AN INTRODUCTION


Preface
All over the world tribal languages
are going extinct. The language of
peacemaking is likewise profoundly
threatened. Whatever your religious
or political persuasion, I am sure you
agree that all is lost if we forget the
logic of peace. I offer this letter to
whoever will pass it from hand to
hand in these desperate times.




Introduction
This is a time of profound global crisis. The pathway into the future is tangled and confused, and some believe the world itself is at stake. It behooves us to call on the memory of great leaders who have faced the kind of international turmoil we find ourselves in today.

Dwight David Eisenhower was the chief architect of the defeat of the Nazis. Such was his stature, his affability and integrity that both political parties sought to nominate him as president. His presidency saw the Russians respond to our testing of the hydrogen bomb with their own just as Truman dealt with the Soviets going nuclear after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His were dangerous times. Yet he knew that questions of war and peace cannot be asked or answered crudely. A Five Star General skilled in war, though he despised it, he was also a consummate peacemaker.

In his final speech before the nation, Eisenhower expressed alarm about "the military-industrial complex": the radical interdependence of "a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions" and "an immense military establishment" dangerous both to democracy at home and the prospect of world peace. "The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government… we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."

The situation Eisenhower warned us of has reached an extremity surely beyond his worst imaginings. The world is thoroughly armed against itself; yet few nations don’t hunger for more weaponry. And fewer still can remember the old traditions of making peace.

There are many ways to understand the current crisis, but one that is useful and empowering to each of us individually is the idea of addiction. We Americans, human beings have become addicted to weaponry, warfare, violence and images of violence. We see its consequences in the lives of our children, their rage and fear, and at night we are sleepless because we don’t know how to protect them.

We observe it in our souls which know little of peace but much of that appetite that will never be filled within an American dream that has become malls and multiplexes. We are victim to hungers that are not ours though they sometimes possess us.

To serve this imbalanced life, our government has been swallowed up by the military-industrial complex, and our foreign policy has become a factory that mass produces enemies. Feeding our hungers and allaying our escalating fears requires a permanent war economy.

When Eisenhower told the nation that the military-industrial complex influenced all aspects of contemporary life, he did not fail to mention the spiritual: Our souls are endangered. If we do not tend to our souls, the world itself is endangered by us. This danger is called addiction, and there is a way through it. Shall we walk the twelve steps together? I think we must.

It is awkward to find the language for this: the secret anguish in our individual lives and our families writ large in the behavior of a nation, the secret anguish of a nation mirrored in our everyday lives; us, citizens, this nation, walking the twelve steps that might return us to balance and understanding. Let us follow the question of hunger and first consider the context we live in: How did this extraordinary country come to such a moment as this? Knowing the history is necessary if we are to walk the twelve steps as an act of healing for both ourselves and this beloved country.

Eisenhower’s was a complex and penetrating intelligence, lucid and farseeing in a time of fear "when everyone else in the country," says historian Stephen Ambrose, "wanted to step up defense and was scaring others." Ike’s response was, "We’ve got to cut back on military spending."

That was two generations ago.

In their presidential campaigns Nixon and Kennedy outdid each other with the rhetoric of expanding defense spending, and soon M.A.D. (Mutual Assured Destruction) became the strategy of containing Soviet expansionism.The U.S. and the Soviet Union spent decades engaged in often devastating geopolitical manipulations in countries like Afghanistan, El Salvador, Angola, The Congo, Vietnam with little genuine understanding of these worlds and little substantive assessment of the consequences, leaving many millions of civilians dead. The end of the Cold War has left the U.S. by far the wealthiest country and the strongest military power in the history of the world.

Feeding the desire to kill other people is good business. Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has supplied four times the weaponry of the second largest supplier and now arms ninety-two percent of current wars. According to the Center for International Policy, eighty percent of weapons exports went to non-democratic regimes. Selling weapons is good business also because after agriculture, it is the industry most subsidized by the federal government.

But these are numbers, dry and lifeless. They say nothing of the life of a ten-year-old girl before being blasted by a land mine in Quang Tri Province in Vietnam. Two-thirds of the mines have been cleared in Quang Tri, but 225,000,000 remain. Sixty thousand people have died this mindless death since the end of the war. ("I hate war," said Eisenhower, "as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.")

The American military budget is currently six times larger than its nearest competitor, but this is just the baseline. After a couple of generations of descending into addiction, we are more crazed than we know. In response to an atrocity committed by a handful of terrorists armed only with box cutters, there is almost unanimous bipartisan support for hugely expanding the Pentagon budget.

People who are recovering from addiction and those who love them know this story well. A teenage boy, for example, begins with a little pinch of cocaine up the nose, then takes to the pipe, freebasing omnipotence. Damage is done because he can’t really see another human being, is craving the next time he is in that place of ecstasy and power.

Nothing is so dreadful as coming down. Raw, fetid, defeated. One is so consumed in the compelling nature of hunger that one can ravage family, spouse, children, parents, even strangers and scarcely really notice.

At the core of the American push towards consolidating economic and military hegemony is an insatiability that bears the mark of a true addiction. How might the twelve steps help us recognize and then recover from this addiction to making war and preparing for war, making enemies and preparing for enemies that have yet to present themselves?

STEP ONE


Admit that we are powerless over this addiction and that our lives have become unmanageable.

When I was a boy, I had the good fortune of being mentored by a remarkable and remarkably quiet man, the Reverend Bill Brown. Bill’s path to the ministry had led through the gutter. He had been a derelict, hard core, waking in vomit, at the very bottom. Alcoholics Anonymous had delivered him to a path of self-scrutiny, humility, grace and compassion. He had no son; so briefly I was it. He taught me scripture and how to move with spirit. When he sang "Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me," it was for real, and you knew it.

I’d sometimes hear Bill’s singing those years I was homeless and strung out, sleeping under freeway bridges. Bill always told me that no hell was beyond grace, but even God cannot reach a soul that is unwilling to admit its affliction. Step One bitter, humiliating and utterly necessary — is the moment we look ourselves in the eye.


