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Authors: Medea Benjamin

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“Democratic vigilance has been disproportionately expressed by artists, activists, and intellectuals in American life … to be a democratic individual is to speak out on uncomfortable truths.”

—C

ORNELL

W

EST

I work for peace with pigment, plaster, and clay. With images from dreams and international news reports, with the voices of our ancestors, with insights from family and friends, with scenes I witness in the world, and with the private struggles of the heart. All of my work is the product of many peoples, and an intimate experience all my own. The whisper of the charcoal as it brushes across paper; the easy, sensual glide of the paint as I stroke the wall with my brush; the warm, responsive way the clay bends to my touch: these are the physical delights of making my work.

Ceasefire/Alto al Fuego
.Acrylic on stucco, 10 by 15 feet.Twenty-first and Mission streets, San Francisco. © 1987 and 2002 (restored) by Juana Alicia.

 

© Juana Alicia

The other satisfactions are harder to describe. I use the process of painting, drawing, and sculpting to resolve problems in my own life, to bear witness to the conflicts we are living through, and to propose resolutions for those struggles in dialogue with many other people facing the same challenges. Painting a mural is a tremendous opportunity and responsibility, no less than trying to create a monumental identity for a community through the skin, muscle, and bones of its architecture.

What interests me is not simply including multicultural faces and traditions in the same social tableaux, but instead expressing the vital, painful collective project in which we are engaged. I am always striving to reveal the hidden, or unofficial, narratives of our lives in the Americas and internationally. The Chicana/o mural, like African American blues or jazz, is a narrative full of the pain and sacrifice of a marginalized people who have played a crucial role in the struggle for democracy, social equality, and civil rights in the United States.

Once preoccupied with issues particular to Chicana/os, Latina/os, and Native Americans in America, our struggles have expanded from the farm-workers’ movement and fights for equal education in urban American schools to include international liberation movements in Central America, South America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. We have also fought forces inside and outside our own communities, with people of many colors battling to be included in the women’s movement or represented in the gay/lesbian/bisexual/ transgender community. Through our large-scale murals, we can tell these stories, little-seen histories of women and of people of color that run counter to the mainstream images and stereotypes that advertising and mass media promote. These paintings are our cinema of the streets.

When I am actually making the work, I feel a sureness of purpose, a calling, the knowledge that this is what I came to this life to do. This in itself is an act of peacemaking, claiming a role that feels rich and fulfilling, doing work that feels meaningful. The right to do such work should be the goal of all who struggle for a world without war. So many potential young painters, composers, writers, actors, healers, dancers, and poets are dying in senseless wars, with no way to escape poverty apart from the military.

Our communities often suffer the casualties of these economic disadvantages most deeply, because our children pay with their lives for the affluence of the classes that exploit the lands and peoples where those wars are fought. I do my work in public places as an effort to prevent and heal those casualties.

Murals claim the space of both the public square and the human circle. Whether I am creating a mural that celebrates the flowering of human development in elders or the contributions women have made to the world, or conceiving a work about healing and diversity for an urban medical center, I am striving to bring the interior life of the community to the fabric of the environment, to promote a dialogue between members of diverse communities. I am hoping that this dialogue energizes the people who engage in it to know each other and to act for peace.

“There is talk in Colombia about an armed revolution. But for us,

 

revolutions are not made with weapons.

Revolution

: what does it mean?

 

To renovate, to create, to invent.War was invented long ago, and so were

 

weapons.There’s nothing revolutionary about violence.”

—Leonardo Jiménez

MAKING

A SCENE

KATHRYN BLUME

Kathryn Blume is a cofounder of the Lysistrata Project, the first worldwide theatrical event for peace. She has toured
The Accidental Activist
—her critically acclaimed one-woman show about the Lysistrata Project—to more than twenty-five cities in the United States and Canada. Her new play,
Vanya/Vermont
, a modern adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s
Uncle Vanya
, premieres at the Vermont Stage Company in 2005.

 

On March 3, 2003, hundreds of thousands of people in fifty-nine countries and all fifty U.S. states gathered together to read a play. They gathered in groups of twos and threes and tens and hundreds. They gathered in the streets, on boats and on subways, in parks, living rooms, bars, and restaurants. They gathered in jungles, in theaters, and on the Internet. Some met in secret, and others in the most public manner they could muster. Some of them were world-famous, A-list Hollywood actors, some were Broadway stars, and some had never picked up a script before in their lives.

Houston CODEPINK women give Bush a “pink slip” while getting folks fired up to vote in Texas. © 2004 by Scogin Mayo

The play they chose to read was
Lysistrata
, a twenty-five-hundred-year-old comedy about achieving peace by sexual boycott, and this event, the Lysistrata Project, protested the Bush administration’s seemingly inexorable march toward war on Iraq.

When I ask myself the big questions—what are the causes of conflict? What are the roots of imperialism? What makes anyone think it’s acceptable to hurt, maim, torture, or sacrifice others on the battlefields of war or commerce?—the most basic answers I can come up with, the most universal impediments to living a peaceful existence, are
too much fear
and
not enough compassion
.

Those are easy and understandable imbalances in our makeup. We all know what it’s like to be afraid, to feel alone and disconnected, to fear we won’t get enough of what we need in our lives. We all know what it’s like to fear losing what we’ve got. And we all know what it’s like to think of someone else as the “other,” as not like us, not quite as human, not as vulnerable to pain or fear or loss. We know what it’s like to see someone as deeply and insurmountably different—and therefore dangerous. We’ve all fallen into that trap: red states and blue states, radical fundamentalists and secular humanists, terrorists and … the rest of us.

