We Don’t Have to Live and Die This Way

    The subject of the morning is written all over everybody’s faces and if I can add one person’s or let’s say eight persons’ experience, to your own about what it is to be unexpectedly alive today that might be of help to all of us.

     And I couldn’t even begin without saying a few words about those who are in prison of the eight. Certainly the state of Pennsylvania has been miming to the last iota the feverish and hateful conduct of the national government with regard to dissent.

     And shortly after we were locked up by orders of that Judge in King of Prussia they began scattering us throughout the state which is a little bit like scattering good seed because you know there’s one here and there’s one there.

     They always make the wrong move, so from Pittsburgh right through the east, there are these fine people in jail this morning and I would certainly want us to be mindful of them and they would want you to be mindful their greetings.  They’re in fine shape and the prison system will never be the same.

 

     What mainly occurs to me this morning are a few moments in that sentencing that I would like to kind of offer as a mutual reflection.   Some who are in the audience here were there but it wouldn’t hurt perhaps to recall some of the things that were said in a very highly charged atmosphere. in which hundreds of friends had gathered from all over the country to say whatever needed to be said, hail or farewell.

     And I think mainly to reinvigorate themselves by the sight not so much of American justice — which is not very invigorating — but the sight of those who were in a sense saying something hopeful about a plight that doesn’t seem very hopeful and is our own, all of us, all of our plight.

     In any case, that morning you may have heard there was certainly testimony allowed, which was not allowed in the course of the trial.   Evidently the judge concluded, well he was going to sew up the bag with us in it, and it wouldn’t do any harm now to hear something from the experts.  

     And so they allowed into the courtroom a very distinguished psychiatrist who had spent years studying and working with and living with the victims of Hiroshima, Dr. Robert J. Lifton and then another distinguished professor from Princeton, Richard Falk, whose expertise is around the whole area of war crimes and international law.

      Well, the judge got a little bit more than he had bargained on I think he was probably expecting a little bit of jargon and a little bit of cold logic and instead he got so a few arrows aimed right at his heart and his head, and I think before the morning was over he was not necessarily ethically improved, but we were.

     Just a couple of things that occur to me that those men said that day that had great meaning for me that I think probably would be of point here.  Lifton brought into the courtroom of course the tragic fate not so much of the dead as of the living after Hiroshima, and not really the fact that thousands of those poor people are still dying of leukemia. But from the point of view of the psyche or the soul, he was talking about the screen that had come down around those lives as a way of coping and living at all.

     And he talked at length about that famous theory of his that it was a kind of psychic numbing that allowed these people to go on after Hiroshima — kind of self convinced and trying to present themselves as though they had not been there, as though that thing had not occurred — as though there hadn’t been a bomb — there hadn’t been that hideous unspeakable August morning.

     And so they concealed their plight. They concealed their condition physically. They concealed their cancer, some of them up right up to the point of death, and they concealed their social stigma because they had become kind of the pariahs of Japan.  Their children couldn’t marry if the fact were known about by the parents. It was very difficult to get jobs. They were stamped with that morning. He said as a result of all this they kind of put down the screen as though we must present ourselves as normal, as though that thing hadn’t happened.

     And then he went on to speculate, Lifton did, about Americans you see before a hypothetical Hiroshima. He felt the same thing was occurring here, and at that point I began to pick up something because for a long time I’ve been trying to understand the psychic state of our people facing the fact — not of Hiroshima but the arms race since–Hiroshima localized, Hiroshima come home, on the prevailing winds.  And I had thought for a long time I didn’t have that particular expertise and I was groping for words to understand a kind of soul numbing or his kind of denial of our plight which I was feeling everywhere and which was kind of reducing the eight of us and a few other friends — a few people here and there — kind of to the status of outsiders where, you know, you could become convinced after a while that you were insane and that the public and the public authority were sane.  

     And you felt yourself in a kind of spiritual limbo dragging along a knowledge or an insight or conclusion that most people simply were not sharing, about where we are now, where we are going and then I found this translated into terms that I could really understand and grab because Lifton went on to say that he thought that before Hiroshima, that is to say before a catastrophe here, the Hiroshima after effects were coming home. What was being laid on us was a kind of spiritual pollution coming down before the fact.

     Lifton said that he thought that most Americans were simply existing as though there were no bomb. They were trying desperately to create some kind of inner normalcy which would be matched by a landscape without a bunker or without a think tank or without a Pentagon or without a MX and they were simply blocking out this unspeakable, unculpable, monstrous reality.

