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By George Grattan ’91
 In 1990-91, leading up
to and during the first Gulf War, I was in my final year
at Holy Cross and fortunate
enough to be a co-coordinator of the Holy Cross Pax Christi
group, along with Ann Cahill ’91. During the long autumn
prelude to that war, Pax Christi, under the guidance of Chaplain
Kim McElaney, provided a valuable forum for its members to
grapple with the moral issues raised by invasions, sanctions
and warfare, allowing us to attempt to ground our response
to such matters in the traditions of Catholic thought on
peace and conflict.
The group decided that
one of our many responses to the war would be a “teach-in” for the College
community. We wanted to shut down the school for a day to
hold this event, and Ann and I went to the office of then-President,
Rev. John E. Brooks, S.J., to discuss the idea. (We weren’t
your typical college anti-war protestors showing up at a
president’s office, though: we made an appointment,
wore our “interview” clothes, and brought no sleeping
bags. Not everyone in the group was happy with such an “Establishment” approach,
as I recall, and I’m still not sure who was right.)
Fr. Brooks supported
the idea of a comprehensive teach-in, provided all sides
were represented and that intellectual
and theological rigor were central to our planning. But he
was also quite clear that no classes would be cancelled.
He made a persuasive case—one I find myself trying to
impress upon my own students now, on occasion—that the
daily intellectual and spiritual tasks of a Jesuit liberal
arts education are the last things one should jettison in
an attempt to confront the central moral issues of the day,
and that any other actions be a complement to, not a replacement
of, regular classroom instruction. Ann and I agreed, somewhat
reluctantly, and Pax Christi began planning a daylong event
eventually held on a Saturday with good attendance, informative
panels, and spirited discussion and prayer from a wide range
of participants in the College community. For good, and for
some smaller ills, I think, it was not your mother’s
protest.
I’ve been thinking often about those months
lately, with the disquieting sense of déjà vu
I’m sure many have felt, whatever their views on the
current war. I remember writing my conscientious objector
letter and mailing a copy to myself to have it “officially” dated
via the postal stamp—Jan. 14, 1991, two days before
Allied bombings began—and I still have that sealed envelope
and ponder its weight and possible failings. (I realized
with a shock recently that the moral clarity of that earlier
conflict is thrown into starker relief by the current one.)
I remember the willing, gracious, honest, and vital contributions
of ROTC faculty and students to the teach-in, despite the
fact that it was being organized by “peace activists”—a
lesson that has stayed with me to the present day. I remember
the late Professor Maurizio Vannicelli insisting, as was
his wont, that we remain true to our purported intellectual
aims for the day, making sure that the speakers and panels
we assembled would be substantive, challenging and balanced.
I remember the Mass in St. Joseph Memorial Chapel the night
the bombs began to fall, more crowded than I had seen it
since the Mass of the Holy Sprit as a first-year student,
or than I would again until Baccalaureate Mass. I remember
attending rallies and marches on campus and in Worcester
and Boston. Most of all, I remember sitting with my roommates
in front of the television night after night (discovering
CNN along with everyone else), watching the world change
and not knowing what, if anything, I should do about it—or
what I could.
Thinking through all
of this lately, and watching current events unfold with
the crushing, context-free immediacy
of 24/7 media coverage that makes Bernie Shaw’s 1991
radio dispatches seem like things transmitted by Western
Union in comparison, I’ve found myself wondering how
current Holy Cross Pax Christi students are grappling with
these events, and the questions they raise. While teaching
at Holy Cross as a visiting instructor in September of 2001,
I experienced the great blessing of being on campus on the
11th. I was able to attend the Mass at noon—again so
very, very crowded, but so much more raw and immediate—and
was able to watch events unfold in D.C. and Manhattan and
Shanksville while gathered with colleagues and students around
a television in the Maurizio Vannicelli Seminar Room. (The
very room, of course, where we’d met over a decade before.
As a teacher of literature, I’m generally a fan of symmetry
and parallel structure—but this was too much. Vannicelli
himself would have found it mawkish, I’m sure.)
In that afternoon’s class, on that painfully
beautiful day, we sat outside and talked about the events
that threatened to overwhelm us, and then we did some work
on our assigned readings, however disconnected they seemed—and
I remembered Fr. Brooks. My students’ composure, empathy
and thoughtfulness astounded me—even that day they struggled
to find their own best selves, and I’ve seen students
trying to do so in other contexts during the other semester
I’ve taught at the College. Truly, these are young women
and men trying their best to determine what the world most
needs of them and what they can best do in response to that
need.
