ONE. Everyone is talking about the US President’s Board of Peace to accompany his “Gaza peace plan,” announced in Davos this week, and since we’re in the peace business here, I wanted to say a few things about it. And while European allies have declined his offer, authoritarian regimes, monarchies, and others who want to curry his favor have climbed on board – Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Hungary, and yes, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. The President suggests it’s his alternative to the United Nations, and who better than himself as chair in perpetuity, with absolute power of veto, acceptance of new members, and ability to appoint a successor (he’s been hinting at Don, Jr.). Of course, it says alot about the man that he thinks peace can be bought, with each permanent seat costing a billion dollars, payable to him that he will control. Three additional farcical things about all this:
(1) its ironic mimicking of George Orwell’s “Ministry of Peace” in 1984; while
(2) the self-aggrandizing and self-appointed “peacemaker-in-chief” wrote the Norwegian prime minister that he no longer felt “an obligation to think purely of Peace” and also said if Palestinians don’t cease their resistance, “they’ll be blown away very quickly“; and
(3) immediately after the announcement, in front of Board of Peace banners, Trump son-in-law, Jared Kushner, unveiled the master plan for Gaza, a seafront “coastal tourism zone” with up to 180 skyscrapers, many of them hotels. This would all be satire if it wasn’t built on top of the bodies of 180,000 Gazans, 25,000 of them children, and two million Gazans displaced from their homes.
Trump, Netanyahu, and their cronies – genocide as peace and as economic opportunity.
The ghosts of the Palestinian dead are crying out to us from their rubbled graves – and their families still living do, too, they’re literally, literally crying out to us to bear witness, even more, to resist. To resist.
TWO. I watched two short videos this week, two official Department of Homeland Security ICE recruitment videos. The first one is prefaced with a quote from Isaiah: “Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send and who will go for us?’ And I said, ‘Here I am. Send me!’” The most recent one begins with bold Gothic lettering,, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” then with accompanying haunting music, masked armed agents, weapons drawn, raid on homes knocking down doors, or with night-vision goggles, repelling from helicopters raiding a ship, and interspersed with, “for they shall be called the sons of God.” And what’s even more striking is these beatitude words are paired with the song blaring in the background, “Welcome to your life, There’s no turning back, Even while we sleep, We will find you … All for freedom and for pleasure, Nothing ever lasts forever” – and it ends with DHS Secretary Kristi Noem fist-bumping a soldier and its refrain on repeat: “Everybody wants to rule the … world.” “Blessed are the peacemakers.” “Everybody wants to rule the world.” There you go! ICE and the US military, God’s peacemakers. See https://x.com/DHSgov/status/2011149634643902647?s=20)
THREE. I’m kind of a classics nerd; this week I reread an optional reading I assigned in my Religion & Violence class – the 4th century BCE, Plato’s Republic, Books 8 and 9. Socrates describes five different kinds of government: aristocracy; timocracy, based on a code of honor; oligarchy, ruled by an elite; democracy; and the fifth, tyranny, which he says is a potential outgrowth of democracy when people don’t pay attention, when they’re exhausted into submission. Then he lists the “steps toward tyranny.”
Weaponize the justice system – the courts and law enforcers, meant to protect, now become tools of revenge;
Destroy moral norms by redefining language – call truth lies and lies truth, empathy and compassion are defects of the human spirit;
Redistribute property – say it’s for the people, but in reality, the tyrant, his family, and his cronies profit;
Create enemies, domestic and foreign – every tyrant needs a war, an enemy for the people to fear and to conceal his own sins;
Absolute loyalty litmus tests – purge those who speak out, especially teachers, in universities, and workers, and artists and poets and playrights, and those whose job it is to speak the truth.
2400 years ago. Socrates says what you’re left with are the ambitious, the corrupt, the inept, the violent, all sycophants who use democracy to destroy democracy, and pit people against each other, create enemies lists, destroy cultural institutions, so there’s no more sense of the common good. Democracy, if not nurtured and cultivated, becomes tyranny. We spend so much time making fun of the president or hoping he’ll pay a price for his cruelty that we ignore the political, economic, and religious system that created him. He didn’t just emerge tabula rasa out of nowhere; America birthed him.
