Those who have read my posts over the past 2+ decades since joined DK know that I am by choice, and after a long period of exploring and wandering through multiple religious and spiritual traditions, a member of the Religious Society of Friends, a Quaker, by choice, or as we say,nby convincement, And yet there are things to which my response is not always one of total non-violence. That is to say that there are circumstances where I will use force or violence, and others where I can accept its use by others. As one who taught adolescents for almost 3 decades, the example I most often use is that I am prepared if necessary to kill to protect the students entrusted to my care, even if they may be 300 pound all-Met football players.
In light of what happened in Butler PA on Saturday, and in the greater context of both rhetoric and actions in our larger current political environment, I want to offer a reflection on force and at least the potential for what is violence from a personal perspective.
I do not propose what I offer as anything but my personal reflections. I offer them in the hope that others might engage and share their perspectives, so that perhaps together we may come to a deeper understanding of what we can do to avoid what might otherwise be a series of violent catastrophes in our civic and political life.
You will note that the image I chose to illustrate this post is not merely of firearms, but includes knives as well. That is because there are many ways of threatening force or violence, and for the record include not merely guns and knives, but clubs, arrows, regular objects, images of objects, and words, very much words, to “inspire”, intimidate, motivate.
We have police powers with law enforcement entitled to use even deadly force on our behalf to keep order and protect us. In theory there are supposed to be restrictions on how that force, and the threat to use it, is supposed to be applied. We struggle ensure that those authorized to use such force are properly trained and held accountable if they misuse their powers. We are not always successful in either restraining such eople or in holding them accountable. Too often the type of people drawn to such occupations are inclined in ways that many of us including me, view as problematic, and far too often they or their superiors are not held accountable for the misuse — far too often egregious and/or selective — in against whom they use force or the threat thereof.
Similarly almost every nation state has a well-armed military that is capable not merely of defending itself from external violence against it but capable of projecting violence externally. In the case of our nation, we are by treaties that have been ratified (and thus are part of our constitutional framework) legally required to use force outside our borders, and we have military assets in almost every country in the world — I remind folks that US embassies and sometimes consulates have Marine detachments capable of using deadly forced, but even beyond that we have other military forces stations in well over 100 nations.
I do not own firearms. I do not regularly carry a knife, although on occasions I may have a pocket knife or a box cutter in my pocket. I do know how to use various ordinary objects as weapons and have on occasion cited the fact that to defend my students I am prepared to stab someone in the eye with a pencil — that is a decision I made clearly after the shooting at Virginia Tech when a survivor of the Holocaust held the door of his classroom shut so his students could go out the window and got shot through the door and killed as a result. I would try not to do violence but I am prepared to in that situation. My first instinct might be like that of the man in Butler who died because he imposed himself between the shooter and his family, but if I had any opportunity to do more I long ago made the decision I would, even though my preference is not to do violence, or to threaten violence.
What is harder is to look at the words we use, the images we display, our inactions as well as our actions. Do we speak up against rhetoric that is getting demeaning or extreme? Where do we draw the lines? What risks to ourselves or those we care about are we willing to take to oppose the threats of violence? Think here of Republicans in the House and Senate who knew after January 6 that they should vote to impeach in the House and convict in the Senate and thus bar from office Donald John Trump but did not do so because they were afraid for themselves or their families, or they considered that in the House there would be enough votes without theirs and in the Senate by the time of the trial Trump was no longer President. As a parallel, think of the reluctance to fully aid Ukraine because of fears that Putin would cut off natural case to Western Europe, or as an exttreme he might use tactical nuclear weapons which could lead to a world wide cataclysm.
As a result of my spiritual wanderings, I tend to draw from a variety of religious traditions. With the last name of Bernstein which is Eastern European Jewish (in my case derived from Poland and Lithuania), I tend to think of the following from Hillel:
If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?
Given the time I spent in the Orthodox Church, where for ten years my spiritual father was an abbot on Mount Athos, I think of a statement from someone who was during World War II a spiritual father on Mount Athos, later the head of a monastery in England. He knew only vague details about the war, but as he has written he prayed that the less evil side might win, thereby recognizing that even the most justifiable war is inevitably and inextricably interwined with evil.
Go back to WWII, where aerial bombardment or artillery shelling of military targets would often kill civilians either because the aim was not accurate enough or the destructive capability went beyond the bounds of the specifically military target.
And then, what is a legitimate military target? Different cultures and political systems approach these things in vastly different ways.
Or in our own time, hink of how some violent actors like Hamas embed in the midst of civil infrastructure — how do you prevent them from using such as places from which to project violence and destruction without harming or killing those who have no choice about their presence?
Those here might criticize someone who says if you hit me I will hit you back 10 times as hard. But think of the British Air Force string German cities after their own citizens lived through the bliss. Or our own air force not merely with city destroying nuclear weapons but also the bombing of Tokyo with incendiaries in March of 1945, in some ways the most destructive bombing attack other than nuclear weapons in history. Was that a justifiable response to Pearl Harbor, was it necessary to break the will of the Japanese people to continue fighting? Was it a necessary evil, even if one can justify it?