Few addicts end up in the gutter, but most people know what it is to be unable to control the emotional patterns that entrap them and even undo them in small or large ways.


You feel afraid or overwhelmed by the world or your own feelings. Your thoughts get obsessive and then your behavior: obsessively eating, shopping or working in an attempt to chase away an undefined anxiety. Maybe you throw yourself into meaningless sex or maybe into an intimate relationship which, like the previous one and the one that will follow, has no room at all for your vulnerability or the other person’s. You grow more desperate. The postures you’ve acquired to hide the despair themselves drive you nuts. The world seems like a cruel place, and you’ve glimpsed or been stunned by your own capacities for pettiness and cruelty. All your efforts to find a safe haven have left you feeling even more defenseless.


We all know the disease. It’s always in our face. In another century, Thoreau called it the "quiet desperation" of ordinary lives. Now I think it’s more accurate to say "quiet dissatisfaction" — hopefully, manageably quiet. But all of us have felt or seen the bottomless pit that this dissatisfaction skirts. Most of us have kin or friends that have fallen in.


Nothing is ever quite enough. As a people we know self-satisfaction, dissatisfaction, spiritual impoverishment and sterility, but how many really know "enoughness," sufficiency, a simple ease in an unfortified life, a genuine home for our souls to return to?


The Dutch writer Ian Buruma writes of the tantalizing quality of ‘America’ (in quotes) — that drug the world hungers to take for the sheer exhilaration of the high:


"The pull to cut loose, to reinvent ourselves, to shake off the past, and to want instant gratification, sexual, material, spiritual, is something most of us have felt. That is why ‘America,’ the ideal expressed in Hollywood movies, rock music, advertising and other pop culture, is so attractive, so sexy and, to some, so deeply disturbing. All of us want a bit of ‘America,’ but few of us can have it, and even those who do still hunger for more, and more."


Step One calls for bluntness. Almost half the world lives off less than two dollars a day. When I told my daughter Nicole this when she was twelve, she saw the equation immediately. "We are all white South Africans, aren’t we?" she said. It is not possible to pursue mindless hungers at the expense of the world’s majority without being sick in ways few will admit –- a sickness white South Africans knew all too well. "America," the drug, has democratized a dread disease. Every immigrant quickly learns that he or she becomes American not in the voting booth but by partaking of "America the drug" in the various temples where consumers gather.


America is a theater of distractions, and because we concede day by day, year by year to anything that will distract us from an authentic life, we die poorly. To die a shapeless death having never made one’s own acquaintance is common enough to go unnoticed.


Let’s take bluntness a bit further. What are the deceptions and self-deceptions we live by to make it from week to week? Your deceptions and mine? Those raw months after September 11th -- anthrax maybe in the mailbox, all of us wondering now what will be the next terrorist attack and the President telling us that shopping should be the citizens’ response to such a time. Or two days into the bombing of Afghanistan, a small country on the edge of famine in an unstable nuclearized part of the world, an upbeat article in the business section about investors "bidding up" on new weapons systems. How am I/we invested in apocalypse? Invested to the last penny and pretending we aren’t?


What are we in fact willing to sacrifice for our hungers? The possibility that we will ever feel secure or at ease in the world? The possibility of a meaningful and truly generous life? Our children’s future? Their children? The lives of countless strangers in another part of the world? Their children? The world itself?


What is sufficient?


The question is addiction, and about it we must not lie. Our lies imprison us in a world narrowed by fear and altogether few efforts to see beyond our diminished lives. Or, as Michael Ventura puts it, "Your enemies oppress you as much by your fidelity to your own lies as by anything else."


The addiction to militarism and enemymaking that characterizes American foreign policy has yet to make it to Step One as so few citizens understand how unmanageable the current situation is.


One reason is that, unlike most addicts, the Pentagon is never without resources to feed and expand its habit. Uncle Sam is without a wife who might ask what exactly happened to the 1.2 trillion dollars he cannot account for. This is the addict’s misfortune for he never need "come down" and get real. Not only is the addiction rarely seen or questioned, it is, as with the bravado of an addict, celebrated.


Americans are not an extremist people, but we currently suffer an extremist government. Many who do not in good conscience celebrate these self-destructive patterns are nonetheless cowed by the President, though his election remains greatly in dispute, and his Attorney General, who sometimes seems to echo Hermann Goering’s statement at Nuremberg that a people "can always be brought to do the bidding of their leaders. All you have to do is tell them they are attacked and denounce pacifists for their lack of patriotism."


I cannot and am unwilling to believe that Attorney General Ashcroft would consciously echo the sentiments of the Third Reich, but what are we to make of his statement before the Senate Judiciary Committee claiming that those who would "scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty only aid terrorists for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve"?


One can see how the political climate does not exactly encourage the soul-searching so necessary to the first step.

Eisenhower believed that a vibrant and reflective Republican party would best safeguard the inviolable rights of the individual. Through his term of office, he struggled with the likes of Joe McCarthy, who used a manipulative and shallow patriotism to intimidate Americans who saw things differently from themselves. I will presume for now that Ashcroft doesn’t hear the implications of his own words.


Currently this unmanageable and misguided patriotism has sometimes become so extreme that even to suggest that there is a historical context to the horror of September 11th is to risk being called a traitor. But maybe it is a patriotic imperative to challenge the juggernaut imposed upon America that is so thoroughly distorting our relationship with the community of nations and will predictably yield harvest after harvest of terrorists.

Why not begin in 1953? Iran. British oil milking the country and returning little until the popular leader Mossadeq tries to nationalize the oil and is overthrown by a coup engineered by the CIA. In exchange, the U.S. gets forty percent of the oil profits, and Iran gets a quarter of a century of the brutal Shah. A nascent Islamic fundamentalism grew in response to the dictatorship, and the Shah was replaced by the inevitably anti-American Ayatollah Khomeini.


