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Voices of Peace
Crossing The Line at Fort Benning: A Discernment Process
"The way to reform has always led through prison." Emmeline Pankhurst (1855-1928)
By Peg Morton
Posted on Nov 8, 2003 |
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Eugene, Oregon
November, 2003
On November 22 and 23, thousands of people will gather outside of the Fort Benning army base in Georgia to once again demand the closing of SOA/WHISC (Army School of the Americas, now re-named Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation). The movement to close the school continues to gather momentum as it rolls into its fourteenth year. Many thousands have gathered at Fort Benning, year after year, in a combination of festive puppet pageants, music, testimony, political analysis, and solemn procession in memory of the hundreds of thousands massacred, assassinated and tortured throughout Latin America over a period of some 50 years.
The event brings together people from Catholic sisters in their 80's, to young families, to anarchists. Several thousand have crossed the line in nonviolent civil disobedience. Over a hundred have served over a cumulative 70 years in prison. Hundreds of thousands around the country have signed letters and petitions; others have fasted; newspapers, unions, faith communities and other groups have called for its closing. Hundreds of classes and groups have studied the issue. (See end notes-ed.)
Yet, the school is still there. Massacres, political assassinations, torture and disappearances still occur, while former dictators and generals, documented perpetrators and SOA graduates have not been brought to justice.
Some raise the question: Is this movement effective? Knowing, as we now know, that there are some 200 similar U.S. military training facilities around the world, it is an important question. Yet there can be no definitive answer. The U.S. House of Representatives has come within a few votes of withdrawing funding for the school. Multi-thousands of people have become aware of this school, of the training it has given in techniques of torture, and now see that it serves as a military arm of globalization economic policies that cause poverty, violence and the destruction of the delicate eco-systems of our planet.
The movement to close the school is a movement that many of us have adopted. Many of us have spent time in Latin America, living among the poor, accompanying refugees, listening to personal stories. Our hearts have been stirred up forever. We join together in a powerful community of love, joined with courageous survivors working for justice throughout Latin America. We follow in the footsteps of Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as all the courageous people in India, in the U.S. south, who walked, sang, went to jail and were killed. We find courage, too. We move in active love, in remembrance of the massacred, in solidarity with the poor. It is not a movement of hate of the perpetrators, but it is one of firm resistance to the atrocities they have perpetrated. It is one that believes that there is a force more powerful than hate and violence.
Can we succeed in closing the school and changing the policies of our government? Yes, the school will close. However, it will be a long and difficult haul before our government chooses to change its policies and the system of corporate dominance and consumer and corporate greed that are at their root. The important thing for me, right now, is that I know that this is where I belong.
I have participated in the full range of activities that have been devised by SOA Watch—post-card campaigns and lobbying of Congress, video houseparties, swarming in the streets of Washington, DC, fasting in a nationally-coordinated fast, getting arrested at Fort Benning for "trespassing." I am a Quaker, and have long felt a leading to voluntarily risk prison. My likely sentence would be for six months. The leading has felt blocked by back surgery and continued back problems, but it has remained deep in my consciousness. A part of the leading has been the spiritual struggle for discernment.
I was originally inspired to join the SOA Watch movement in 1999, upon meeting Sister Megan Rice on a delegation to Guatemala. She came from serving a 6-month sentence in prison for crossing the line, and has since then served another 6 months. She and other friends who have gone to prison continue to inspire me. I hold a firm belief that prisoners of conscience do inspire and feed the energies of the broad movement for peace and justice, for compassion. I am in my 70's, my children grown and in a position to take this risk and to serve time in prison.
Yet the pulls not to take this risk have been strong. My supportive roles as grandparent, parent and friend, my rich community/Friends Meeting/political activities, my love of the outdoors, my fears of putting myself at the mercy of "Homeland Security," all loom large. Most of all, there is my ornery back. I fear for its deterioration, increased pain and complications.