If I am honest with myself, I have at least since adolescence and probably even since childhood used words as a form of violence. It is something with which I have struggled my entire life. I have a quick tongue (which also is paralleled by what I do online) and I can lash out, sometimes in reaction or defense, far too often preemptively and/or to gain an advantage.
Clausewitz wrote that war is politics by other means. Here is the context:
WAR IS A MERE CONTINUATION OF POLICY BY OTHER MEANS.
We see, therefore, that War is not merely a political act, but also a real political instrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means. All beyond this which is strictly peculiar to War relates merely to the peculiar nature of the means which it uses. That the tendencies and views of policy shall not be incompatible with these means, the Art of War in general and the Commander in each particular case may demand, and this claim is truly not a trifling one. But however powerfully this may react on political views in particular cases, still it must always be regarded as only a modification of them; for the political view is the object, War is the means, and the means must always include the object in our conception.
Our own politics tends to be fairly bellicose. Folks here may strongly disagree with the statement of Michelle Obama that when they go low we go high. Some here want to hit back as hard as they see the verbal and other blows from Trump and those who support “MAGA” (which btw is far more of a thing than Antifa). Some even equate not doing so with appeasement a la Chamberlain at Munich in 1938. They want to hit back at MAGA and Trump even harder.
If you argue that democracy itself is at risk, then it becomes easier to justify escalations of verbal violence on our side, but then the question becomes to what end? That leads to situations like this from Vietnam:
“It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” That's how a US Army major during the Vietnam war described the decision to use massive amounts of firepower, to include aerial bombs and artillery, while attacking approximately 2,500 Viet Cong who were besieging the city of Ben Tre and its surrounding villages.
And that begins to move us in the direction of what we have seen from the Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza.
Which at least in my mind brings me back both to Hillel and that Athonite Elder (whose name was Sophrony). From Hillel, how are these actions being for others? From Sophrony, do our actions still allow us to consider ourselves less evil? And on that, even if so, is the level of evil we do truly necessary?
I sit on my patio listening to birds and squirrels. The Quadrangle is still fairly quiet this Monday morning. I have been invited to tomorrow’s online discussion of current events, which I am sure will be dominated by what happened Saturday in Butler.
President Biden has tried to tell us that political violence is not acceptable. Except that far too often it has been. There are far too many examples of actual physical violence to achieve political goals of one sort or another. We have had our share of assassinations and attempted assassinations. We have had riots — think of the draft riots during the Civil War. We have had attempts at violence suppressed — think of the plot to get Lincoln before he could be sworn in, or the attempt to kill Truman when he was living in Blair House. We have had lynchings. One can legitimately call the killing of Civil Rights workers like the 3 in Neshoba County MS doing voter registration political violence, The “Brooks Brothers riot” in Miami stopping the recount in Dade during the aftermath of the 2000 election was political violence.
But our political violence starts with rhetoric.
I believe EVERY instance must be confronted and challenged.
We cannot continue to have it escalate and have our liberal democracy survive.
Yes, I am aware of the difficulties of confronting the kind of Gish Gallup that Trump did in the first debate. To my mind the Biden campaign and CNN should never have agreed to no real time fact checking. Here I remind folks of Candy Crowley fact checking Mitt Romney in real time during the debate she moderated with Obama. That fact check had a real impact.
So what can I offer? I can say I will work on restraining my own rhetoric, but that does NOT mean I will not challenge, here and elsewhere, what I think is wrong, including wrong rhetoric.
I am 78. I have survived a stroke, cancer and other ailments, and many other ups and downs in a life approaching 8 decades. I have lived through multiple wars and multiple incidents perhaps as damaging as wars.
I am not currently teaching (although that could change) but I still have a responsibility at least for my wife, not because she cannot speak up for herself because she can and will but because she is limited by some of her own health issues.
I am moving my membership from Langley Hill Meeting in Virginia, where I officially became a Quaker just over 2 decades ago, to Haverford Meeting, where I first directly encountered Quakers in 1963. I have attended the past two First Days (Sundays), where as it happens I have sat next to someone I have known for more than 50 years, a classmate from my final class at Haverford, who himself finally became a Quaker about 6 years ago. There are others from the Quadrangle community who attend. There is a woman with whom I overlapped at Langley although we did not really know one another,
I intend to try to better live my beliefs and values.
As a Quaker I try to follow the teaching of George Fox to walk gladly across the earth answering that of God in each person I meet, To use the words of St.Paul, I want to hold fast that which is good.
I may not always be successful. I am human and I will fall short. I have to be willing also to accept that in others, which as a teacher I regularly had to do with my students.
A Quaker I know and respect, Parker Palmer, wrote a book titled Let Your Life Speak. The notion is very much of a Quaker ethos, that our words mean little if they are not reflected in how we live.
I am now on the evening twilight of my life. It could last quite a while — there are folks at the Quadrangle who are over 100 and still fairly active, although I do not expect to live that long.
In writing this piece, to some degree I am thinking aloud, but I am also having a discussion with myself which, as has been my wont, I choose to share with others.
If you are still here, I thank you for your patience.
Make of it what you will.
Peace.