1963. Iraq. The government of Abd al-Karim Qassim withdraws the country from the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact and so suffers a coup organized by the CIA. James Critchfield, who was head of the CIA in the Middle East at the time, boasted, "We regarded it as a great victory." Ali Saleh Sa’adi, the Ba’ath General Secretary, concurred. "We came to power on the CIA train." After a reign of terror, the Ba’athists established the vicious police state that would eventually find Saddam Hussein as its leader.


1980. Saddam Hussein, then an American ally, invades Iran, afraid that the Muslim theocracy will disturb the delicate Sunni/Shi’ite balance in his country and destabilize his socialist regime. The U.S. opposes U.N. efforts to condemn the invasion. The United States (and Britain and France) arm Hussein against Iran, but Reagan also secretly arms Iran against Iraq as does Israel. America and its allies supported both sides of a war that left upward to a million people dead and several hundred thousand refugees.


1987. The U.S. dispatches the Navy to the Persian Gulf on behalf of Iraq.


1988. Saddam Hussein kills thousands of Kurds with chemical weapons. The U.S. deepens its economic ties with Iraq.


Finally, there are the Afghani fundamentalists that Reagan praised as freedom fighters. They received no less than 30 billion dollars from the CIA for their fierce commitment to drive the Soviets from their land. We trained and armed Osama bin Laden and many of his soldiers and politically supported the Taliban right up to September 11th.

The revolving door of American foreign policy, "friends" becoming "enemies" again and again, has created a situation where a nominally peace-loving country has been perpetually at war for most of sixty years and where our last six military engagements have had American soldiers attacked by weapons provided by American arms merchants. This is the kind of unmanageability that the first step addresses.


All this forever justified with the lie of protecting American interests and American lives. Eisenhower, warrior and patriot, saw all this with prescient courage and insight: "We must never let the weight of this combination [the military-industrial complex] endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together."

On the national level Step One requires the self-awareness and truth telling of "an alert and knowledgeable citizenry." The World Trade Center was the most recent domino of many to fall — the previous having fallen in the Arab world. Where will the next fall?

STEP TWO



We recognize that only a Power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity.

Jim was my patient for a couple of nights. An accountant, late fifties, he was quite drunk as he drove to work and veered off an overpass nose down onto the freeway below. Rush hour. Miraculously intact and miraculous that he didn’t kill anyone, he was nonetheless emotionally shattered.


And then there were the DT’s. At three a.m., he virtually leapt from bed, undistracted by a broken hip and that he was minutes from respiratory failure, convinced that the staff was going to kill him. I managed to wheel him back into his room on a bedside commode, hooked him to oxygen and let him cry and cry.


"Am I going to hell?" he asked.


"No," I said. "I think you are leaving hell."


Dear God, I had the pleasure of seeing his face fill with light as it dawned on him that perhaps he was forgivable, maybe he could start again.


"Only the prayer of a person with a broken heart can open the gates of heaven," say the Hasidic Jews. Step Two is about facing the Divine with the full heartbreak over what one’s life has become.


Life can be relentless in calling us to this moment of facing God and turning our lives around, but for many it is not at all dramatic. One way or another we are drawn inexorably to the moment of truth — the truth of our helplessness before our addiction and the truth of our radical vulnerability before the goodness of God.


September 11th delivered many of us directly to Step Two. No longer possible to ignore the global culture of violence and our participation in it as victims and victimizers, whatever else we might do, we must at least face God. Baffled, we ask, "Why do they hate us?" and in our bafflement, yearning for a God who would make things whole again, September 11th was a pivotal moment in the spiritual life of a nation.

STEP THREE



To make the decision to turn the will over to this Power as we understand it.

Mr. Begay was my tutor, patient in his efforts to teach me the Navajo language. He had fallen deep into the bottle, very deep, but had been dry for five years. He was bingeing with his girlfriend — bad wine, cocaine — and for reasons he could never understand, cut her face up with a knife. That was his turning point: nausea and self-disgust. Step One. He joined AA and sought out a Singer (a medicine man) for spiritual guidance.


"The liquor belongs to Coyote," said the Singer. Coyote -- that wild streak that cuts through the otherwise orderly world of clan and tribe. "Give it back to the rascal and then we can do a Blessingway." And so Mr. Begay poured his last bottle into a coyote bush and gathered his people for the four-day ceremonial that reconciled him with them, with the spirits of the land and with the Great Spirit.


Coyote not only likes liquor, but he thrives on any impulse that divides us from being in right relationship to the world.


Mr. Begay’s story says something essential, though implicit, in Step Three. We are reconciled with God to the measure we are reconciled with the community. This is the essential context of the twelve steps: None of us can do it alone.


God’s healing moves within the circumstance of our fragility, most specifically the fragility of our relationship with the world that has been ravaged by our addiction. In recovery culture the community of recovering addicts bear witness to each other’s little and big moments of surrender. One could imagine an AA meeting as kind of Blessingway ceremony.


Step Three is about yielding the substance, the arrogance, the emotional immaturity, the hopelessness – whatever it is that alienates us from the movement of God’s will in our lives.


September 11th slashed into the American psyche just as we have slashed the Iraqi, Iranian and Afghani people. The fractured world of the addict seeks wholeness but will often act in ways that tear at international relations even further. But running with the wounded rage of a presumably innocent victim has squandered the moral capital of our call for justice by redoubling the militaristic bravado that is making us more and more isolated in the community of nations. It is for the citizens now to sing a Blessingway on behalf of America to heal the consequences of our violence in the world.


Since God sits in the community that sustains us in our effort to be free of our addictions and since there are no extant recovery programs for those addicted to militarism, enemymaking and rampant consumerism, how might we invoke a circle that receives America in its present confusion?