And then, in my times of reflection, I remember sitting one November with Sister Dianna Ortiz. (See end notes-ed.) I was studying Spanish in Guatemala City in November, 1989, when this tiny Catholic sister, then in her 20's, was also in Guatemala, teaching young Mayan children literacy in the highlands. She was kidnapped from a convent, horribly tortured, with a U.S. man present through it all, and finally allowed to escape. Each November, she relives that torture. In 1999, I viewed the long columns outside the National Cathedral in Guatemala, lists of thousands of tortured, disappeared, assassinated and massacred civilians from the 30 year war, carved in stone.
Back in the early '80's, when these atrocities were at their height, the United States public was unaware. The sufferings of the Mayan people and human rights leaders in Guatemala, and in so many other countries, were invisible to us. We were unaware of the U.S. policies of support, in the name of "counterinsurgency," that fed the atrocities. Many now are aware and we have offered our solidarity in the struggles of these peoples. But what will it take from all of us to stop policies that cause such horror? Because they still continue.
Now we are becoming aware of another "invisible" population, the 2 million people in prison in the United States. As more and more people in the social justice/peace movement find their way into these prisons, they are experiencing prison and jail conditions, meeting the prisoners and hearing their stories. The other evening, two such peace prisoners, Chani Geigle-Teller and Ann Huntwork, shared some of these stories. There was the woman with diabetes and deformed feet, who moaned each night with pain because there were no proper shoes for her; women who lived in the same household with a drug trafficker, incarcerated for years, away from their children; undocumented immigrants who have lived in this country since childhood and have no connections in their countries of birth, who will be deported, dumped without resources in these countries.
I have been reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Protestant pastor and leader who was assassinated by the Nazis in the '30's. I feel powerful responses to some of his messages, as they relate to my discernment process. Commenting on Matthew, Ch. 10, he writes: "Thus the disciples are bidden lastly to think, not about their own way, their own sufferings, and of their own reward, but of the goal of their labours…" (The Cost of Discipleship, Collier Books, reprinted 1963, p. 246") And: "The object of Jesus' command is always the same—to evoke whole-hearted faith, to make us love God and our neighbor, with all our heart and soul." (Ibid, p. 252.) Queries that rise up from within, and demand my attention are: How much faith do I have? and, Who is my neighbor? I thought of the Good Samaritan story. My heart answered that those prisoners are my neighbors, and I need to listen to and perhaps tell their stories. Sister Dianna Ortiz and all the survivors in Latin America are my neighbors, calling for us to join them as partners in the struggle for healing, for a world that cares.
Finally,Thomas Kelly, in the book Testament of Devotion (Harper and Brothers, 1941), calls us in one paragraph after another, using one name after another, to return to the "Source," the "Presence," the "Seed," the "Holy Whisper." As I breathe in that Spirit, I will know what I am supposed to do, and the struggle will disappear. I am on the threshold as I prepare to leave for the East coast in a week. I will give myself complete permission to choose not to cross the line, even at the last minute.
Editor's end notes:
No.1.
For more background, visit Ms. Morton's article Back to Fort Benning and follow the links for more information.
No. 2.
"Sr. Diana Ortiz, author of the award-winning book The Blindfold's Eyes: My Journey from Torture to Truth, was honored Oct. 16 with the 2003 US Catholic Award for furthering the cause of women in the church. Ortiz, an Ursuline Sister of Mount St. Joseph, accepted the award on behalf of members of her organization, The Torture Abolition and Survivors Coalition and on behalf of all who have suffered torture. She was abducted, tortured and raped 14 years ago in Guatamala, where she was a teacher of indigenous children." –from the National Catholic reporter, Nov. 7, 2003
Copyright © 2003 by Peg Morton
This article will also appear in Friends Bulletin for its "hard copy" debute.
Visit an other conscience-informed actions and articles of and by Peg Morton at We Sang, "O May We Never Rest Content till All Are Truly One": Imaginative Nonviolent Actions Enliven Campaign to Save Human Services Budget in Oregon and follow the links.
© Copyright 2000-2004 by West By Northwest.org
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