The hardest work comes in remembering that while differences between us do exist, we are mostly the same. We share not only basic genetic patterns but also the same needs for food, water, shelter, safety, love, and meaning. Turn to the world’s tales of spiritual growth, and they all describe enlightenment as the dissolution of the illusion of separateness.

We grow the roots of peace when people go from being “other” to being “us.” I have a photograph, one of my favorite “other”-to-“us” examples, of a
Lysistrata
reading in Nikko, Japan. Look at twenty-five Japanese people sitting around the sanctuary of a Catholic church, reading an ancient Greek antiwar sex comedy, and you know the universality of human experience.

Another
Lysistrata
reading happened at a Kurdish refugee camp in an abandoned factory in Patras, Greece. None of the Greek architecture students who organized the reading had ever met the Kurds before. Nevertheless, in spite of language barriers, and in the face of a massive power outage, the performance generated tremendous intimacy among the participants. As one of the organizers wrote, “We could see our shadows in the white tent, and we could feel more the voices. . . . We talked in ancient Greek (text), Greek (text and dialogues), some English, and Kurdish (through spontaneous translations). We also talked a lot with our eyes, our movement, and our body. We drank tea.”

I love how the ritual of theater generates a safe space, a well-bounded sanctuary for the actors and audience to share stories and unguarded, authentic emotional experiences. Many Lysistrata Project participants hadn’t felt comfortable writing letters or joining marches, but they were happy to get up in front of their communities and wave a giant balloon or vegetable phallus to protest the war. And the audience members, by their very presence, were active partners in that protest.

The theatrical experience helps us drop our personal defenses to watch live human beings, right there in front of us, trying like hell to connect with one another. And most of the time, we cannot help but identify with what we see. We notice characters who remind us of ourselves and the people in our lives, and we instinctively ask ourselves the question, What would I do if I were in that situation?

In the Lysistrata Project, what inspired us was a fictional tale of strangers coming together with chutzpah and creativity to solve the intractable problem of the (all too real) Peloponnesian War. Therein lies what may be theater’s greatest value: the ability to enact what is, but then to stride into the lands of imagination, the realms of the possible—the infinitely possible. Through theater, we can model new worlds. We can dream them up, act them out, make them live and breathe, and render vivid and true ideas that only a moment before were daydreams of maybe-perhaps-someday.

That’s the work—what playwright Tony Kushner calls “the great work”: coming together, revealing our common humanity, opening hearts, modeling new possibilities. Hopefully, through that work, we can make the world a little less lonely, a little less scared, and a little more prone to peace.

“What struck me was that people all over this country and in England

 

really want peace. And they are very upset—no, it’s not upset.What is it?

 

It’s like despair: What are we going to do?…And I found CODEPINK

 

women everywhere in my audiences. I would walk in thinking, Gosh, I’m

 

really alone here, but I’d look up and there they were, the CODEPINK

 

women with their boas and their pink shirts!”

—from an interview with Maxine Hong Kingston

THE NEW

AMERICA

CYNTHIA MCKINNEY

Georgia’s first African American Congresswoman and the only woman serving in the state’s congressional delegation, Cynthia McKinney has emerged as an internationally renowned advocate for voting rights, human rights, and the strengthening of business ties between Africa and the United States.This essay is based on a talk at the UC Berkeley’s African Studies Department graduation ceremony on May 17, 2003.

 

Consider the current state of America. Under President Bush, the United States has turned its back on the United Nations and the entire international community and has waged war in Afghanistan and Iraq; more potential conflicts are threatened with nations like Iran, Syria, North Korea, and even China. Here at home, unemployment is rising, our economy is on its knees, and our national debt is threatening to reach unprecedented levels. The word
deflation
is whispered by many economists.

More families than ever before try to relieve the mounting pressure by depleting their savings and falling deeper in debt. Yet, the president advocates more tax cuts, not for poor America, but for the rich.

One million black children now live in poverty, and one million black men and women are in prison. Every night on the streets of America, over a quarter million veterans sleep as our forgotten homeless.

Special interests have taken control of our nation’s capital and are perverting it from the noble traditions of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Kennedy, and instead are using our precious national resources for personal profit and personal needs.

In 1953 Dwight Eisenhower warned of failing to address the pressing social needs of the nation in deference to an uncontrolled arms buildup. He said:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.

We cannot plunge our country, which we all love, and the world that we all live in, into a never-ending cycle of war and violence and hate.

The unique American character, the values that we struggled so hard for and won in the civil rights movements of blacks, women, and gays—everything we hold dear to us—are all being threatened today by a small but powerful group who want to silence the people, yet speak and act for them.

Our president tells us that we are now engaged in a war that will last for the rest of my life. He says that for the next generation or more, we Americans must be prepared to fight any foe who is inclined to harm us. And for the Bush administration, that means conflicts with some sixty nations of the world. He says that we must be prepared to invoke this Bush Doctrine of preemptive strike and regime change whenever and wherever we need it. And his secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, tells us that our military must be prepared to seize foreign capitals and occupy them.

To accomplish this, according to the administration, we will need a larger military. That military must have usable nuclear weapons, and the billions it will take to deploy a national missile defense must be spent. In addition, some in the administration insist that our military must control space and cyberspace and that advanced technologies must be utilized for military applications. The Bush administration has a blueprint for the world that will be of its making. But as an American, it will be done with your blessing—and in your name.

BOOK: Stop the Next War Now
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