"Blessed are the peacemakers," said Christ, "for they shall be called the children of God." Christ’s teachings about peacemaking are consistent and adamant: There is nothing in the gospels that could justify war of any sort for any reason. In some scriptures Christ almost seems to dissolve the very concept of "enemy." "The rain falls on the just and the unjust." Rather than defy these teachings, many early Christians died for their refusal to serve in the Roman army.


Few Westerners realize how central peacemaking is to Islamic society from the level of the village to the resolution of conflicts between Arab nations. "Among the Shabana of Southern Iraq," writes Raphael Patai, "the peacemaking function belongs to the sada class, whose members enjoy the status of nobility based on their generally accepted claim to descent from the Prophet Muhammad through his daughter Fatima. The sada are associated with each tribal segment of the Shabana but remain free of active fighting and do not become involved in blood feuds. Instead they take an active part in peacemaking."

Likewise, in Algeria the holy ones, the marabouts, "interfere as soon as a conflict becomes intensified to the point where human life is threatened: They stop the fighting and then embark on a lengthy process of mediation. This enables the two sides to discontinue the fight without dishonor or shame. This is, as they call it, a ‘door’ to an honorable way out of the dispute."


When Patai writes, "The very authority of the elders who arbitrate in such disputes is based on their recognized ethical stature," he could just as well be referring to Ashkenazi or Sephardic Rabbis applying Torah to resolve disputes in their respective communities. Both Judaism and Islam confer authority to those who have shown their skill in the arts of peacemaking through the pragmatic application of sacred law and folk wisdom.


In all three traditions we stand with our adversaries before God — equal in our insignificance and our frailty, equal in our possibilities and our capacities for wickedness.


Peacemaking is both the heart and soul of these three traditions and dismally marginalized by all three’s insistence that "God is (militarily) on our side." Making peace within a community is different than making peace between demonstrable enemies, and the damnable parochialism of peacemakers leaves us knowing each other’s violence but scarcely able to imagine being a guest at each other’s table.


If we take seriously the recovery of America from its addiction to violence, the elders must step forth. The vitality of the twelve steps approach would invoke a community of brothers, sisters and sponsors, some of who are farther along the path of renouncing the compulsion to make enemies. Alone, none of us are wise. Wisdom is in the community itself. God wants peace and will move through whoever yields to the possibility.


Without this context September 11th will remain an incomprehensible trauma impeding the possibility of yielding to God’s will. Within this context we can face our brokenness with generosity and hope.

STEP FOUR



To make a fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

Hannah left home when she was sixteen because her father was a drunk and would sometimes lash out. By the time she was twenty, she and her two year old, Billy, lived in a small apartment in a working class neighborhood in Portland, Oregon. After a brief romance, Charlie joined them.


The way she thought about it, Hannah took Charlie to be very different from her father. Though he sometimes drank and would swing between sweetness and verbal abuse, he, she said, only hit her twice during the five years they were together. Their relationship was volatile, to be sure, and Billy would sometimes hide in the closet or under his bed when the adults would fight. But Charlie seemed to love the kid, and Billy definitely loved Charlie. Then one morning after a particularly angry night, Charlie split. No warning. No note. Never to return.


Through the years of his childhood, the volatility of Hannah and Charlie continued between Hannah and Billy. Billy idealized Charlie and blamed his mother for his disappearance. He was skillful with his rage, knew exactly how to push his mother’s buttons. She in turn spewed poison about his beloved Charlie and sometimes slapped him when all her efforts to control him came to naught.


Billy loved slasher movies and violent video games, and for a while Hannah attributed his rage to his emotional immaturity and the vile culture of his peers. It was only when he tried to burn down the neighbor’s garage that Hannah became fearless with the questions of her role in raising a violent boy.


"It was the hardest thing I ever did, looking at how I hurt my boy the way my daddy hurt me. Everything was sour at that time –- alone with my son and us always fighting, struggling hard not to hit him, scared for him, confused, and bitter that Charlie left us like he did. I had clutched to Charlie, thinking I’d drown if I let go, and I kept clutching even when things were getting ugly. I sacrificed my son ‘cause I was so scared of being alone."
Hannah knew humiliation and violence through her father, her lover and then her boy (though he always retained the stubborn dignity of never answering her violence with his own). When she thought about her father’s mother, she could trace violence across generations and sometimes felt completely trapped in a story not of her making but one she was nonetheless responsible for.


While Step Three conjured the sacred community within which we surrender to God’s will, Step Four involves the solitary wrestling with our own conscience. "Fearlessness" says it well, but we have been prepared for there is little more frightening than yielding to God and the Divine imperative that we make peace.
How are we, like Hannah, implicated in the violence that comes our way?


Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld tells us that the war against terrorism might last fifty years. "Think the unthinkable," he says. Let’s try.


In many ways the unthinkable has already happened; not our response unfurling into an inconceivable future but the horrible reality of September 11th itself — the fire, smoke, stench of corpses thick for weeks over the streets of Manhattan. Until then, such was unthinkable on American soil. But isn’t September 11, 1973 also unthinkable? The U.S. engineers a coup in Chile: the presidential palace bombed; the President killed; and for a generation, a dictatorship that tortured its citizens and "disappeared" any who dared oppose the state. The perverse gift of September 11th opens the possibility of empathizing with those who have been our victims. This is where a moral inventory gets real, digs in to the possibility of cutting through the lies that uphold a violent order.


Or the hell, truly unthinkable, that we’ve visited on the citizens of Iraq. In a country of 20 million people, 500,000 children dead from the U.S. embargo. A six hundred percent increase in leukemia and a plethora of birth defects proves that depleted uranium has all the "advantages" of nuclear warfare without the public outcry.


Think of it. What if something like that happened to our children? Mass destruction justified by the desire to rid our former ally of weapons of mass destruction; then Secretary of State Albright actually affirmed on Sixty Minutes that it was "worth it."


How would we feel about such an enemy?


