Winter 2005:
Activist Editorials
A New Home for Greatness
Forgotten Oil Wars
Uzbeki Dictator, U.S. Ally
The Draft Debate Heats Up
Remembering as Resistance
Letters

Homepages:
War Resisters League
The Nonviolent Activist

Activist Editorials
Now That We’ve Licked Our Wounds

By Judith Mahoney Pasternak

fter the election, millions of us sat in real or virtual huddles and shared critiques—witty and barbed, or crude and profane—of Bush and the Bush campaign, Kerry and the Kerry campaign, the media, the U.S. electorate, and anyone but ourselves we could blame for the disaster.

From Kerry supporters to third-party voters, the wide range of opponents of the Bush administration appeared united in defeat as we had never been before. Union workers and stock market analysts, disenchanted military personnel and longtime pacifists, anarchist atheists and religious leaders, liberal Democrats and liberal Republicans and radical activists of every (left-leaning) stripe, we were one, at least, in our outrage: We felt robbed. (We may have been, but that’s another discussion.)

The unity was illusory, of course. The left end of that spectrum respected Kerry supporters only marginally more than it did Bush voters. It was primarily middle-of-the-road and liberal Democrats who exchanged web tidbits like the map that divided the country into blue “United States” around the edges and a massive red “Dumbfuckistan” at its heart, declaring that those who voted for Bush constituted at least another nation (if not another species). Progressives were ready to consign Democrats who actually believed in John Kerry to Dumbfuckistan along with Bush’s supporters, leaving us ourselves as the only true heirs of decency and democracy.

It was the wrong attitude. Segregating ourselves from the majority of our compatriots hasn’t won us hearts and minds for the last several decades and won’t in the future. On the contrary, we need to be thinking about what we have in common with them—yes, with middle-of-the-road Democrats and even with Republican voters.

Because whether Bush won a majority of the vote or not, the fact remains that many millions of people did vote for him. Most of them are not rich. Most of them are not the people who are profiting from the Bush policies; indeed, many, possibly most, of them are losing more from those policies than are many of those who voted for Kerry.

Seriously. The electoral demographics suggest that the majority of Bush voters were from the very stratum of people whose jobs are fleeing offshore fastest, who are working the largest numbers of jobs per household for the lowest hourly rates—exactly the people that progressives should be speaking to. Instead we’re dismissing them as rednecks, racists, homophobes and morons (and committed Democrats as barely better).

But isn’t that—the dismissiveness, the stereotyping—one of the things we complain about in them? Isn’t our side the one that says we should look for the humanity in even the meanest of our opponents?

Those are rhetorical questions, of course. Yes, we have failed in loving our enemies. But, perhaps even worse than that, we have failed in our analysis. The policies of the Bush administration may be murderous and mean-spirited—are murderous and mean-spirited, no maybe about it—but those who voted for Bush are not necessarily either. They are our compatriots, and they are no more monolithic, in fact, than are those of us who oppose the Bush policies. They are union and non-union workers, working poor and middle class, military personnel and religious leaders and, almost certainly, even liberal Republicans and Democrats.

And they voted for Bush for many different reasons, although we have reason to suspect that underlying many of those reasons was fear, or rather, many fears: fear of terrorists and bombs on U.S. soil, fear of changes that may undermine time-honored traditions, fear of an uncertain economic future …

“Possibly.” “We suspect.” We don’t know, because we haven’t been talking to them. And we certainly haven’t been listening. Were we to do so, we might find out, say, who voted for Bush for what reasons; we might find ways of assuring people:

• that war won’t bring any of us peace or safety;
• that tax cuts won’t feed our children or pay the rent;
• that banning lifestyles won’t turn back the clock of change.

But first we would have to listen—listen with respect.

It’s time. It’s time we stopped huddling together and turned outward, met and talked with the other people in this country, found out for ourselves and let them find out for themselves that we are members of the same species, living on the same planet—“washed by the very same rain,” in the words of folk singer Pat Humphries—and that, more than ever before, we will live or die together.

We can start by learning to talk together.

Longtime activist-journalist Judith Mahoney Pasternak is the editor of this magazine.

By John M. Miller

et’s face it, we’re not used to winning. Whatever progress we seem to make one day is often undermined the next. It goes without saying that abolition of war, much less the elimination of its causes, is a long way off, an objective we’re unlikely to see in our lifetime. It’s a laudable goal and the reason we belong to the War Resisters League, yet at times it seems, depressingly, to keep receding, rather than drawing closer. We lose more campaigns and struggles than we win. And while our ideals help sustain us, the lack of progress contributes to disillusion, and people drift away.

So some of us, at least, need a little more than ideals to get us through the night. One thing that sustains me is being a New York Yankees fan. The Yankees have won more championships than any other professional sports franchise in history: 39 American League pennants and 26 World Series. Many in WRL see this identification with the perennial winner (its American League playoff loss this fall to the Boston Red Sox was just an aberration) as a major character flaw, not a psychological asset. I hear every cheap joke ever imagined about Yankee imperialism. When not spouting something about the team being run by an imperial George (Steinbrenner) and/or out-spending all other teams, they complain about Branch Rickey sneaking away from New York in the middle of the night with the underdog Brooklyn Dodgers and their beloved Jackie Robinson decades ago. (Not that the Yankees had anything to do with Rickey’s defection).

But mostly, Yankee haters home in on the team’s winning ways. In New York, most WRL baseball fans cheer the hapless New York Mets, despite their incompetent organization and their poor judgment of talent. Mets fans revel even in their team’s inconsistent play.

This can’t be healthy. When we try to convince others that nonviolence is not only a moral necessity, but a strategy for successful social change, we usually point to historical examples, like Gandhi’s campaign for India’s independence and the U.S. civil rights movement—ancient history to many, and no substitute for winning now. Yet only by building a string of victories, however modest, can we counter the trend toward disillusion and dropping out described above.

I have been fortunate to have worked on a number of winning campaigns. I like to think that my efforts have contributed to freeing a country, the now-independent East Timor; the closing of military bases in New York harbor and the Philippines; and the fact that no new nuclear power plants have been ordered in the United Statesfor decades. While the abolition of war may seem no closer, U.S. foreign policy was changed, people’s rights have been defended, and real lives have been saved. Participating in real world victories certainly sustains activism. We need to defend and expand on these, and, as importantly, consciously build toward additional ones.

In the world’s real life and death struggles, we root for the underdog. But why carry this over to the unreal world of professional sports? While my Yankee fandom may have been handed down to me from my Bronx-raised father, it has served me well, letting me know that it is possible to win and win consistently.

Clearly, it is far more satisfying to be on the winning end than to just root for it. But both are needed to help lift the gloom and get through trying times like these.

John M. Miller, who does the design and desktop publishing for this magazine, has been on the WRL National Committee for almost as long as he’s been a Yankee fan.