By Joshua Ellis
It seems every generation is unified by a moment they never forget. For my father’s generation, it was the Kennedy assassination. For his father, the attack on Pearl Harbor. For my generation, it will be the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. An act of violence too horrible to forget.
I remember those first minutes of sadness on my way to work, listening to radio coverage of an accident. The sadness was replaced by fear as more reports came in, and by the end of the day, September 11th was written on the minds of the American people. 3038 innocent people were killed. An international landmark was destroyed. The tiny town of Shanksville, PA achieved international infamy. A people’s faith in the security of their nation was shaken.
In the year since, the United States has not been idle. The rubble is gone from “ground zero” where the World Trade Center buildings used to stand. Gone too are Afghanistan’s Taliban regime and Al-Qaida training camps. The United States and its allies have declared war on terrorism. And now, in late 2002, the United States has unveiled a new security policy, and stands poised to invade Iraq as a preemptive measure.
As someone who holds non-violence as a moral ideal, I opposed the attack on Afghanistan. This won me no friends, and lowered my esteem in the eyes of many close to me. Every time I chose to defend my position of non-violence, invariably the question was asked, “Oh yeah, well what if someone came to attack you or someone came to attack your wife? What would you do then?”
Until recently I had rehearsed, but effective answers. To the question, “what if someone attacked you?” I would respond, “believing, as I do, that what lies after this life is so much greater than what we have now, I would honestly rather die than kill someone in self-defense.”
The defense of my wife was another story, and I would answer such questions with, “Lord help me, though I know it is wrong, I’d probably kill someone before I let them harm my wife. May that day never come.”
These answers seemed to satisfy my friends, but they did not satisfy me. They seemed hypocritical. How does one justify a reckless indifference to their own life with Christianity? How does one justify, “I know it is wrong but…?” Violence seems so abhorrent and un-Christlike, but could my friends be right?
What I failed to realize was that the questions of my friends and my effective but rehearsed answers belied a common mistake: the false equivocation of non-violence and pacifism. I had always assumed that to be non-violent meant one must be a pacifist. That to avoid violence meant standing idly by, content with the knowledge that I was doing the right thing in a world full of people doing the wrong thing.
Then one day I heard an interview with educational activist Parker Palmer. Dr. Palmer is the author of such books as “The Company of Strangers”, “The Courage to Teach”, and “Let your Life Speak.” He is also a Quaker. During the interview, Dr. Palmer shared the Quaker view of non-violence. He explained that Quakers do not limit violence to physical attacks upon a person. For them, violence is the name for any act that violates the humanity of another person. Any time we say, “that person does not matter. That person is not important. That person is not worth my time or concern. That person is less-than-human to me,” we are committing an act of violence.
This may seem a simple concept, but it is a profound change from the way most people view violence. Using this as a definition of violence, I suddenly found myself guilty of violence on a daily basis. It occurred to me that I committed an act of violence against the people at work who I would blow off; the waiter I didn’t feel like tipping; entire classes of people who I considered unimportant: or rather, entire classes of people who I didn’t consider at all. Suddenly the phrase, “those people,” became one of the most violent things one can say.
Convicted of my shortcomings, but enthused like a zealot, I sought to stamp out violence in my life wherever it was found. And I made an amazing discovery: non-violence is hard work. Despite my pride at being an open-minded and non-judgemental person, every day revealed more ways I was guilty of violence against others. Slowly non-violence transformed from something I claimed to practice to something I strive for on a daily basis.
Recently I reconsidered the questions, “What if someone came to attack you? Or someone came to attack your wife?” It became clear that idly standing aside to let someone else perform whatever physical harm they desired is not an act of non-violence. It is an act of pacifism. And it is an act of violence: violence against oneself, or violence against one’s family. While I (assured of my salvation) would rather give my life than take the life of another whose heart I do not know, to refuse to defend myself disregards the value of my own life. Likewise, to feel defending my wife would be wrong disregards the value of her life, and is an act of violence against her. My answers have changed. I will defend myself and my wife.
Willing now to defend myself and my wife, the defense of our country finally made sense: it is a land filled with humans, each of whom has a value. To stand aside while we are attacked, refusing to act because the ideal of non-violence says we cannot resist, is a delusion. That is pacifism, not non-violence. And pacifism itself, taken to the extreme, is an act of violence. Is it possible to reform the dictators and terrorists of this world? Perhaps not. Perhaps the best we can do is capture and isolate them, and eliminate their ability to wreak havoc upon our people.
Every time we disregard a foreign nation as “those people,” or say “it will be easier to kill /those people/ than to reform them,” we commit one more act of violence. An act of violence like the attack on Pearl Harbor, or the murder of JFK, or the terrorist attacks of September 11th. If we refuse to see this, if we blindly engage in acts of violence against mankind, we are no better than “those people” are. And remember, there is an entire generation in Afghanistan unified by a moment they will never forget: the day bombs started falling on their country.
© 2002 Joshua Ellis