But no need even to use the weapons we’ve accumulated — sufficient the violence of pouring our wealth into their creation. Eisenhower: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."

STEP FIVE



Admitted to God, ourselves and another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

Tony was a kid in a migrant worker family, doing the strawberry fields on the central coast of California. When he was eighteen, he joined the army with a couple of other Mexican boys he’d known all of his childhood. It was in Vietnam that he learned the usefulness of heroin: self-medication, he called it.


"It wasn’t such a big thing really," he told me. "We just shot up so we could kick back. You know it was very stressful over there."


I was moved by the poetry and compassion in some of his stories about Nam: his friendship with a Buddhist monk, the time he intervened when another grunt began raping a Vietnamese woman in front of her children. "He was a big scary guy, and I was real afraid of him, but when I told him to pay attention to the children, he said, ‘Oh. I didn’t think of that,’ and he stopped!"


Tony was nothing if not laid back. A week before the end of his tour of duty, he was relieved that, to the best of his knowledge, he hadn’t killed anybody. "I thought I was going to make it back to the world clean," is how he put it.

No such luck.


It was so simple: a Vietnamese man carrying a burden along an irrigation ditch. Tony told him to stop in Vietnamese. He didn’t. Tony shot him almost without thinking. "Why did I do that?" he asked me. "Ever since that moment, my heart has been dead meat. I don’t feel nothing there anymore."


His heroin habit that initially had softened the harshness of the war became a monkey on his back. His moral inventory began with an almost casual killing and ran through his fifteen years as a junkie.


In Step Four we strive to be accountable to ourselves. Here the painful solitude of moral inquiry opens up towards a transparency before God and the human community, very much including the enemy who may not be present but is nonetheless receiving the gesture of reconciliation.


This is the fulcrum point from which the desire for peace approaches manifestation.


"We think the Vietnam war was something that happened to us," Tony told me. "But actually it was something we did to them."


Imagine the unimaginable.


Roughly sixty to seventy Vietnamese died for every American who shed blood in Southeast Asia. But that doesn’t really say it. The Americans were combatants. Nine out of ten Vietnamese casualties were civilian, altogether one-sixteenth of the population.

It was far worse in Cambodia and Laos. The war took the lives of no less than a quarter of their people, again, almost all civilians. Having participated in the deaths of twenty percent of the population of Cambodia, how much outrage can we have that the Khmer Rouge killed another third in their bizarre autogenocide? After all, we, alongside China and Thailand, armed them: our allies in the war of attrition against Vietnam after the fall of Saigon.
Enough of layering numbers upon numbers. They are available in the public domain. For America the war was a tragedy; for Southeast Asians it was a holocaust.


Vietnam era vets are heroes not because they fought for their country — this war served nothing that most Americans believe in. Betrayed by their country to participate in a bloody display of power, their anguish mystified, their duty idealized or scorned, they are heroes because they have borne the unbearable knowledge of the American shadow that few of their fellow citizens are willing to countenance. Their souls never needed parades and blaring trumpets; they just needed us to listen to their stories without fear, sentimentality or judgment.


To speak from the heart and listen from the heart — so simple and so rare. Step Five is the moment ethical reflection begins seeping into the bones.

STEP SIX



We’re entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.


Back to the story of Hannah.


Somewhere midway through her season in hell, Hannah befriended a neighbor, Carla, a single mother of a five-year-old girl. Carla belonged to a group of single mothers who met every week at a local church and invited Hannah to join them. Stripped by months of looking into the roots of her violence in her family, she was greatly moved by the openness with which the women spoke of their own anger and their children’s. It was the first time it occurred to her that her demons were not a private matter. In the company of these women, their honesty and kindness, she began to see possibilities for her life if she could forgive herself, if she could be forgiven.


At first Billy was skeptical and irritated by his mother’s interest in religion but softened a bit because she started treating him better, she was no longer violent and she didn’t preach to him. He even accompanied her, Carla, the local minister and a few women from the church to the Klamath River for baptism.


"I was so filled with different feelings, excited and happy and full of uncertainty, but I was ready, too."


At the edge of the waters of redemption, one’s friends praying, singing – a life being left behind, a new and mysterious life ahead. This moment offers the perfect image of Step Six: entirely ready to trust God’s grace, the possibility of a fresh start freed from the patterns of violence and shame.


Step Six stands at the edge between the known and the unknown, between a soul that has learned the habits of self-examination and a soul that will be born to a life of freedom.


What can this possibly have to do with the larger picture of redeeming us as military-industrial addicts from our untenable self-destructive patterns? Here a generous hope is called for. We betray our children if we don’t believe this planet has a future.


That is what is at stake.


Where are the waters of redemption? Do we imagine this country, having examined its soul en masse at the riverside, ready to trust the mercy of God? Naïve.


Let’s remember the Winter Soldiers tribunal in the early seventies, Vietnam Veterans Against the War speaking openly about atrocities they had committed in a far-away country.


Or reservists in the Israeli Defense Force likewise speaking out about the horror they have visited upon Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.


Or honor the 7,000 perpetrators of torture and assassination, pro-apartheid and anti-apartheid, and 20,000 of their victims speaking openly before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa that the country might heal from an excruciating history.


Or Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect, pleading guilty at Nuremberg and the decades he spent in Spandau prison trying to understand how he’d been seduced by National Socialism.


These ones were delivered to the edge of redemption, maybe willing to step in. One becomes a peacemaker by examining one’s soul and by receiving those who have traveled so far in the examination of their lives.
The conscience of the nation and the world likely rests in a few courageous souls. They are precious beyond measure.


What would it look like if each of us in this country in our own way appealed to God to remove our addiction to violence?.

STEP SEVEN



To humbly ask God to remove our shortcomings.


When Benjamin checked into the hospital, he didn’t know whether he came to die or get a new heart, and he didn’t care one way or another which it was to be. At sixty, he was played out, and his heart was, as Tony might say, "dead meat." When I became his nurse, it had been only a few days since he’d received the heart of a man half his age. He couldn’t keep from resting his hands across his sternal incision, astonished to feel another man’s heart beating in his chest.


