It has not been a good year to be a peacenik. Consider the story I heard from Connecticut state representative Jessie Stratton, who was active in SANE and the FREEZE before becoming the first Democrat ever to represent her district. During the gulf crisis, a friend of hers who’s a small-town volunteer fireman and ambulance worker “happened to be in the ambulance with a 55-year-old blue-collar guy whose son had recently joined the Army. He was worried that his son might go to the Middle East. He was sick about it. He hung his head over the steering wheel in anguish. Was this what he had wanted for his son? What would be the purpose of it? There was this incredible searching.
It was, and they were. When U.S. casualties turned out to be light, the “No Blood for Oil” slogan lost whatever punch it had had, and the peace movement was left with a Herculean task: convincing the U.S. public that a dead Iraqi weighs just as heavily in the scales of justice as a dead American.
It hasn’t been a good half century to be a peacenik, for that matter. Desert Storm and its opposition simply repeated recent history (on fast forward) for at least the fifth time since World War II. The “scientists’ movement” against the atomic bomb (1945-1950) gradually expired in cold-war hysteria and McCarthyism. The test-ban movement (1957-1963), sparked by fear of fallout, vanished quickly after Kennedy and Khrushchev signed an atmospheric-test-ban treaty in 1963, even though the treaty merely drove weapons tests underground without slowing the accumulation of nuclear overkill. The anti-Vietnam-war movement (1966-1971) drove one president out of office and set limits on the war-making options of his successor, but eventually foundered as a result of its own sectarian excesses and Nixon’s Vietnamization scheme. The push for a nuclear freeze (1980-1985) captured an unprecedented ground swell of support and put more pressure on the Reagan administration than most of its other opponents, but could find no satisfactory political outlet.
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Whatever NPR did, American Public Radio is still one-sided. APR began its July 24 Marketplace with a glib single-source story claiming that there was never any “peace dividend” available after the cold war, only a “peace deficit” due to closing military bases and weapons factories. The report did not mention the possibility of converting plants to civilian production or how tax money formerly spent on military goods might be redirected. Marketplace may have been guilty only of lazy reporting, but the program is funded by a major defense contractor, General Electric. With enemies like that, the peace movement will need all the friends it can get.
There are three ways one could answer this question. The movement needs more strategy. It needs more morality. Or it doesn’t matter: no peace movement inside a major world power can hope to be more than a gadfly minority, regardless of its approach. (We can duck this third point, since even if it’s true the gadfly will still want to make the best possible choice between answers one and two.)
As a strategy, this does have some good points. The connections are newsy and easy to make, even though they rarely air in prime time. David Boyd, administrator of Unity House on South Vincennes and cochair of the Chicago-area Coalition for New Priorities, says, “We have 92 percent less affordable-housing money in Chicago than we had in 1980–and people wonder why there are homeless.” And Illinois SANE/FREEZE executive director Kevin Martin adds, “Did all those states with budget crises this summer just happen to get poor and dumb simultaneously? No. That’s ten years of increased military spending, domestic cuts, and tax cuts for the rich coming home to roost. People are furious about school closings and CTA fare increases. They’re ripe for our message. It’s up to us to make these connections clear.”
