http://www.indypendent.org/2010/09/09/plowshares-8-thirty-years-on/
By Mary Anne Muller and Anna Brown
September 9, 2010
While imprisoned after his 1967 Baltimore 4 action, Philip Berrigan,
in his Prison Journals of a Priest Revolutionary, wrote:
When a people arbitrarily decides that this planet and its riches
are to be divided unequally among equals, and that the only criterion
for the division is the amount of naked power at its disposal,
diplomacy tend to be essentially military, truth tends to be fiction,
and the world tends to become a zoo without the benefit of cages. And
war tends to be the ultimate rationality, because reason has been
bankrupted of human alternatives (5).
Post-Vietnam, the American political, economic, and militaristic
landscape described by Berrigan had worsened. The "naked power" of
the United States now included an arsenal of 30,000 nuclear warheads
and a first-strike policy. On September 9th, 1980, Berrigan and seven
others said a decisive "NO!" to nuclear madness by entering the
General Electric Re-entry Division in King of Prussia,
Pennsylvania. Along with Philip, Fr. Daniel Berrigan (his brother),
Sr. Anne Montgomery, Elmer Maas, Molly Rush, Dean Hammer, Fr. Carl
Kabat, and John Schuchardt hammered on two nose cones of Mark 12A
warheads, poured their own blood on warhead documents and order
forms, and prayed for disarmament and peace. With this act, the first
of over 75 Plowshares disarmament actions came into being. The
"Plowshares disarmament movement" is now international in scope. Many
of its activists, who understand that waging peace has its price,
have served a substantial amount of time in prison.
Art Laffin, a lifelong Plowshares activist and community member of
the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker House in Washington, DC, speaks to
what Plowshares activists hope to communicate through their actions
in his introduction to Swords Into Plowshares: A Chronology of
Plowshares Disarmament Actions:
…[there is an] underlying faith that the power of nonviolent love
can overcome the forces of violence; a reverence for the sacredness
of all life and creation; a plea for justice for victims of poverty,
the arms race and economic sanctions; and acceptance of personal
responsibility for the dismantling and physical conversion of the
weapons; and a spiritual conversion of the heart to the way of
justice and reconciliation (3).
In this same introduction, he explains why hammers and blood are or
have been used in Plowshares actions. Hammers are used to begin the
literal dismantling of weapons that rounds of "peace" talks have
failed to do. They are also used to symbolize the "building again"
process, e.g., a hammer can be used to build homes and hospitals.
Blood clearly points to the blood that is spilled so carelessly in
war. It is also an essential component of life, which points to our
need for one another and our unity as one people. In their
nonviolent actions and their acceptance of responsibility for their
actions, Plowshares activists are those who accept suffering rather
than to impose it upon other people, as is done, for example, in the
waging of armed conflict.
While commemorating thirty years of resistance to nuclear weapons at
the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant in Oak Ridge, TN, this past July, John
Schuchardt reflected upon the first days of the Plowshares 8, "We
would never be thinking about starting a [Plowshares] movement," he
said. "This was a humble, simple human action by a few people who met
and prayed and studied the scripture together, spent time together
for about nine months and, of course, talked about the practical,
logistical aspects." Daniel Berrigan, in his foreword to Swords Into
Plowshares: A Chronology of Plowshares Disarmament Actions, writes of
how community members struggled to name themselves and their action:
We were locked in a dilemma, eight of us, as summer tipped into the
fall of 1980. We had met for months of prayer and discussion. But try
as we might, one matter escaped us. What to name our newborn resolve
(or better, our not-quite born resolve?)
… According to our Bible, the 'name' must go beyond itself, mean
something, connect. It must evoke a tradition, a vocation, a task in
the world a gift (even a wildly difficult one!). It must hint at
community desire, passion, hands-on conscience…
What most Americans took horridly for granted as 'normal' nuclear
weapons studding the earth like the sores of Job, the Pentagon
squatting monstrously on the land, brooding, hatching its hellish
eggs, its invasions, bombings (add in the year 2002 a plague of
depleted uranium, sanctions throttling the Iraqi children). Quite
simply, these could not be taken as 'normal' acts of a civilized people…
We knew it in our bones. That as yet unnamed 'name' of our action
must echo the primordial nay.
On that late summer day, 1980, a momentous breakthrough occurred. It
came as I recall, through Molly Rush, grandmother [and] founder of
the Thomas Merton Center in Pittsburgh. At her suggestion, we opened
our Bibles and took a close look at Isaiah 2: 'They shall beat their
swords into plowshares' … (ix-x).
Sr. Anne Montgomery, who at 83 years of age has recently been
indicted for her participation in the 2009 Disarm Now action, her
sixth Plowshares action, writes beautifully of the communal process
that helps one to prepare for such an action. In "Divine Obedience,"
a chapter included in the book, Swords Into Plowshares: Nonviolent
Direct Action for Disarmament, she notes:
…we begin our process with community prayers, reflection, and
decision making; we try to reach a harmony, deeper than differences
in philosophy and style, that will maintain our spirit through the
trial and prison processes, which often require reaching consensus
under difficult conditions. To make our prayer and action one, to
reach out to the 'other' in a personal way, requires that we
emphasize depth and relationship rather than numbers and high-powered
organization … In such communities we can learn the true meaning of
'conspiracy': 'breathing together' the Spirit of life and beige
formed by it into people faithful to the covenant of love the law
written in our hearts (27-28).
When Molly Rush walked into the GE nuclear weapons plant in September
of 1980, she hammered on a warhead nose cone and "put a hole in one
and a dent in another. And, I thought, these things are as vulnerable
as we are, and we can undo what has been done. That was an amazing
moment." For thirty years now, Plowshares activists have refused to
accept the "nuclear way of life," a way of life that demands
trillions of dollars and, potentially, millions of lives. With
courage and conviction, daring and imagination, love and patience,
they have risked everything to say, quite clearly, "another way of
life is possible. We can undo what has been done."
This article originally appeared on WagingNonviolence.org.
http://wagingnonviolence.org/2010/09/the-plowshares-8-thirty-years-on/
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