Benjamin was astonished also for an even more profound reason. He was feeling compassion for the first time. "I was never a man who was given to weeping," he told me, "but now it’s all I do." I was moved to watch him minister to his roommate, a young man who was himself on the short list for a new heart.


Mostly Benjamin was weeping because he’d spent forty years in the CIA, cold and efficient, "on company business" in Laos, El Salvador, the Congo; supervising torture in Latin America, clandestine operations in Africa and Asia. "If only Americans knew," he kept saying. I suppose for the two days I was with him, I represented the America "that needed to know." He poured his heart out.


All this was far less melodramatic than it sounds, maybe because he had utterly come to the end of his rope. His grief was soft, reflective, and he was continually surprised that he could feel anything at all. His new humility was genuine, and every night his prayers were quiet as he began his new life.


It is a beautiful thing, the prayer that comes naturally when cruelty is acknowledged and razed to the ground. "I thank God for removing that hard heart of mine," said Benjamin.


The twelve steps are a schooling in the nature of humility from the moment we say "yes, I am incapable of altering those patterns that cause such violence" through uncompromising self-scrutiny to this raising of the hands in supplication.


Step Seven prays from the knowledge that for all our self-examination, we will never fully see ourselves though we are fully seen. We will see more clearly after our hearts are changed, but to be human is to be born with a measure of blindness. Like Benjamin, we do not genuinely know what impedes our relationship with God and the world. We must concede the ragged heart to a wisdom quite beyond what we will ever understand.


Benjamin’s story belongs to all of us who live on the fruit of our countries’ violence. Our hearts have been likewise hardened by what has been routinely done in our name. Can we locate the cancer of cruelty in our lived lives? Or does it take the guise of indifference? Or do we just rely on people like Benjamin to enact the cruelty that sustains an unmanageable culture of addiction? You may discern a vague answer to these questions, the outline of a hardened heart that is the only heart we know, but no matter. Offer it up, as did Benjamin: I am here. Heal me. For the sake of the world.


It is here we succumb to the generosity of Spirit.

STEP EIGHT & NINE

Make a list of all persons harmed, become willing to make amends to all. And make amends to such people whenever possible except when it would injure others.


In 1989, I took part in a spiritual retreat of reconciliation between Vietnam veterans and Vietnamese people organized by the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. Monks, nuns, veterans, journalists, nurses and others who had been affected by the war spent five days together meditating.


Richard told me privately that he loved the sheer exhilaration of dropping bombs, that sometimes he and his friends would drop LSD just to marvel at the beauty of the fire below. Occasionally, he said, they’d drop a payload on no target in particular with no concern about who might be on the receiving end.


For two days, we sat in small circles telling stories. A monk of impeccable bearing, having listened to so many stories, said, "I am usually in control of my emotions, but I think I will speak now if I can." He told his story of growing up under the French occupation, the coming of the Americans, taking his vows, attending to the dead and wounded during the frequent bombings. His eyes dry, he withheld nothing of his feelings.


After a few minutes of silence, Richard spoke directly to the monk, "I have never said it: I am so sorry for what we did to your people," and broke into sobbing. The monk stood up; did a full prostration, forehead to ground before Richard; then rose and held him as he cried. "We Vietnamese also have blood on our hands," he said.


Eisenhower wrote, "Any failure [to make peace] traceable to arrogance or our lack of comprehension or readiness to sacrifice would inflict upon us grievous harm both at home and abroad." In his simple statement, "I am so sorry," Richard undid his nation’s arrogance, lack of comprehension and refusal to sacrifice.


We can now appreciate what a cramped little room this mindset of enemymaking was. The intimacy of Richard’s apology opens the door so the soul can be free to learn the craft of peacemaking. All the previous steps have led to this exquisite moment to be repeated again and again. Awareness gives way to the gesture of reconciliation.


We know the list of those we’ve harmed is endless: from the decimation of the original peoples of this land; through slavery; through the bombing of Tokyo, Dresden, Hamburg; through the brutality of our relationship with the Arab world. Yet guilt mongering and "Blame America first" is an indulgence we can’t afford. It ensnares the ethical imagination in self-righteousness and paralyzes the necessary labor of reconciliation. How can we stop the violence even as we find ways of reparation?


Every tribe will protect its parameters from enemies. It is the disease of so-called civilization to draw wealth from far-away places, seek to control markets and peoples and amplify defense so it invites war. Robinson Jeffers:


The war that we have carefully
For years provoked
Catches us unprepared, amazed
And indignant.


Currently, fifty percent of our tax dollars serves the Pentagon. One percent goes to foreign aid, two-thirds of which goes specifically to Israel and Egypt. Now that we can think outside of enemymaking, perhaps we can imagine reversing these figures.


Fifty percent of the tax dollar towards a more sustainable world. Beginning with our former enemies, de-mining the Plain of Jars in Laos, cleaning up the tons of depleted uranium in Iraq, allying ourselves with Israel to economically engage a viable Palestinian state, and so on.


Our former enemies first and foremost and then the others, not in the spirit of missionaries dispensing handouts but collaborative, grass roots work that heals the past by addressing the suffering of the present.


And the military budget? No longer inflated by imperial necessity, we have rejoined the community of nations. In a generation, it’s possible that our former enemies will defend us and protect our interests because we’re worth defending.


Inevitably some enemies will remain — the impulse to violence runs deep, and the memory of war can linger for centuries. Peacemaking is never a fait accompli. It is a culture we pass on to our children so they can pass it on to theirs.

STEP TEN

Continue to take a personal inventory and when wrong, promptly admit it.


Guido grew up big brother with two little sisters who sometimes worshipped him and sometimes resented him. Mom cleaned his room and sisters did his laundry through his teenage years while he hung out with friends. Very funny, a great storyteller, almost irresistible. Seems like he was born that way.


