered. I, like many other women, recoil from confrontational, negative approaches to politics, so this celebratory and positive alternative feels like a comfortable home for my budding activism. Anger can’t sustain my commitment or interest, but the belief in every child’s right to health, education, and safety can.

Reaching out into the world through mau has become a spiritual calling to the mother in me. It is a cousin to the urge to cook chicken soup for friends suffering from a loss, or the desire to put my sweater around the shoulders of a cold child on the playground. With mau, though, my response to the needs of the world is not only personal but also political—because American politics has far-reaching effects on the quality of children’s lives. Whether babies in South Africa get the antiviral aids drug they need is based on a political decision to allocate aid to that country. Whether millions of U.S. children receive quality preschool through Head Start is a political decision. Politicians determine the priorities for each nation’s resources and allocate funds accordingly. Since nobody stands to make a profit from lobbying for the health, education, and safety of every child, then I must speak up and advocate on behalf of these children. Indeed, who else will give voice to the voiceless?

Mothers are a natural lobbying group for children. The gargantuan momentum of mothers mobilizing has the potential to catapult us to a future in which children’s needs are prioritized and their rights protected. Let us whisper this to each other, sing it on the streets, yell it from our rooftops, and declare it in our houses of government: We will protect our children—wherever they live on earth—with our personal and political strength!