Sometime in the late 1960s I became intellectually convinced that the war the United States of America was engaged in in Vietnam was an imperialist war. Since I also became intellectually convinced that imperialistic wars were wrong, I also became convinced that the war in Vietnam was ethically and morally wrong.
A little while later I got involved in the anti-Vietnam war movement at my junior high school in Oak Cliff, Dallas, Texas, T.W. Browne Junior High School. It was a very small movement, just me and my friend John Cirillo, the person who more than anyone else helped me realise that the Vietnam War was morally wrong. Our smallness didn't stop us from protesting the ROTC (Razis) at nearby Kimball High School or planning a walk out in protest against the war as part of the national walk out against the war in 1970, however.
John and I planned the walkout to coincide with our every Friday pep rally in the afternoon at Browne. We spread the word orally. Hundreds of students left the pep rally, most of them for the reason, I suspect, that it meant getting out of class, with the intention of walking out of school a week after Kimball students did the same thing. Unfortunately, for us, the administration of Browne also heard about the protest and responded by placing two teachers at every external door and putting chains on those doors to keep us in. After milling around for a while, particularly in the central out door plaza at Browne, we had to admit defeat.
My anti-war activities at Browne were only the beginning of my anti-war activism. I wanted to attend anti-war rallies at Lee Park in Dallas but my father wouldn't let me noting, probably accurately, that the police would likely beat me over the head if I went. I supported Bobby Kennedy for president because of his opposition to the war. I hated Hubert Humphry so much for his support of the war that I was even momentarily blinded by my emotions into supporting Richard Nixon who said he had a plan to win the war. John, on the other hand, supported Gene McCarthy who was also opposed to the war and who in retrospect I wish I had supported because I came to understand that his plan for ending the war was superior to Kennedy's. I supported George McGovern for president in 1972 because I quickly realised that Nixon's "plan" to end the war was demagoguery of the worst sort and simply a cynical strategy to get votes and because McGovern too opposed the war and wanted to end it.
My opposition to the war inevitably drew me to pacifism and my interest in pacifism, in turn, drew me to the Quakers, the Religious Society of Friends. In the 1970s I became increasingly involved in Quaker peace activism, the phrase many Friends preferred to the more pacific sounding pacifism. I began attending Quaker silent meetings. I became involved in Quaker actions beyond anti-war activism. In the 1970s and 1980s when I lived in Bloomington, Indiana I was involved in Quaker protests against nuclear energy. When I lived in Athens, Ohio I protested against American covert actions in Nicaragua though I didn't regard the anti-Noriega movement and the Sandinistas as the essence of manichean goodness in the known universe. Activism nutted by reality. When I lived in Provo, Utah in the 1990s I went down to the Nevada Test Site where the US government tested nuclear weapons, the progeny of the nuclear weapons the US dropped on civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the name of ending the war, to protest those indiscriminate nuclear weapons and their testing which had negative health impacts on the "downwinders". When I moved to Albany, New York I got involved in the many local Quaker protests against the many ultimately American imperialist wars in Iraq, the former Jugoslavija, Iraq again, or Afghanistan.
Over the years I came to admire Quaker anti-war persistence despite broad public apathy. In a city of almost 100,000 people and a mid-major megaversity of 18,000 only around twenty to thirty people, at best, regularly came to witness to and speak truth to power about the intellectual and moral evils of war, something that inherently violates, as I came to realise, human rights and which unleashes destruction, brutality, mass murder, vigilante "justice", and rape.
This is not to say that I didn't have several intellectual problems with Quakerism. In the face of apathy and the seeming lack of impact of anti-war peace activism I came to appreciate Reinhold Niebuhr's critique of Quakerism. Niebuhr argued, and I think rightly, that Quaker attempts to make the world Quaker were doomed to failure because they were too utopian. I also came to appreciate John Howard Yoder's argument that the only viable way for pacifists to witness to the world was to understand that the world, as Niebuhr also argued, was fallen and hence never perfectable and that the only space from which witness to the fallen world was possible was from a community that separated from the world and practised in its everyday life the agape and pacifism that it preached.
Eventually my realist side became ever more prominent and in the face of mass public apathy, ineffectual activism, and the ever increasing American police and surveillance state, I came to understand that even Niebuhr's more nuanced approach, one that jettisoned the manicheanism, was problematic because no one, and certainly not the United States, had any moral ground to stand on in a world of grey. I also came to understand the wisdom of Buddhism and Niebuhr's Serenity Prayer. I came to realise, in other words, that you can only do something about what you can do something about.
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