His first wife, Alice, on the other hand, came to think of him as a vampire. She’d been taken by his charm and his apparent sensitivity, but into their brief marriage, she realized she could barely begin speaking before he’d take off with his own opinions. He was stunned by her anger. All his life, his opinions had been received with delight.

When his second wife called him a vampire, he began to notice that she became tired and silent the more talkative he was. He was addicted to the sound of his own voice. "I was into mainlining my own monologues," he said. Admitting it again and again as the old patterns reasserted themselves, he slowly came to understand the give-and-take required in a real relationship.


Guido’s story can be translated across genders. Sort of. We’ve all met women lost in their tales of woe or what they really want to buy, oblivious to the listener. In men it’s called egotism; in women, narcissism.


The main difference is that men individually and collectively have a lot more social power than women. And that makes us far more dangerous.


The tempering of a man’s soul is a process that takes years of vigilance and self-forgiveness, listening for the efforts to reel us in, friends to reflect with on the meaning of integrity. Men who seek consciousness are healing a history thousands of years thick that is layered into our personal ignorance. The warrior’s courage here is not revealed on the battlefield but by brave and endless self-examination and the willingness to admit transgression.

Currently, the United States is mainlining its monologue about its commitment to democracy, human rights, free markets, defeating terrorism and defeating poverty with globalization — all laced with the need for an overwhelming military that will make it possible. Even our allies are becoming skeptical for they have witnessed our routine commitment to supporting dictatorial violators of human rights, manipulating market forces on behalf of our multinational corporations and a willingness to arm any violent entity that will serve our agenda.


Like Guido, there is a strange unreflective innocence to the monologue of our essential goodness. However couched in statesmanship, high seriousness and realpolitik, who can deny a certain boyishness to the rhetoric of war, even a boyish eagerness to send young men into battle, a boy’s righteous self-importance in calling peacemakers naïve, a boy’s belief that the virtues of battle can only do the soul of a country good? Writes Andre Gide, "It is easier to lead men into combat and to stir up their passions than to temper them and urge them to the patient labors of peace."


How does one temper the soul of a nation that often acts like an overly avid teenager? How does one bring into public discourse the complexities of peace and war? The heart of war may be strategic, but it’s rarely reflective. Benjamin came to the end of his rope and let go into a heart that was compassionate by virtue of being reflective. Guido was weaned of self-obsession into a reflective understanding of his own actions. Herein develops the freedom within which a peacemaker’s mind thrives and from which the creativity of peacemaking moves.

STEP ELEVEN

Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our contact with God, praying for knowledge of Divine Will and the power to be a vehicle of it.


Malcolm X went through two religious conversions that brought him further into alignment with the will of God. Imprisoned for being a cat burglar, he was approached by a minister of the Honorable Elijah Mohammed and found himself drawn to the man’s decency and clarity of presence. It took a while, though, to find the courage to give his will over to God in the traditional Muslim way. "For evil to bend to its knees, admitting its guilt, to implore the forgiveness of God is the hardest thing in the world," but he did it and his life was changed. "It was as though someone else I knew of had lived by hustling and crime."


Was Malcolm an addict? He knew drugs because he knew the streets, but his real attachment was to hatred. Sufficient to grow up poor and black in America, to know the bootheel of white policemen, to see your mother manhandled by a traveling white salesman, to look at your light brown skin and your red hair in the mirror and know in your blood you were a child of rape. The Black Muslims introduced him to the spiritual life but also gave him a theology that explained the evil of whites.


This worked well enough until his pilgrimage to Mecca where he prayed and circled the Kaaba with thousands of Muslims who were white. His heart broken once again, he surrendered his racialism to Allah and sought the door to making an alliance with whites of conscience.


The basic prayer of remembering God among Muslim people is the fatiya: washing one’s hands and face, prostrating in the direction of Mecca while whispering the first sura of the Koran to "God most gracious, most merciful." The crucial thing, an Iranian friend tells me, is to "put your forehead to the dirt because we want to be very, very small before God." Five times a day.


Remembering. To re-member — that is to re-member a self, a world that has been dis-membered; to return to wholeness.

To strive for anything less than "liberty, dignity and integrity among people and nations…would be unworthy of a free and religious people," said Eisenhower. Free, yes — free enough to celebrate the presence of fellow citizens who are not in the least religious. And yes, we are, by and large, a people committed to Spirit in all its many manifestations.


Whether you’re a Muslim waking to morning prayer, a Buddhist sitting still and watching her breath, a Pentacostal singing in tongues at a Wednesday night service, a Hindu doing puja to remove obstacles, a Catholic taking the sacrament, a Navajo offering a pinch of pollen at sunrise and recommitting to the way of Beauty, a Jew lighting the Sabbath candles or an atheist walking on the beach with a friend and pondering "the meaning of it all," we all have solitary and communal ways of returning, deepening our relationship with that center around which our life turns. The times insist that we take our different ways seriously and respectfully, to give our whole selves to the path so the mystery of peace becomes intimately familiar.


Life lived between the solace of the Presence and a world gone mad, the prayers are always the same: "Make use of me," and "Show me how," and "May I be a vehicle of your kindness."

STEP TWELVE

Having had a spiritual awakening, carry the message to the world and practice it in all one’s affairs.


Craig Scott Amundson was twenty-eight years old when he died on September 11th, leaving his wife Amber and their two small children. "For the last two years," wrote Amber, "Craig drove to his job at the Pentagon with a ‘Visualize World Peace’ bumper sticker on his car. This was not empty rhetoric or contradictory to him but part of his dream. He believed his role in the Army could further the cause of peace throughout the world."


