This Means War (and Peace)

 A chapter from my book:    

The terminology of warfare is all around us. (The San Francisco Chronicle front-page headline on the day of this writing, for example, reads, “Battle looms over high court choice.”¹) The metaphor of war—one nation’s army of uniformed soldiers facing off against another’s on the battlefield—seems to apply to any and every struggle. But it is a strange kind of metaphor, considering the hazy lines containing modern warfare. Many wars are undeclared: they are covert or referred to as “military actions.” Nowadays the battlefield is everywhere, and civilians seem more often than not to be the targets.

The definition of war seems to vary from person to person, some people sticking to officially declared wars and others including occupations and other acts of aggression. Gang warfare is a fairly obvious example of something happening on our own soil which is experienced as a kind of war. So are many attacks on the working class and poor. Anything from dehumanizing immigration laws, past and present forms of slavery and exploitation, police brutality, the prison system, and police state policies, to domestic violence and child abuse can be seen this way as well.² The death, hardship, and suffering are the same, and the various categories tend to bleed into each other, one vulnerability or disaster begetting another. It is not such a stretch to think of the criminal acts of many big banks as a kind of warfare on the public and on the land—whether they are cheating people out of their home, collecting exorbitant interest rates from destitute countries, or causing terrible environmental destruction with projects they loan money to support.

Many words relating to our social problems—what I would call our state of warfare with ourselves and each other—feel sloppy and insufficient to me. War and racial hatred—or any hatred, any bigotry—intermingle. Is there a difference between what, for example, sexism, racism, classism, homophobia, or snobbery are in essence? That is, can bigotry really be defined by its target of the moment? It seems that people have a tendency to pick an object of abuse in opportunistic fashion, according to prevailing customs. What exactly is hate, and can it ever be separated from self-hate (as in the example of homophobia, or the self-hating woman or black person)? Although an urge to steal from, exploit, or eliminate others as competition does seem to be a big motivator for bad-mouthing and prejudice, I wish there were also a word to describe this emotional impulse to relate to another person as one’s inferior, regardless of personal gain. How do we refer to this need to project faults and inadequacy onto someone else? How do we address this dangerous compulsion to say, “I’m OK because you’re not”? Maybe it is more like, “I feel OK with myself now because I’ve disowned this quality which I see in you.” This does not solve any of our problems, obviously.

“War” is a word that we parcel out and remove from ourselves, though it seems to be in the very air we breathe and in the very thoughts we think. News anchors and commentators talk flippantly about every effort or struggle as being a war: against cancer, against poverty, for the Senate. The “War on Drugs” and the “War on Terror” are presented to us, at least, as traditional warfare, fought by marked, uniformed soldiers or police against an external, public enemy.³ These are indeed real wars but with real human and community targets, and devastation that ripples outward from those targets into all areas of our society.

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My experiences as a schoolteacher have helped me to appreciate the extent to which war is never a wholly external thing. It never only happens somewhere else. In time of war as well as in time of peace, there is a dynamic relationship between the world outside and the world within. We bring our own problems into war, and when it’s over we tend to take it home with us.

As a pretty sheltered middle class American, probably the closest I have come to a personal understanding of war has been in serving in the public schools under a government hostile to education in the post-NCLB years. The topic of war no longer feels abstract to me. I am lucky never to have experienced bombings, front line combat or brutal occupation. Rather, the war I experienced was a cultural one. My experience of warfare was as insidious as a military occupation. It seems to me that any teacher in the system who works in an at-risk community (somewhat like the residents of that community) knows what war feels like, though in our case the threats and torments come from the hand that feeds us, our own bosses. Many former teachers I know and respect, once they retired, pretty much stopped talking about it at all. The avoidance kind of reminds me of war refugees.

There is no doubt in my mind that the federal reforms initiated under G.W. Bush represent an unofficial War on Education, a kind of hostile corporate take-over by the corporate class of people who paid for the politicians’ campaigns. The weapons and tactics may differ, but as with the more explicit wars, the lives of countless people are being damaged, preventing a great many from contributing to their communities. There is widespread discouragement, causing more students to drop out and more teachers to leave the profession than ever (including some of the best teachers I have known.). Many of those who stayed—teachers or students—have reason to envy the ones who were able to leave.

Teaching is often described as being “on the front lines” for good reason. Besides often nasty politics in the world of education, certainly cultural warfare spills over into the school community as well. An older jazz musician from whom I took lessons once related to me with a shudder how traumatized she was as a young person teaching in a conservative community during the cultural upheaval of the Vietnam War when many were resisting the draft. We could say that she was caught in the cross fire. I certainly feel as though all of us teachers at my school (and to some extent all the members of our school’s community) were subjected to a certain kind of non-physical, yet still brutal, violence, which was part of much larger cultural clampdowns.

