My Personal Armistice

After such a gruesome war I wonder whose idea it was to have the armistice to end World War I begin on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the year. Did they really think the symbolism was so great that it warranted allowing eleven more hours of killing between midnight and the appointed hour? I suppose the church bells rang eleven times with the last peal’s harmonics drifting on the late fall breezes throughout Europe. Some of the oxygen and nitrogen atoms that vibrated in response to that last peal of the church bells probably reside in our Meeting House today. Of course, the armistice only related to the Western Front; the war continued elsewhere, but since we from the United States ignore what does not immediately affect us we celebrate Armistice Day as the day that World War I ended.

The War to end all Wars wasn’t very successful. One short generation later, Europe was at it again and the so-called greatest generation had a chance to show its stuff. And that war had no sooner ended than the Cold War began. Which didn’t stay all that cold in the 60s and 70s with the Viet Nam conflict. Finally the Cold War and the War on Poverty both breathed their last gasps when a new baby was born into our historical records: the War on Terror.

You might have guessed I’m not a big fan of wars.

And you might have guessed wrong. And therein lies the cause for my personal armistice. For the truth be told, I have been fascinated by wars since I was very young.

As a child I read about our revolutionary war heroes – you know the ones in Britain they would refer to as traitors and terrorists. I read through the school’s library of “We Were There” books – books that planted a youngster in exciting times: Invading the Normandy Beaches, at the Boston Tea Party, with Ethan Allan and the Green Mountain Boys stopping the British, with Jean Lafitte at New Orleans. I combined these with the Landmark series that included books about West Point, and Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox. I learned of my five greats grandfather who was a colonel in the revolutionary war. As an aide-de-camp to General Gates with good penmanship, he wrote the articles of capitulation signed by General Burgoyne at Saratoga. By Junior High, I was an avid Civil War fan as we celebrated the 100^th anniversary of the conflict.

Around 1962 my parents took us to Gettysburg and allowed me to run Pickett’s charge from Seminary Ridge to Cemetery Ridge. It was only a mile or so and marked the so-called high water mark of the Confederacy. It may have also marked the high-water mark of my uninhibited infatuation with war.

As a child I was filled with the dreams of glory and sacrifice and wondered when my turn would come. In 1965 I used my hard-earned money to purchase SSgt. Barry Sadler’s album Ballads of the Green Berets. Then sometime in High School I spent hours with a ten volume pictorial collection of the Civil War my father had. In these ten volumes, the reality of war presented itself in the black and white photographs of the dead and dying lying rank by rank felled in a charge or sprawled helter-skelter by a sunken road, or picket fence or rock outcropping. The truth of the result of bravery began to sink in and war became a two-sided beast – but still a fascinating one. The subjects I chose for history class reports were war related. For European history I wrote an analysis of the Thirty Years War which combined a series of conflicts between two religious groups and included a civil war. In this case the years were 1618-1648, the religions were Roman Catholicism and Protestant Sects and the civil war occurred in Germany. For US History I analyzed aircraft carriers and how they changed the way wars were fought.

And slowly but surely during my high school years the war in Viet Nam captured the evening news. I was a typical high school student more interested in sports, girls and colleges and yet I had become positive this war was not a just war. But the war was not the biggest concern of my life and it would not personally affect me for some time, if ever, since I would automatically obtain a 2-S deferment status by attending college. In my junior year I wrote several antiwar pieces as part of a creative writing class. One was a satire describing Caesar’s report back to Rome of his invasion of Britain and the savage’s “hit and flee” tactics, and the other described a typical American victory from the perspective of a villager as the B-52 ‘bees” defecated on her village early in the morning before anyone else had gone to the fields leaving only her alive. None of my antiwar pieces was selected for publication in the student magazine – the establishment was for the war in 1967.

I graduated from high school in 1968, the year of the Tet Offensive when the citizens of the United States first learned the war was not going as well as the Johnson Administration claimed, the same year American soldiers carried out the war atrocities of the My Lai massacre (although we didn’t learn of it until a year later.)

Away at college, I studied more and developed a nascent understanding of the economic basis of wars. At the same time one of my required courses was Army ROTC. I had been a boy scout; I knew how to march and I aced the tests which were about various weapons. Right up my alley. I got a ton of demerits for not having well-shined shoes and letting my hair touch my collar! Fortunately, the administration stepped in and told the Army they could not reduce grades based on the demerits until our junior year when ROTC became an elective. Then for my sophomore year the ROTC requirement could be traded in for physical education. I swapped war clubs for golf clubs.