Wracked with grief, Amber nevertheless had the presence of mind two weeks after her husband’s death to say in no uncertain terms that answering the death of innocents with the death of innocents was morally reprehensible: "To those leaders I would like to make it clear that my family and I take no comfort in your words of rage. If you choose to respond to this incomprehensible brutality by perpetuating violence against other innocent human beings, you may not do so in the name of justice for my husband. Your words of revenge only amplify our family’s suffering, deny us the dignity of remembering our loved one in a way that would have made him proud and mock his vision of America as a peacemaker in the world community."


On the day of Craig’s memorial, Amber’s sister Kelly Campbell turned on the television. It was the day America started bombing Afghanistan. "I wanted to think about Craig, but I couldn’t help but think about all the innocent lives that were about to be lost."


On behalf of Craig and her sister, Kelly joined three others who had lost loved ones on September 11th and traveled to Afghanistan to offer what they could to the victims of the American bombing. She was especially moved by a six-year-old child who had become mute with terror after a bombing raid had killed eight neighbors. "Nobody knows why the neighborhood was bombed except that it is near the Kabul airport, which they supposed was the intended target."


Returning to America, these brave men and women have called for a fund to compensate the victims of our bombing similar to the efforts to aid those who lost loved ones on September 11th.


Long before the dust at the World Trade Center began to settle and even before the dead were buried, a hallucination began gathering within which we’ve struggled to make sense of a horrible event. The addict conflates justice with revenge, makes war for oil, lies about it and manipulates public confusion to cast an aura of legitimacy to an unelected President. What is so striking about the story of Amber and Kelly, and what characterizes Step Twelve, is the lucidity and directness with which they act and think outside of the hallucination.


Americans trust this kind of common sense, know it to be solid because it relies on inarguable common humanity. To refuse to lie and to live by truth: an Afghan life is not worth less than an American life, the terror of an Afghan child should call upon the same regard as any child’s terror. Euphemisms such as "collateral damage" make our victims faceless and expendable.


Common sense. Common humanity. The common labor of healing and sustaining the world.
These twelve steps can be seen as a pilgrimage to realizing and living by the quality of mercy. "God was in this place and I did not know," says the scripture, but now we do know. This place where God is is called Mercy, and it is the eye of calm within a merciless storm. Here we have stepped outside of the predictably bloody paradigm of Us versus Them. All one’s activity has become Spirit’s opportunity to heal.


Amber wrote, "I call on our national leaders to find the courage to respond to this incomprehensible tragedy by breaking the cycle of violence." As we have seen, this cycle of violence generates from an addiction that pervades our private and public lives. In Step Twelve we join those who have marked this path for us, American to the core:
Bill Brown, brought to his knees by the extremity of the liquor; and Jim, stunned at three a.m. in his hospital bed, realizing that as ugly as he knew himself to be, that he was forgivable; Mr. Begay, having slashed his lover’s face, gives the liquor back to Coyote and gives his will over to the Great Spirit; Hannah, anguished that she had violated her son with the same rage and humiliation that had violated her as the daughter of an alcoholic; Tony, confessing the casual killing of a Vietnamese man and the long story of his life as a junkie;


Hannah, now, her bemused son alongside her as she inches towards the waters of baptism; Benjamin, astonished to have a heart that could feel compassion, offering to God the cruelty of the life he had led; Richard, who had loved the beauty of bombing Vietnam, weeping in the arms of a Vietnamese monk; Guido, so utterly in love with the sound of his voice and his quick wit learning eventually how to communicate with another human being; Malcolm X on his knees in prison and then in Mecca, giving up hatred; Amber, writing her fierce words to America in the wake of September 11th – do not kill in my husband’s name; and her sister, Kelly, tending to the children in the ruins of Kabul.


We are all familiar with the language of war. War has its own compelling logic, gods, rites of initiation, blood offerings and poetry.


September 11th has thrust the West and Islam into a looking glass epic with seductive stories of brave men and their heroic selflessness. Leaders like George Bush and Osama bin Laden share a common worldview in which
peace descends after Evil is defeated in an apocalyptic battle. Both sing the same song: God will lead our warriors to victory against the forces of darkness.


Eisenhower had a more expansive vision of human possibility:


"As one who has witnessed the horror and the lingering sadness of war —
as one who knows that another war could utterly destroy this civilization which
has been so slowly and painfully built over thousands of years — I wish I could
say tonight that a lasting peace is in sight. To all the peoples of the world, I
once more give expression to America’s prayerful and continuing aspiration:
"We pray that people of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their
great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to
enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its spiritual
blessings; that those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy
responsibilities; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn
charity; that the scourges of poverty, disease and ignorance will be made to
disappear from the earth; and that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will
come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual
respect and love."

Blessed are the peacemakers
for they shall be called
the children of God.



The meanings of our lives are embedded in circles of kin and strangers. I offer this letter to whoever will pass it from hand to hand in these desperate times.


Reproduce it, quote it, publish it, translate it as you will. It is available at www.gatheringin.com where you can sign up for its sequel Overcoming Terrorism: The Looking Glass War, to be posted by September, 2002.


The twelve step model is obviously applicable to other concerns. I encourage colleagues to adapt it to, for example, matters of gender, the Israeli/Palestinian conundrum, our war on the earth, and so on.





About the Nganga Project
All proceeds from the publication of this essay
go to the Nganga Project

Representing the work of an international peacemaking community, the Nganga Project is a hands-on, person-to-person program committed to supporting and sustaining traditional healers and their communities in Africa as well as helping to preserve these living cultures so critically endangered by poverty, inter-racial and ethnic conflict and the demands and circumstances of modern life.


In addition the project seeks to create dialogue and collaboration between practitioners of western medicine and the healing arts in North America for their mutual benefit and enlightenment.









Michael Ortiz Hill is initiated into the peacemaking
tradition of the Shona and Ndebele people of
Zimbabwe and a registered nurse at UCLA Medical
Center. He is the author of Dreaming the End of
The World (Spring, 1992) and co-author with
Augustine Kandemwa of Gathering in the Names
(Spring, 2002). He is married to the novelist and
healer Deena Metzger.