Lessons for the Past Year from Rev. John Haynes Holmes

In pursuit of a master's thesis this week, I have read far more American pacifist literature of the 1940s than I ever expected to-- dwelling in particular on the work of John Haynes Holmes, the great Unitarian minister, renegade preacher of nonviolence, and social reformer. Holmes had his hand in every great left-liberal pie of the first half of the Twentieth Century, from the Social Gospel to the NAACP to the ACLU to the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Here was a man who never once deviated from the path of most resistance, proclaiming that "War is the great atrocity" even when the full heft of progressives, Popular Front-ers and fellow-travelers in the world of liberal religion was pressing down against him. I am not a true and thoroughgoing Holmesian in my ideology, but still, I can't help but feel -- especially when we look back on this year of universally-ascendent gangsterism and savagery -- that we need to hear again his lonely cry for peace.

Violence and Responsibility

The theme of this blog the past few weeks has been the importance of showing mercy, even to people who have done unconscionable things. And I suspect with regard to the particular crimes under discussion lately, this stance will seem to many readers far too lenient toward the guilty, and far too indifferent to the needs of victims. I hope I won't be read this way (if I'm ever read at all), because my hope has been to suggest a model of justice that makes both protection and support of victims and mercy toward the perpetrators central to its conduct. Even people who give me the benefit of the doubt, however, I suspect will feel on some level that such sentiments are just that -- sentimental, unfounded in any real experience of violence.

A Poem

Young People

A big bearded 20-something who
Is the loudest in the room
Is eating hummus and saying: “The oppressed demand a permanent revolution
“They must have blood!
“Kill the fascists!”
(At some point it emerges from the conversation
That he is studying for the priesthood.)

Protest

6:30 PM
The train had pulled into the Harvard Square station, and I was battling with the front edges of panic that were creeping into my brain, like fingers of smoke curling beneath a doorway. There had been a prayer in front of the station for Eric Garner and for healing. Then we had gone underground to wait here at the side of the subway tracks. A group of law students pushed past me with surgical masks over their mouths that bore the words “We can’t breathe.” Looking at the legend gave me the brief sensation that my own throat was constricting. I suddenly had to face the fact that I had no idea what was going to happen on the other end of this train ride. Any protests I had been to in the past had been carefully orchestrated, staid, and populated mostly by the usual handful of middle-aged die-hards—“Unitarians, Quakers, egg-heads and old farts,” as Jessica Mitford would say. You could have brought a picnic lunch. This was going to be something else entirely—massive crowds, civil disobedience, angry police and Boston drivers staring on. My mind began quizzing itself on a dire crescendo of “What ifs.” What if something went very wrong? What if there was a medical emergency? What if I suddenly couldn’t breathe? 

An Immigration Crisis of Conscience

My previous post on this blog stated a view I very much believe to be true: that the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants is morally equivalent to ethnic cleansing -- and therefore that President Obama's deferrals of these deportations were admirable for the same reasons that any executive action to withdraw the threat of an ethnic cleansing would be admirable. I return to the point in another post today, not because I wish to retract it-- but because I wish to be very clear about what I mean by it. Ours is a polity of such inflated rhetoric and debased references, after all, that one's eyes can easily glaze over on seeing the words "ethnic cleansing." We have cheapened our own moral coin so much that hearing that a given policy is tantamount to a crime against humanity now entirely fails to shock. What I want to make clear in this post is that I use the term "ethnic cleansing" advisedly-- and not just because I was trying to find the loudest and most abrasive synonym for: "policy I happen to disagree with."