Thinking particularly,
now, of the Pax Christi group and what leadership challenges
they face in such times,
I sent them the letter on the following pages, invoking the
rights of nostalgia and presumption granted to all aging
college “radicals,” even though I was never a very
good one of those myself.
March 25, 2003
Dear Holy Cross Pax Christi Members,
You are, each and every one of you, extraordinary.
In an age and in a culture that encourage you to think of
little more than the next kegger, the next Eco-Acc exam,
the law school application, or the new DVD player—all
good and worthy things in context—you’ve chosen,
by your involvement in Pax Christi and in other ways, to
grapple with weightier matters, to struggle to find paths
to lives of substance in a world of ephemera. While some
of you may well feel a sense of great despair in these days
of a war that you worked and prayed so deeply to prevent,
I want you to remind yourselves that what you have done—what
you will continue to do—makes a difference. In accordance
with one of the best traits of the Jesuit tradition, you’ve
attempted to live in recognition of the idea that ideas themselves
have consequences, that matters of the heart matter,
that faith calls us to reflect and to act.
I hope you know that many of us in the wider world beyond
your campus take great strength from you and those like you
engaged in a deeply thoughtful way with questions of peace
and justice. The war has indeed come, but you remind us all
that true Peace is greater than any one war, however horrible,
and however much we must work against its particular wounds.
Your continued commitment to Peace as a tenet of Faith and
as a practice of the thoughtful life allows us all to transcend—thank
you.
And now the bad news: that you have chosen to engage your
faith so directly in your attempts to find a way to live
peace in a world that lives violence means that you’ve
accepted a tremendous burden. And, perhaps, that burden is
made even heavier because of your age: it’s a terrible
cruelty, but the world expects so much of its young. We send
them to fight our wars and to construct our peace. I’m
so glad to know that Pax Christi continues to thrive at Holy
Cross because I so deeply need to know that there are young
adults like yourselves, with all of your energy and potential
and brilliance, ready to hold the rest of us to account.
And we need that now, more than at any other time, perhaps,
in the last 30 years. I only ask that you continue to hold
yourselves to account as well, as I know Pax Christi asks
all of its members to do through careful prayer, reflection
and discussion.
As I observe and participate with many of those who gather
to protest the war, I am saddened to see them too often standing merely as “protestors”—that
is, merely opposed to something—rather than in demonstration
of something else, some other way. I’m angered, actually,
by the reductive simplicity I see on too many signs and hear
in too many chants—and sense welling in my own heart—from “No
Blood for Oil” to “Bomb Bush” to things even
more outrageous and violent in spirit. I’m dismayed
by how many people I see treating these marches as days off
from work or school, opportunities to engage in a little
anarchic behavior, moments to solidify their counter-culture
credentials. For far too many people, Iraq and Iraqis have
become invisible—these marches and rallies become about
resistance to a single president, not about providing a larger
witness to suffering and a broader insistence that the world
not turn away from it.
I’m sure you’re as hurt and as outraged as I by
the suggestions (rife throughout the media) that one cannot
oppose this war and yet care for and support American troops—a
binary we know to be false. I hope that you reject
the other easy binaries at hand in these days as well.
Hard as it may be for those of us who oppose this war to
conceive, there are those who are in favor of it for commendable,
even noble, reasons—even if their reasoning itself has
some ultimate flaw. It’s not that things such as oil
revenues and the will to unilateral power don’t play
significant roles, it’s that they’re caught up
with genuine, even loving, concerns for American safety,
for Iraqi human rights, for the promise democracy offers
to those who’ve never been promised anything. History
may well show us that this war came about because of a tragically
naive and evangelical idealism as much as because of anything
else, that its timing and methods may be more important flaws
than its nobler aims, which means we need to be careful about
performing our own reduction of the world into Good Guys
and Bad Guys. There’s too much at stake to do otherwise.
Consider, too, that the morality of war—such as it
ever is—gets even more complex once fighting has begun,
as it has now. Calling merely for American and British troops
to cease their activities as if conditions of life and death
had not already been changed by their actions may well be
equivalent to calling for chaos and more suffering for Iraqi
civilians. We need to find our way through simplistic opposition
and toward ideas for a safe and just cease fire or surrender,
for a focus on swift and substantive humanitarian action,
for a recommitment to the world community in search of justice.
