My parents started the War Resisters League New England when I was a baby. Instead of summer camp, I went to the WRL Organizer Training Program at Woolman Hill for 10 days and ran around in the woods with other kids.. We didn’t go on vacation- we went to meetings. But they felt like vacations to me. Esther Pank and Riley Bostrom taking me and my sister swimming (they were smart, they knew that kid duty was more fun than another meeting). David McReynolds was happy he could eat McDonald’s with us and not feel judged. We watched movies, happy that we could fit two into those long meetings.
When I became a teenager, I wanted to go to the meetings. WRL started a program called YouthPeace just as I was entering high school. In the summer of 1997, I attended a week long training in Voluntown, CT. Out of that, a group of teens from Southeastern Connecticut started organizing our own YouthPeace actions.
I think about those early days of activism during this season. Twenty-five years ago, in 1998, we organized a Black Friday action at our local mall and then in 1999 and 2000.
Reading my quote “War toys teach kids that the best way to solve conflict is to eliminate the other person. We need to teach people to solve problems in ways that don’t cause other problems. Otherwise, we continue to live in fear of schoolyard shootings, hate crimes, suicides and other violence.” is especially striking because that’s literally my job now. I work at an elementary school, teaching social-emotional learning lessons, doing conflict resolution and practicing Restorative Justice. The goal of my job is to help kids solve problems without having to resort to violence- and to help rebuild community when they have used violence. It feels less radical to come into a school every day and work with 7 and 8 year olds than it does to protest and risk arrest, but it’s a continuation of the same activism.
Now I’m a parent and my oldest is the age I was when we were organizing these protests. While I’m not protesting as often as I once did, I still try to resist and confront injustices. And I’m trying to figure out how we can use our collective power for change in a digital world.
We can’t stand outside of a website with messages like “Don’t Buy War Toys” as we did at the mall. So how do we reach parents? I want to teach our kids today that they have power, and the power is in their choices. We don’t have to participate. It’s a hard sell, but I think it always has been.
How do we teach our kids how to solve problems without violence on a large scale? This summer’s Barbie movie was a great infiltration. Greta Gerwig was able to critique our beauty standards while the biggest purveyor of them funded it. But where’s our GI Joe movie where he refuses to fight because he realizes he’s a pawn for the United Fruit Company? How about a hilarious takedown of the Military Industrial Complex? Instead, we are getting inundated with more military recruiting ads than ever. I’m hopeful that our young people, these digital natives, will figure it out. Our role is to plant seeds so they reject war and violence as a solution.
- by Patrick Sheehan-Gaumer