FOUR. In my Tuesday morning class, I described how America used to have a unifying narrative, called the Judeo-Christian story, that most of the country shared. It was the story most of us grew up on and it defined us as Americans. But about 60 years ago, that narrative began disintegrating – Vietnam; civil rights, women’s rights, indigenous rights, gay rights; increasing religious and cultural diversity; they reminded us of all those who had been excluded from our nation’s origin story, that it had been a false narrative all along. It was always wrong, but now no more can we accept that white, hetero-normative, Judeo-Christian, male-centric story. We’re growing up, thankfully so. But here’s the rub – no unifying story, what scholars call a “metanarrative,” has replaced it. What story will now bind us all together as one people, a unity amidst the diversity?
That was my introduction on Tuesday to the May 2024 YouTube conversation we watched between PBS filmmaker Ken Burns and NPR’s On Being’s Krista Tippett. They observed it is been the distrust of institutions that’s led to this crisis of story – breakdown, distrust of families, government, the legal system, labor, educational institutions, medical professionals, the church, other religious organizations, too – institutions that have traditionally been the vehicles of emotional health, a whole life, and moral truth have let us down and left us bereft, no longer trusted, so the question is, “Who’s left to tell the new story?”
We all get the problems inherent in institutions, in the end, it’s a problem of the human condition. It’s easy pickin’s to condemn institutions. The harder work is to invest the time and energy to reimagine and remake them – again, family life; government; the legal system, from courts to law enforcers; education; labor; health care; and religious organizations, too.
This past Tuesday, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos went viral:
In 1978, the Czech dissident Václav Havel, later president, wrote an essay, ‘The Power of the Powerless,’ and in it, he asked a simple question: how did the communist system sustain itself? And his answer began with a greengrocer. Every morning, this shopkeeper places a sign in his window: ‘Workers of the world unite.’ He doesn’t believe it, no one does, but he places a sign to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persists – not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false. Havel called this “living within a lie.” The system’s power comes not from its truth, but from everyone’s willingness to perform as if it were true. When even one person stops performing, when the greengrocer removes his sign, the illusion begins to crack. Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down.
Carney’s words speak directly to us. When does conforming, getting along, compliance cross the line, become complicity? No more seeking the acceptance of those whose values are unacceptable, I’m convinced there are many in our area and all around the country hungry for a community, whatever you want to call it, that boldly bears witness to moral, psychological, social, and spiritual truth. If we continue to do things the way it’s always been done, we’ll continue to get the results we’ve always had. By examining our fears and our privilege both – this kind of honesty and self-reflection is hard but if we don’t do it, then who will? – we can begin to shed the social and cultural conditioning that keeps us from doing what we know we must do.
Costly solidarity. Costly resistance. That’s what I keep asking myself – what does this look like for me?
Because the ghosts of Africans brought here by slavers and their descendants who fought for civil rights, and those women and gay folks and immigrants and children hauled off by ICE thugs and so many others who have fought the good fight and were murdered for it, the George Floyds and Renee Goods and Gazans whose names we don’t know and countless others, victims of a racist and militarist American and Israeli machine – because all of them are crying out to us today and every day and every minute of every day.
To say the time is now doesn’t even begin to capture the urgency of the moment. Progressives like to point to the seeds that were planted that down the Berlin Wall or that ended apartheid. We don’t like to talk about the cultural genocide of Tibet and their removal of Tibetans from their land or, God forbid we’re reminded of what our ancestors did to the Indigenous Peoples in this country. Is that the fate of the people of color seeking asylum in this country? Is that the fate of Gaza? The handwringing and liberal guilt and prayers speak loudly. Is that the best we can do?
Costly solidarity. Costly resistance. What does it look like for you?