I have come to believe that all warfare is cultural warfare. Whatever terrible physical damage is done to people and infrastructure, there seems to be an aspect of cultural destruction, suppression, or take-over which goes along with any war effort. They say that the most insidious type of torture, trauma or abuse—the kind that does the deepest damage—is psychological. This is the kind of abuse perpetrated upon school communities, especially the ones in the neediest and most vulnerable neighborhoods. I know this both from my own experiences and from listening to many other teachers and concerned educators. I remember reading about a low-income school in Chicago which teachers said was run like a gang. Teachers whose classes had lower test scores were ordered to hide under their chairs in shame at staff meetings. Although I did not live through McCarthyism—the prime example of cultural warfare in this country—teaching has allowed me to feel an affinity with the many people working in government who were harassed with such thuggery at that time.⁴

I remember, way back when I was getting my teaching credential, hearing a combat veteran speak as a guest speaker for a required class on Urban Education. He was quiet and soft-spoken, and his words carried weight. He said that he had worked in education since leaving the service after WWII. He noted that during all those years, discussions about reforming education have always used the language of war, and have referred to the cause as a war effort. (This was true of that particular class as well.) Change in the schools is indeed conducted—by administrators, teacher trainers and others—as though they were conducting battle, and the line between what might be called progress as opposed to aggression has become blurred.

The undeclared war on education uses the usual aggressive, oversimplified language of war, presenting tactics of war as heroic acts of rescuing victims from their tyrants—which in this case are lazy, complacent middle-aged teachers. I can’t think about the so-called “Civil War” that broke out in Iraq during the U.S. occupation, which we were told was an unintended (but predictable and predicted) consequence of our aggression, without also thinking of the infighting and gangs that flared up between the teachers in my school (and sometimes between teachers and parents as well) when we were in the clutches of government reform. As in Iraq, once the infrastructure was broken and taken over by a new regime acting on behalf of its own powerful interests, old cultural differences and tensions around which people had managed to live in relative peace and civility turned into toxic oil fires.

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The policies which so effectively target childhood and learning strike me as seminal to the whole meaning of war. When I think about it, an underlying trait of war is that it separates us from our humanity and from a large enough understanding of what humanity is.

But war, in whatever form, may also serve a real purpose. Since it brings to light our human weaknesses, it also provides a powerful opportunity to learn and heal from the damage often caused not only by events, but by our own responses: our own lesser instincts which can so easily trap us. It lets us know in a clear way that change is essential, and that we need to heal.

I am starting to believe that the real difference between war and peace lies not so much in occurrences as in our attitude towards them. Perhaps warfare is an excess of resistance: fighting a foe, running away or hiding out, rationalizing or covering up one’s mistakes. Sometimes we need to resist and sometimes we do not. War to me means separation, fear, rigidity, control and domination. It is the Fight or Flight response and a threatened, closed mind. Peace for me, on the other hand, signifies connection and understanding, joy, growth, creation. It is opening both to what is true and to what is possible. War is resistance to honesty and truth; peace is openness and freedom. Both are inside us and around us every day; both, on some level at least, are choices we make.

War-making seems to require, and feed off of, a certain kind of self-seriousness (as individuals or as a group) which is as untouched by humility as by wit and irreverence. War involves superficial limitations and battle lines. Peace-making entails coming to understand life—including the whole experience of war—within a larger context. It might mean realizing that we do not always need to consider ourselves the good guys or in the right.

I am not saying that it is wrong to fight a battle, physical or otherwise, especially to defend ourselves, our people, land or cause. But we cannot live our lives that way. At some point we have to make the adjustment to a peaceful existence in order to live well with our family, friends and neighbors. Peace is not letting war have the final say, not letting it shut us down or keep us fighting or hiding forever. 

 

Peace necessitates understanding that the hope of healing—moving beyond the primal urge to fight—offers greater promise than the hope of winning the next worldly battle. Rather than perpetuating a cycle of violence, misunderstanding, and general inhumanity towards others, peace allows us to work thoughtfully for growth and change.

1 Feb. 1, 2017

2 There is a scene in the 1937 Jean Renoir film, Le Grand Illusion, in which a German officer at a WWI P.O.W. camp invites his French counterpart, a prisoner, into his comfortable office and offers him a whiskey and a fine cigar. When the French prisoner asks why he has been picked out from his friends for special treatment, the German officer replies that he can tell that the Frenchman is aristocratic like himself. He asserts that the real war is not between their two countries at all, but rather between their class and the lower classes.

3 Even the traditional wars like WWI do not seem to follow our definitions of war and peacetime. My husband and I watched Lawrence of Arabia (1962) along with the 2003 documentary about the same character, T. E. Lawrence. There is a terrifying scene in the 1962 film that reenacts an Arabian army on horseback being overpowered by Turkish artillery and air power supplied by German allies.

In the documentary we learned about the shameful Sykes-Picot Agreement made in secret between the UK and France. The agreement gave Syria to France, breaking the Brits’ promise to the Arabs that if they helped defeat Turkey (which they did with incredible bravery and sacrifice), they would be allowed self-rule. After the war was officially over, the Arabs were left out of the peace talks in Paris. Following that, the French conducted air raids over Syria in order to get the Arab citizens to leave. Officially, this bombing was not referred to as yet another act of war but as “enforcing the peace treaty” with Syrian “allies,” whom the French had betrayed.

4 The movie Julie & Julia (2009) did a great job of portraying the tenor of the times—a theme rarely addressed in movies—by showing the crass bullying that Julia Child’s husband was subjected to in his high-level position at the French embassy where he had done such important work.