     And then he said that there was “psychic numbing” going on here and that these eight people — and at that point the judge began to listen — these eight people had broken through that, in his opinion, and had raised this outcry in this wilderness. in this spiritual wilderness of non-coping and non-hoping and non-future. He said that someday this would have been found an honorable instead of a punishable event.  He said that very clearly and sat down.

     I think that breakthrough is occurring — that’s our only hope. Our only hope is that people begin to say, “We can turn this around. We don’t have to live and die this way.”

     We don’t have to live as though we were tasting death before death, we can deny this stuff. We can be politically mature. We can look in the faces of children and say, “You do have a future and we’re going to give it to you. We’re going to make sure you have it” — things like that.

     Since September the ninth a year ago, things have changed I think dramatically, not so much here as in Europe. The Europeans have made a very unexpected break through.  I was wandering around Europe two summers ago and just was infinitely more depressed than I was at home because they really did seem resigned to their nuclear colonization. West Germany was the most hideous example of all that they were, just more military than we and more accepting of all this and now, West Germany is the spark of all this anti-nuclear resistance.  And as you know within a week a million Europeans are gathering in Bohn to say a resounding No from all over Europe to this maniacal policy.

     So things are changing and my conviction is that here, we have to be patient and modest because there’s a sort of revenge on us for having created this stuff and trying to peddle it in the world and we’re awakening more slowly.

 

     I want to speak also on the second expert that morning, Dr. Richard Falk.  Dr. Falk’s position was very interesting and dramatic. Here was a Jewish judge and a Jewish expert confronting the judge in a very particular way.  Falk spoke mainly that morning about the anomaly, if not the idiocy, of American efforts since the Second World War to create an international body of law which would prevent not merely war crimes, but prevent their preparation. Of course we were the chief instrument in forging that whole Nuremberg set of principles later ratified by our own Congress and therefore, purportedly, it was part of the law of the land according to the Constitution.

     And he was saying what the judge had never allowed John Schuchardt, our lawyer and one of the defendants, to say in the course of the trial, that we had a case in virtue of international law, which was domestically approved by the Congress, in many, many instances.  Not just Nuremberg but in many other instances, there has been this approval in this effort to get an international law going against the kind of stuff that is being dumped on us.  Anyway, he went on like that.  And then he kind of bore down more heavily upon the experience of people under Hitler and began to say something that again became extraordinarily uncomfortable for this judge.

     He said that he wanted to speak this morning more especially about the degradation of the judiciary under Hitler, and the way in which Hitler had been able to enlist the law of the land in favor of genocide.  This was really quite something. He said what Hitler drummed into the German judiciary for years as part of his preparation for war crimes was the statement, “The law is the law, the law is the law.”

      Well, it was like little echo in the courtroom because for two weeks, Judge Salus had been yelling at us, “the law is the law.”  You see what I mean?  That principle narrowly applied disposed of effectively — either by legal murder or by legal silencing — disposed of all sorts of untidy people under Hitler, disposed of them legally either through capital punishment or through exile or through torture or through jailings — in any case, disposed of them.

     Falk said looking straight at the judge, the same process is going on in this courtroom with your help.   The condemnation of the of the Plowshares 8 and their sentencing, which was to follow within the hour, he said, is an instance of the Hitlerian method applied here in this courtroom.

     Well at that point of course there was a great uproar of anguish from the judge and he was so out of his depth with this great scholar and this man of conscience that he really could only blare away and try to corner him and he got nowhere.

      “Do you mean to say you would approve or advise these people to break the law?” he asked, and Falk said, without ruffling a feather, “I want it known that I honor them for what they had done,” and then he stepped down.

 

     You can’t have nukes in your back pocket without destroying the fabric, the very fragile fabric, of public justice.   I think that’s the conclusion that we’ve learned the hard way and that other people are going to have to learn in other ways.

     What I think what is worrisome apart from our experience is this creation of an atmosphere in which law and order under that kind of rubric are fast becoming official lawlessness and disorder.  In fact, I’m understating the case.  They have become that.  The Constitution is by no means the law of Reagan’s mind, nor these other people nor as it filters down into the judiciary is the Constitution going to be respected in courtrooms where dissidents are saying what must be said, and so on.

     You see these people are busting the fabric of a very difficult tradition, a tradition has been created by a great deal of blood and sweat and heroism over centuries.  And they are officially contemptuous of the law — that must be said — and I have had to think with the help of other people that we shouldn’t be talking any longer about civil disobedience in our regard. That phrase ought to be buried. 

