Quaker – Engaging Peace

A continuing series by guest author Jean Gerard

Moving to California, I married and began raising three boys. It was the time of World War II, with its nuclear atrocities that wiped out vast portions of my beloved Japan. All too soon again came the Korean “engagement.”

Finally worried and angry enough, I joined Quakers. With the strength of their comradeship and guidance, I committed to non-violent protesting of further nuclear testing and missile development.

I was a paid office manager for the Sane Nuclear Policy Committee, then later for Women’s Strike for Peace and the Nuclear Weapons Freeze movement, and finally for the American Friends (Quaker) Service Committee. My main interest has long been in world peace:

To what extent could it be taught?
What are the essential ingredients of intercultural understanding and acceptance?
What does empathy have to do with understanding differences?

It is no surprise that I have fallen in with Occupiers. I find them particularly engaging because they are trying to do what I failed to do – discover and employ the most important fundamental of peace-making – creative alternatives to violence.

I have read some, listened a lot, and thought a great deal about the works of Gene Sharp, Richard Gregg and others, and the practices of Gandhi, Mandela, Schweitzer, Havel and Walesa, the Berrigan brothers, and Catholic Worker activists.

When the recent uprisings began in the Middle East, I started reading Al Jazeera and several foreign English language sources. I recognized at last some hope for stopping the destruction of this failing world and for rehabilitating our decadent American democracy.

I see the free Internet as an aid to improving international understanding, and nonviolent revolution as a means toward a human future.

A continuing series by guest author Jean Gerard

I was raised in the early 20^th century by a conservative middle class family. My father educated himself and became a teacher of geology and geography in a large high school in Pittsburgh.

Unemployed during Great Depression — Store vacancies & unemployment during Great Depression. Photo by Dorothea Lange, in public domain.

Dependent upon coal and steel, Pittsburgh suffered from strikes, pollution, and racial and class tensions among social groups– the very rich, middle class professionals, and many immigrant poor.

Children observed or experienced discrimination every day: the Italian boy who couldn’t speak or read English; the Jewish girl with the violin and the heavy accent; the eight Catholic kids who moved in next door. “I don’t know what you see in those people!” my older sister used to say.

Thousands of “working stiffs” were slaving for next to nothing in the mines and mills, under a system that, in spite of temporary reforms here and there, would persist and eventually destroy the very idea of “liberty and justice for all” to which I swore allegiance every morning.

During the Great Depression, teachers were lucky to keep their jobs. Consequently, every Saturday my father bought large sacks of groceries and gave them away to sad-faced, lost men slouching on sidewalks.

By the time Franklin Roosevelt came on the scene, my family was split by the politics of middle-class prejudice. I came to see how changes of the New Deal improved the lives of some of my friends even while they enraged others.

Then came Hitler, screeching over radio static from Germany. His ovens turned his country (and the land of my ancestors) into a living hell. By the mid-1930s he had almost made a Communist out of me – but not quite.

I sympathized, but didn’t join any political party because I was too confused and individualistic to join anything. It never crossed my mind that I had the same instinctive fear of consequences that had kept Hitler’s people voiceless–and now again has brought most of us Americans to a state of voluntary amnesia.

I was a political coward. I refused to take responsibility for fear of risking my safety. I remained an observer with a guilty conscience.

Committed to non-violent protesting (Quaker reflections, Part 3)

Then came Hitler (Quaker reflections, Part 2)