We need to work for, essentially, all the things our idealists
have promised us this war is for: the good of the Iraqi people,
the security of American citizens, the safeguarding of tens
or hundreds of thousands of people from future devastation.
Groups like Pax Christi can hold the war’s advocates
and planners accountable in the weeks, months, and years
ahead, can call them into accordance with their own best
selves by shaping the peace that must follow this
conflict and ensuring its stability. We need to be willing,
then, to be proved wrong. More so, we need to work
to make sure that happens—we’ll stop what’s
wrong about this war by making sure, with the help of God’s
grace, that all that could possibly be “right” about
it comes to pass. Seek partners, not opponents.
What a radical possibility, then, presents itself! To be for something,
to recognize that saying “No!” to injustice and
war is necessary, but that it is also ultimately an incomplete
gesture on the way to saying “Yes!” to justice
and peace. Seek ways to say “Yes,” even in the
face of suffering—especially then. Christ teaches us
this, as do Gandhi and Dr. King. It’s a terrifying idea—I’ve
never been fully up to it, myself, and am probably less so
now than ever—but the history of resistance to injustice,
from Dorothy Day to Nelson Mandela to Aung San Suu Kyi and
countless others, shows us how saying “Yes” to
the world’s pain is the only thing that ever truly transforms
it.
Imagine the impact of a demonstration that was in
favor of things, a “smart demonstration” to match
the so-called “smart bombs.” Imagine calling for
the United States to work more closely with the International
Red Cross and Red Crescent and Arab neighbor states to secure
and sustain humanitarian aid to Iraq as soon as possible.
Imagine calling upon the media and the military to keep themselves
rigorously honest in their reports of civilian and military
casualties, to resist the allure of propaganda. Imagine calling
for the United States to join the International Criminal
Court with a specific eye toward vigorous prosecution of
war crimes in this and other conflicts. Imagine calling for
Congress to protect and even increase the benefits paid to
veterans and their families (the current Bush budget proposal
seeks to cut $14 billion from veteran programs even
as our military women and men are dying, killing, being injured
and injuring in service to his policies). (Think about the
effect of a war “protester” carrying a sign that
said “Bring Our Troops Home Soon—And Pay Them a
Fair Wage?” Talk about breaking down assumptions and
binaries …) Imagine calling for transparent and accountable
structures of transition in post-war Iraq. Imagine calling
for an earnest push to a just two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict that lurks just behind the words of every conversation
about this war in the Arab and Muslim worlds.
Take yourselves seriously. If you want to participate in
civil disobedience after careful thought and prayer (it’s
a highly individual choice with life-changing potential),
don’t make your actions frivolous or pointlessly disruptive.
Don’t endanger others, even indirectly—that’s
asking them to pay the price you must be willing to pay,
and it recreates the abuse of power you seek to combat. Closing
down a bridge or a road because you can, consequences be
dammed, is perilously close to the mindset that unilaterally
wages a dubious war because it can, consequences be dammed.
Rosa Parks and the lunch-counter demonstrators of the civil
rights movement sat down in the direct space of the injustice
they sought to combat—they didn’t prevent anyone
else from sitting, but forced them, with dignity and respect,
to bear witness to injustice in action. The marchers in Selma
and Montgomery risked their own lives, their own jobs, and
their own health in direct response to injustice. They did
it, too, in their best clothes—because they knew they
were doing something that required ceremony and respect.
Can you imagine, again, the effect of an anti-war demonstration
with thousands of people dressed the way they’d dress
for a job interview, for church, for a wedding, for a funeral—for
any of the other occasions of life and death we routinely
demonstrate our respect for through our demeanor and appearance?
Take yourselves seriously. Take everyone seriously. That’s
Peace.
Okay—lecture over. My apologies for going on so long
and for sounding like such an old grouch. Again, you have
my deepest thanks and my deepest admiration for the work
you do. The rolling fast you’ve organized for the duration
of the war is a powerful witness and entrance into solidarity
and mindfulness. We’re in a time of perilous questions.
The College—and others—will be looking for answers.
You’re well poised to be a vital part of that conversation.
Shalom, Peace, Salaam,
George Grattan ’91
George Grattan is finishing his Ph.D. in English at
Boston College and is a consultant to the Urban Ecology
Institute in Boston. He has taught courses in literature,
American studies and environmental studies at Holy Cross
and at Boston College.
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