     Our action and the action of those who have followed us into Pantex in Texas, into the Trident base up here in Groton, and into the Trident base in the state of Washington — these actions cannot be understood as civil disobedience. They must be understood as civil obedience. 

     We are the ones who are being obedient, whether to a higher law to international law to a law of conscience, or narrowly considered to the law of the land.  And it is the law of the land that is being flouted in these idiotic, kangaroo courts where these absolutely ignorant and prejudiced, malfunctioning judges are shipping people off to pay for their conscience.

     I see these things, I hope, in a spirit that’s very positive; for me it’s much more intriguing and interesting humanly to go forward in an obedient frame of mind, an obedient understanding of one’s own life then it is to see ourselves as lawbreakers.   It’s absolutely absurd, absolutely absurd and unreal in the instant and it is a kind of healing, a healing of understanding to see ourselves not merely within a rampageous American system at the top, but to see ourselves as Americans within a larger humanity struggling for its real life.

     And the reason among us are our friends in prisons — and they’re really not very pleasant places, especially in Pennsylvania. We want to be identified with the people of El Salvador and with the people of South Africa, with the people of the Philippines and the people of Chile, and all of those who are the real hope and who are suffering infinitely more than ourselves in trying to express and embody that hope as we know.   And it’s that sense of being linked with reality — reality — rather than this absurd, flimsy violent system that is threatening to bring the world down and that is calling itself “legal.”

     I bring all of that up because I think a true sense of ourselves it’s so important if the energies of our hearts are to gather about the real tasks at hand. I think that anyone in this room should be able to look in the face of a child and say “I am an obedient person.  I am obeying the law of life.” That’s one way of saying, “I love and cherish you and I would break the law in your favor.” Like that. Very immediate, very concrete. 

     Actions like ours have called them to account in a way that history will do in a much larger and more rigorous sense once the tables are turned in our favor.

      From perhaps another point of view, I often think of these poor hopeless and entrapped and enslaved minds that believe we can have a world and have children and have these bombs. I often think, “What access do they have to any reality except ours?” Where is [Alexander] Haig to learn anything except what he’d learn from those who are paying for it?  Where is Ronald Reagan to learn anything except from those were saying No to him?  And so on and so on and so on.

     I look upon our witness as their only hope. They’re certainly not getting it around their cabinet table. Our witness is extraordinarily important in any world that wants to call itself a tomorrow, let alone a today. 

    There are some of the reflections that occur to me. I think that something is happening across the land which we can take heart from. It’s really happening across the world.

     If we are going to have an inhabitable world and anything faintly resembling a human community and still build and build and build bunkers and weapons, then they are going to be much more seriously challenged in the months ahead, let alone the years ahead.

     We must see ourselves as part of that challenge. It’s a very difficult time and it doesn’t begin and end here. It must be carried into the streets. It must be taken into every dark corner where that stuff is justifying itself, and we must multiply the impact of conscience at every possible level as we did during the Vietnam years.  We must make it politically impossible for these people to continue in office in the way in which they’re not functioning, as we made it politically impossible to continue the Vietnam War.

     So that our own discipline, our own sense of sacrifice, our own kind of “easy riding” of the benefits of this filthy system–all of these things are being reviewed by us as a matter of life and death so that we are not ourselves getting stuck into a position where we ourselves feel trapped by our appetites, by our sexism, by our consumerism, by our racism, and by all those ills of soul that make the Bomb inevitable.

     It’s a very powerful time for the difficult art of healing, of healing ourselves in order that our politics reflect a more humane way than is constantly being dumped upon us from above. We want to really offer something different than is being offered us.  

    My deepest conviction about the nuclear plight is that it is a spiritual illness — the technique follows the illness, the technique is the symbol and the form of our dedication to death as a social method.

     One of the ironically hopeful aspects of all was pointed out by Martin Luther King, Jr. just before his death. At least the Bomb has narrowed our choices to the point where we no longer have an acceptable body count in the world. We don’t have that kind of choice anymore as to how many murders we can get away with because the murders now include us.  Remember he said so prophetically during the height of the Vietnam War that at least Hiroshima had done that and had narrowed the choices to the point where we know now: we’re either going to be healed in the direction of nonviolence, or we were going to be extinguished.

     That’s a terrible truth, but it may be a healing one as well.