Kathy Kelly (CommonDreams): What We Can Control

[Jack Rabbit]

From CommonDreams
Dated Monday November 29

What We Can Control
By Kathy Kelly

In the past year, several groups have asked me to facilitate retreats for people who want to further explore nonviolence. At the retreats, I ask volunteers to role-play situations likely to generate discussion about challenges people face when involved in peace activism. One of the most reliably difficult scenarios stages a spouse raising with his or her partner a decision to become a war tax refuser and stop paying federal income tax.

In one such scene, an anguished husband implored his wife to understand his reasons for stopping payment of federal income tax. "How could you do this to our children?" she asked. "And why didn't you think of this before you became a father?" The husband responded, "Honey, I just want to do something for peace," to which the wife blurted out, "At Christmas?!" The room filled with laughter. Cut! Point well taken.

Last night, after spending Thanksgiving Day with family, my mother and I groaned over TV news clips that anticipated today's shopping binge. Many progressives refuse to participate in the orgy of shopping that accompanies the Christmas season. But what about the appropriations for weaponry that are so hard to eliminate from our personal budgets? . . . .

Over and over, President Bush told Senator Kerry, "You can run, but you can't hide." It's a harsh line, a hurtful taunt, but in these harsh and hurtful times, the progressive community faces a moral imperative that won't allow us to run or hide. We can't control the US government. Millions of US people tried mightily during the past election season to assert an antiwar agenda. But antiwar progressives can't dodge the fact that more than half of the US democrats voted for Kerry over Dean. More than half the democrats voted for a man who said he would be tougher than Bush on Iraq, but that he'd pursue the warmaking more efficiently. He'd have sent more troops than Bush is sending.

Then more than half of the American people voted for Bush over Kerry.

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