Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has quarrel with mine, though I have not quarreled with him? Blaise Pascal
On June 1st we celebrated the 21st anniversary of the opening of Beatitude House. Among other things we have done for the past 21 years, we have had a monthly presence at Vandenberg Air Force Base. Vandenberg tests intercontinental ballistic missiles which are one of the delivery systems for nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons give us the ability to kill innocent civilians “on the other side of the river” with whom we have no quarrel although our rulers and the rulers of another country might. And those weapons can incinerate millions of civilians within 30 minutes of the missile leaving our silos. What could be stupider?
The bombs we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were an atrocity and a sin. We as a nation have never owned up to that or apologized for that. I know we were at war; I know the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor; I know thousands of our military were killed during the war as were German and Russian and Japanese soldiers. But we dropped those bombs on innocent civilian populations not military targets and in doing so we killed thousands of people with whom we had no quarrel. This was a war crime on an unimaginable scale. Who says that that was alright?
Nuclear weapons are crazy. They place every civilian of every country who has nuclear weapons (and some who don’t) at risk of annihilation, and the sheer power of the weapons we have today threaten the very existence of our planet. We have been standing with our little signs outside the main gate of Vandenberg now for 21 years trying to be a voice for sanity. And yet many folks passing by and some of the military personnel we encounter think we are the crazy ones. All of us, Tensie, Jorge and me as well as some who have joined us at our vigils have been arrested by security forces at the Base. The irony of the suggestion that we might be a threat to the Base when the Base is involved in a project that potentially could wipe the human race from the planet is astounding.
The irony extends to the courtroom. For the entire 21 years we have been vigiling at Vandenberg I have had the same federal prosecutor trying my cases. Her method is always the same; she minimizes our actions as a ‘hobby’, she portrays us as wasting our time, she says we are engaged in criminal activity and we should spend our time helping other people instead and complains that we are a drain on the system. We now have a new magistrate judge who considers it a fair sentence to send folks to prison for four to six months for crossing the green line at the Base. This kind of heavy handed approach leveled against peaceful non-violent protestors who are opposed to immoral and illegal weapons of mass destruction serves to perpetuate the myth that we are somehow safer because of nuclear weapons and that the enormous expense of developing and building them is a project that all Americans should accept and even be proud of. But who can even condone let alone be proud of any weapon which threatens the lives of people with whom we have no quarrel?
Our “defense budget” is obscene as we spend more than all other countries combined on our military and its spread to 1,000 bases on foreign soil. All of this to be prepared for war when war itself should be banned for the
rest of human history. There is no reason that at this point in our history we cannot mediate and negotiate to solve our differences. There is no reason why the entire world community can’t denounce governments with abusive human rights records based upon those country’s actions rather than their individual economic interests. Instead we arm one side or the other so that war can be carried out as we imagine that there will be a winner and a loser. But there are only losers in war.
Bindo is a man who comes each week to our food program. He will turn 100 years old this August. He is in excellent health and plans to do one last skydive to celebrate his 100TH birthday. Bindo is a survivor of the D-day invasion on the beach at Normandy and a decorated veteran. Every day he meets Harry for lunch and they sit and gab, telling stories and delighting in each other’s company. Harry is Japanese and nearly as old as Bindo. During the Second World War Harry at the age of 15 was confined along with his father as prisoners of war at the Japanese concentration camp at Manzanar. They were placed in the camp for no other reason than they were Japanese. Bindo and Harry are the best of friends. There is no river between them and there is no ruler who will convince them that they are enemies.
How is it that we allow our rulers to define our enemies? When Tensie and I visited Iraq in 1998 we found people with whom we fell in love. Six years later our Government taught most of us to hate Iraqis and we allowed our Government to level the “shock and awe” campaign against Iraq and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed, mostly civilians. Abraham Lincoln wrote, “Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?”
Is this not what Bindo and Harry have done?
I recently viewed a documentary about activists who have been resisting nuclear weapons for decades. The reason we still have nuclear weapons more than 70 years after our war crime in Japan is that a lot of corporations are making a lot of money off our tax dollars. This is the plain and simple reason. How else can you explain that one Trident submarine carrying 96 independently targetable nuclear war heads, enough to cause the destruction of the entire planet, is not enough. Instead we have built thousands of nuclear warheads and deployed them in silos, on submarines, on bombers and have stockpiled them by the thousands. It is not even possible that we could use a fraction of them. So why do we have them?
To be honest, it’s a little disappointing that we have used a good portion of our time over the past 21 years to resist nuclear weapons, to get arrested, to expose ourselves to a legal system that is dedicated to allowing these weapons to exist, to spending time in prison, only to find that our nuclear program is more robust and expensive than ever. Were it not for a belief that Jesus was right when he modeled for us a life of love, non-violence and compassion regardless of the personal consequences, I would have abandoned my efforts long ago. In some sense the folks passing by in their cars at the main gate of Vandenberg who flip us off and call us crazy have a point. If we think we will change the world we probably are crazy. But if we are just trying to be faithful, who cares how crazy we seem. We will carry on knowing that we are all in this together and we’ll never be as crazy as nuclear weapons.
Article first appeared in the Beatitude House Newsletter June 2017
Beatitude House Catholic Worker 267 Campodonico Ave.
Guadalupe, CA 93434
