Sorry for the inconvenience. We are trying to change the world. Kate O’Donnell
Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence. Leonardo da Vinci
The strongest bulwark of authority is uniformity; the least divergence from it is the greatest crime. Emma Goldman
Where you need to be calm, you burst out in rage, and where you need to be on fire, you remain indifferent. Abhijit Naskar
Dedicating your life to understanding yourself can be its own form of protest, especially when the world tells you that you don’t exist. Samra Habib
Kindness, and the commitment to see the other as deserving of human dignity, demands of us to protest, resist, and do all that we can to fight that which says otherwise. Bruce Reyes-Chow
One of the most important struggles of humanity is to ensure that our ‘fight against hate’ does not become ‘hate’ itself. Adeel Ahmed Khan
Yesterday morning, I dug up my tattered copy of the tepid New York Times coverage of an event that rocked my world at the time but, 40 years later, didn’t rock the planet and its inhabitants in quite the way we who worked and lived through those days might have anticipated.
The event was the so-called million-person march in and around Central Park in New York City, a mass mobilization calling for an end to a nuclear arms race that threatened all life forms and which, or so we hoped, was near a tipping point where sanity might prevail and weapons might be relegated to some scrap heap or other as powerful nations came to their senses and relinquished their nuclear hostage-taking for more positive and collaborative engagements.
Part of the backdrop for this march and its preparations was the Second UN Special Session on Disarmament a follow-up to the SSD1, held four years earlier, which produced mechanisms, largely of dubious effect, to expand and implement the institutionalizing of the UN’s disarmament obligations in accordance with the UN Charter and what was, even then, the clear and demonstrable wishes of many member states.
In hindsight, SSDII more or less threw the million marchers under the bus, leaving it up to the US and (then) USSR to negotiate deeper cuts in nuclear arsenals but not to threaten the pride of place of such weapons in the security postures of the most powerful states. Despite an almost unprecedented outpouring of public sentiment, it was clear that little would come out of the UN this time to complement that cocophany of voices. And while there have been notable achievements in the nuclear field since 1982, including the establishment of nuclear weapons free zones and, more recently, a treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons, the states harboring nuclear weapons continue to modernize and (in the case of the DPRK) test them. 40 years on, while the area of influence for nuclear weapons and their possessor states has significantly shrunk, the dangers posed by those weapons have not.
In this time of reflection and commemoration referencing the march on the Great Lawn, I’ve been doing a bit on my own. I’m grateful for the initiatives by some peace and security-oriented youth groups, including our office mates Reverse the Trend to assess that long-ago time, a march that preceded their entry into this world but the successes and failures of which they have surely (and often anxiously) inherited. Unlike some of their elders, they have refused to embrace a singular nuclear weapons focus, understanding as we all should that these weapons are not the only existential threat we face as a planet and that a sole focus on such weapons is insufficient to move the international system to an urgent reckoning with discrimination and inequalities, food insecurity and ocean plastics, biodiversity loss and massive weapons flows, severe storms and burning forests, the result in large part of our commitment to unsustainable lifestyles and addiction-like war preparations.
These youth seem to understand, better than many of the people who marched and chanted and left their footprints all over Central Park, that eliminating nuclear weapons remains essential but also elusive and is in itself insufficient to a world experiencing wolves of many stripes baying at every door and window in the human household, their haunting sounds reminding us that time is limited to spring into action and save ourselves from ourselves.
Reverse the Trend and some of their peers have been doing interviews about June 12, 1982 – what happened, why it happened, who was responsible, that and more. I spent two years of my life preparing for that march, working alongside other peace groups, trying to manage “ incoming” from pervasive anxieties, moutains of responsibilities and egos off the rails, wondering how such flawed people as we were could possibly lead a movement without its own fatal flaws, wondering as well how we could possibly make the disarmament case to people living in poverty or under oppression, people we neither knew nor referenced, people waiting for an invitation to our Lawn Party which apparently never arrived.
I don’t talk about that event much. Too much time has passed, time to nudge oneself into a role that was more significant than the one actually occupied, time to romanticize and/or demonize people and processes deserving of neither, time to manufacture and defend meaningful connections between that Lawn Party and the very mixed impacts which have followed in its wake.
I learned much from that time, learned that I had things to discern and contribute, learned that the peace movement and its advocates were not always deserving of the public confidence they sought, learned that cultures of war and violence breed weapons-related threats no matter how many people come out to trample the grass in Central Park, learned that part of the solution to what ails us as a species lies not in our institutions but in the integrity and humanity with which individuals who work in and manage such institutions attend to those structures and their attendant responsibilities.
I also learned how unforgiving much of the work of peace and security can be, how many relationships could not stand up to the pressure of a world under siege, some of which could apparently not survive even a whiff of self-scrutiny. Indeed, amidst the burnout from many months of unrelenting activities, there was a sense that all of these efforts, all of this forced interaction, was transitory, was not much more than a moment in time when we dared to believe in our collective power of voice before being reminded that the afterglow from this party only lasts so long, only illuminates so much, only captures the heart for a season.
I’m glad this march happened and I’m grateful to those who allowed me to be part of it. But the skepticism of those days has not entirely abated for me. I still cannot fully trust ideas of peace put forward by people who are themselves lacking in self-reflection. I still cannot fully trust ideas of peace put forward by people who see no connection between their lifestyles and their policy aspirations, those who assume that the erstwhile righteousness of their cause accrues virtue to themseleves and their character independent of any character-related insight or effort.
That bar applies to me as well.
The Party on the Lawn is now a distant memory. The grass in the park has fully recovered. The softball crowd has long ago resumed their competitions. The party crowd still with us has dispersed in directions hard to detect, some to new structures of nuclear weapons advocacy, some to work in other and (we hope) complementary issue sectors, others in retreat to a now-familiar world of increasing anxieties and logitstical demands. We all did a good thing 40 years ago, but it was not without its flaws both methodological and personal. The younger ones are now trying to figure out where they stand in relation to what we did and didn’t do. We need to be honest with them and with ourselves. Their party is only getting started.
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