[PAA-Discuss] FW: For the Fourth

[Lee Loe]

Charles H. thought you'd like this one. No more, I promise. Lee

In the Austin American Statesmen

Commentary
Van Haitsma: Use hard-won freedom to preserve liberty Susan Van Haitsma,
LOCAL CONTRIBUTOR

Wednesday, July 04, 2007

When I am told that wars are fought to protect our freedoms, I have to
respond that the freedoms I value most are preserved through nonviolent
action, not war.

First Amendment freedoms are protected and defended only by keeping them in
practice: speaking plainly, publishing freely, assembling publicly, living
our moral and religious values openly, and petitioning government leaders
directly.

My freedom to vote, for example, was gained by women using precisely these
means. Between the First Women's Rights Convention held in Seneca Falls,
N.Y., in 1848 and the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, thousands
of women assembled, organized, spoke, wrote, marched and petitioned the
president despite being ridiculed by the mainstream press, ignored by
lawmakers, imprisoned without just cause and subjected to beatings and
forced feedings during prison hunger strikes. These courageous heroines won
a 70-year battle without picking up a gun.

When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke about freedom, he drew from
religious teachings, the writings of earlier black philosophers, the example
of Gandhi's Indian Freedom Movement and his own experience with nonviolent
action taking place in the streets, on buses, in schools, businesses and
jail cells.

Among the enduring lessons of the U.S. civil rights movement is the
underlying truth that, as King wrote in 1963, "Immoral means cannot bring
moral ends, for the ends are pre-existent in the means." He and thousands of
others knew that if it was freedom they wanted, it was freedom they must
practice.

When four black students sat down at a Woolworth's lunch counter in
Greensboro, N.C., on Feb. 1, 1960, they were practicing freedom.  
Their action sparked a wave of sit-ins throughout the South. Many nonviolent
protesters were harassed and assaulted. Thousands were arrested.

Nonviolence wasn't just the rejection of violence; it was direct engagement
with conflict, using methods that included organization, negotiation and
what King called disciplined nonconformity.

On April 4, 1967, exactly one year before he was assassinated in Memphis,
King addressed a gathering of Clergy and Laity Concerned at the Riverside
Church in New York City. In his landmark speech, "Declaration of
Independence from the War in Vietnam," the connections that King made
between the civil rights and anti-war movements still resonate.

He said, "I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my
beloved nation. ... It grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the
North over the last three years - especially the last three summers. As I
have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men, I have told
them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I
have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my
conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent
action. But they asked - and rightfully so - what about Vietnam? They asked
if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its
problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home,
and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of
the oppressed in the ghettoes without having first spoken clearly to
thegreatest purveyor of violence in the world today - my own government. For
the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of
hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent."

King saw that problems of poverty and inequality were not only worsened by
war; they were, in part, created by it. War not only produces extrajudicial
imprisonment, torture, covert operations and surveillance of civilians, it
extracts resources necessary for life and uses them for death.

King's Riverside speech could have been made today. He presented a careful
analysis of how the United States became involved in the war, and he offered
a five-point plan for ending it, including initiating a unilateral
cease-fire and setting a date for withdrawing troops.

King said, "We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are
faced with the fierce urgency of now."

We must speak clearly about what freedom means today, answer honestly
whether war preserves liberty or erodes it, and align ourselves and our
resources with efforts that increase freedom.

Van Haitsma is active with Nonmilitary Options for Youth in Austin. =