By the end of my freshman year I had decided I was not only against this particular war, I was against all wars. And then what did I do? My best friend and I took a week-long driving tour of the northern Virginia Civil War battlefields. The same friend who in December 1970 had his VW bus packed to leave for Canada after his application for Conscientious Objector status had been rejected, after he had passed his physical (despite passing out when they drew blood) and his final draft notice was expected any day. In a bit of bureaucratic irony, the draft board neglected to send out his final notice by December 31^st and under the rules in play that meant he could not be drafted until they had gone through the entire 1971 list of draft-eligible men, which did not happen.

So I knew I was not alone in this crazy juxtaposition of a highly developed interested in wars and a detesting of them at the same time.

At the beginning of my sophomore year I turned in my student deferment because it was a class privilege I did not want to enjoy. I began the process of applying for Conscientious Objector status. I got the forms and started drafting answers. I was interviewed by adults (remember in those days you had to be 21 to be an adult!) including a man from church whose father had been a CO when COs were loathed by our country. I spent a lot of time framing my answers, forcing myself to develop wording for my beliefs, a task made more difficult because I had already rejected the church of my upbringing and was thirty years away from finding Unitarian Universalism.

And I tore the nearly completed papers into pieces several months later when I came to the deep understanding that although all wars were the result of failed communication and negotiations between countries, and that the war my country was in was abhorrent, some wars should be fought. I could not in good conscience apply for Conscientious Objector status with such an understanding.

Later that year the first draft lottery was instituted and I lucked into a high number, meaning I would not be drafted. For a while my non-school reading stayed away from warfare, except for books about the draft, Dave Dellinger’s Revolutionary Nonviolence and the like. But like a moth drawn to flame the history section of bookstores called to me and I found myself before I finished college reading about Barbarossa (the German-Russian conflict in World War II) and about the Normandy invasion in between reading the Pentagon Papers (published by our own Beacon Press) and Michener’s book on Kent State.

Some people feel guilty reading soft-porn or romance novels as they are now styled. When reading a book on war I felt like an apostate relative to the Peace movement. This feeling of dis-ease at the juxtaposition of these two beliefs: the current war (Viet Nam) was unjust, horribly run by a morally corrupt national government; and I must be morally corrupt to be interested in reading about past wars, let alone the current one.

In experiments on mice you can devise a trade-off between pain and pleasure such that the mouse is unable to decide which it desires more, to avoid the pain of an electrical shock, or receive the pleasure of food or water. When the experimenter has tormented the mouse and found the trade-off equilibrium, the mouse is frozen, unable to move.

We humans are so clever we can put ourselves in this same frozen position without the need for an outside power. We do this so frequently we have even developed a language for it: We are caught between a rock and a hard place; we are on the horns of a dilemma; we are halfway between here and there.

Perhaps you are wiser than I and can reconcile what I perceive to be irreconcilable. I finally decided to introduce an internal armistice between my seemingly insatiable appetite for learning about past warfare and my belief that most wars should not be fought. As with all armistices it comes with a price and with justification. The price is I know I have accepted the possibility that I can not be fully centered as long as I do not resolve this conflict. The justification is that the more I understand of the past, the better I can understand the present.

Of course that is not a new idea. George Santayana in his book The Life of Reason (1905-1906), vol. 1, Reason in Common Sense said it this way, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

So today I stand before you flawed in a fundamental way most humans are flawed: we carry within ourselves glaring inconsistencies. What shall we do with them?

Just as we continue to celebrate the flawed Armistice of eighty-nine years ago, we need to recognize and celebrate our flawed nature and set about making something good from it. In nature nothing changes without stress to the system. So too we do not change when we believe everything is hunky-dory with us. We make changes when something is bothering us.

It can be easy for us to accept the flaw and move on. This is how much of modern media represents the “I’m okay with myself” philosophy of life. We wallpaper over the cracks in our structural walls. “Out of sight, out of mind,” we say. Unfortunately for us, we can’t sell our current souls and move to a newer model. If you believe as I do that this is our one go-around on life’s wheel, you are stuck with the structure you build. If you believe in reincarnation, it is even worse since in future lives you must continue to work on the unresolved problems from earlier lives.

And as much as we may say to ourselves and others that we are “okay with that,” we are not truly okay with it. Long-term dis-ease within us eventually causes physical or mental disease. The foundation cracks grow and eventually threaten the entire edifice.

So what to do with these inconsistencies? Embrace them. It is at the annoying edges of our inconsistencies that we have our biggest growth opportunities. When I first declared my personal armistice it allowed me to continue to study about past wars without having to make further justifications to myself. But a funny thing happened on the way to the battlefield. As I would read about individual heroism, specific battles, campaigns within a war, or an overview of a war or series of wars, knowing that I had only agreed to an internal armistice, not a treaty meant I had to keep in mind the other half of my personal conundrum.

My reading turned from tales of daring-do to works from which I could gain understanding. Why did this war start? What were the communication failures? What was the real basis for the war? Was this war justified and if so why? How were individuals, armies, countries changed during the course of a war?

Nations are like people; they and we change when we are stressed in some manner. Whether we change for the better or worse is in large part based on our true moral character. When we evaluate Thomas Jefferson the areas that most intrigue us are the conflict between his ringing words for freedom and his failure to emancipate his slaves, even upon his death. In a recent C-Span survey of historians and viewers, Abraham Lincoln was selected as the #1 best president by both groups. They evaluated ten areas and Lincoln’s worst score from historians on any of the ten areas was 4^th place (International relations and Relations with Congress).

When we evaluate Abraham Lincoln our view is largely framed based on the actions he took to preserve the union of these United States. Without old Abe we wouldn’t have saved the Union; slaves would still be slaves. Though framed as a states-rights issue, the basis of our Civil War was economic.

Here are some of the actions Lincoln took in order to sustain the union. He introduced a draft because there were insufficient volunteers. He introduced an income tax (later declared unconstitutional). He issued executive orders to confiscate personal property of any person residing in a state that was in rebellion as of January 1, 1863 (we celebrate this as the Emancipation Proclamation – only after the 13^th amendment to the constitution was adopted in 1865 was slavery abolished in the nonseceding states.) He suspended habeas corpus throughout the nation, resulting in over 13,000 arrests, largely of so-called Copperheads, the “Peace Democrats;” he ignored orders by the Supreme Court Chief Justice to bring specific arrested individuals before civilian courts; the suspension of habeas corpus was deemed unconstitutional in an 1866 Supreme Court ruling that military trials in areas where the civil courts were capable of functioning were illegal.

Franklin Roosevelt was ranked #2 by the historians and #4 by the viewers. The same Roosevelt who agreed to internment camps for Japanese-Americans during World War II.

We citizens of the United States are willing to throw away the rights of our fellow humans at the drop of an act of war. We are often willing to throw away our own rights at the same time. The moral compass of our Seven Principles points us Unitarian Universalists to a different perspective. We have learned that especially in times of declared or undeclared war we must continue to be a voice for those rendered silent; to be a presence for those no longer present. We must do these things whether we believe the war is just or unjust.

Lest there should be any doubt, I believe these current wars we are undertaking to be morally bankrupt. On September 11, 2001, the company I worked for lost 295 employees over 10% of the almost 3,000 who died that day. We Americans like to keep track of body counts. We are told it gives a good measure of how successful we are. By the end of 2006, our invasion of Iraq had already cost more American lives than the attack on the Twin Towers. This year has already cost more American lives than any previous year of the war. We sure showed them.

I could give litany to historical errors we have recommitted in our invasion of Iraq, but that is not my purpose today. I am standing here in front of you, regardless of how you feel about the War on Terrorism to ask you to raise your voice with mine in protest of policies that hold enemy combatants without trial in military prisons for the duration of a war that we define in decades; at policies that rely on quasilegalistic definitions of torture to justify that which can not be morally justified; at policies that abrogate habeas corpus for enemy noncombatants.

I believe a president should generally be able to select the advisors the president wants. A week ago I wrote to my senators urging them to vote against confirmation of Michael Mukasey because of his lack of stance on waterboarding. The argument some have raised that the next nominee will be worse does not cut it anymore.

For thirty-five years I have recognized that if something positive did not arise from the tension of my self-proclaimed armistice, I would only have been fooling myself.

Perhaps if I convince one person today to write one more letter of protest against the violation of our seven principles in action it will be enough to justify my armistice. Of course two would be better…

Or maybe my reason for standing in front of you today is for one of you to understand your personal armistice a little better and based on that understanding make a change in your life that will benefit you and others. That’s the wonderful thing about this web of life’s existence of which we are a part. We are never sure what good will come from our movement in the web, but of this I am sure: if we do not try, no good will come.

James Montgomery Jackson
November 11, 2007