Читать книгу The Art of Waging Peace - Paul K. Chappell - Страница 9

When I left active duty in 2009, I began serving as the Peace Leadership Director for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. One responsibility I have in this new role is speaking to colleges, high schools, churches, and activist organizations around the country. During a lecture I gave at a law school in 2010, I mentioned that state-sanctioned slavery and the oppression of women had existed since the beginning of recorded history. But in the past two hundred years, humanity abolished state-sanctioned slavery on a global scale and dramatically improved women’s rights in many parts of the world. This demonstrates that positive change is possible, and that we also have the power to make a difference for the better.

After my lecture, a female student said to me, “You naively think the world is getting better, but illegal slavery still exists, and women are still oppressed in some parts of the world.”

I responded by saying, “Yes, illegal forms of slavery still exist, but if we have made progress, why can’t we continue making progress? I am not saying that our global community is completely healthy. On the contrary, our global community is like an unhealthy person who used to weigh six hundred pounds, but through diet and exercise now weighs four hundred pounds. Just as a four-hundred-pound person still has a couple hundred pounds of fat to shed before being healthy, our global community also has a couple hundred pounds of injustice to shed before achieving its full potential. The fact that a woman such as yourself is even able to attend law school—which would have been unimaginable a couple hundred years ago—and the fact that I can speak in front of you despite being part African American, is proof that positive change is possible. As American citizens and citizens of the world, you and I now have a responsibility to help our country and global community take additional steps on the path of positive change.”^*

She replied, “But how do you know your life is any better than your ancestors who were slaves? Workers in America are still oppressed and exploited, so nothing has really changed for the better. Can you honestly say that workers in America today are any better off than African American slaves two hundred years ago?”

I smiled calmly and replied, “It might seem as if nothing ever changes for the better, but have you read the personal accounts of slaves such as Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth? If you read about their experiences, you will see that I am a lot better off as a free person than they were under slavery. I am simply asking people to hold two thoughts in their head at the same time. The first thought is that we have come a long way on the journey toward peace and justice. The second thought is that we still have a long way to go.”

That conversation made me feel slightly uncomfortable, and later I reflected upon the experience to understand why. As a descendant of slaves, I always feel a little insulted when people sugarcoat the horrors of slavery by saying people are not better off today. It reminds me of the pro-slavery and pro-segregation propaganda in the South that argued slavery wasn’t that bad. Improving the living conditions of people in America and around the world is one of the most important endeavors we can be involved in, but let’s not distort the reality of what slavery was. To understand what state-sanctioned slavery truly was in America, a more accurate name for it would be “statesanctioned rape and murder upon a country’s own people.”

It was common for slave masters to rape slave women and murder rebellious slaves, and these crimes were tolerated by the legal system. Frederick Douglass, who was born in 1818 and rumored to be descended from his white master and a black slave, described his life under slavery:

My mother and I were separated when I was but an infant—before I knew her as my mother. It is a common custom, in the part of Maryland from which I ran away, to part children from their mothers at a very early age. Frequently, before the child has reached its twelfth month, its mother is taken from it, and hired out on some farm a considerable distance off, and the child is placed under the care of an old woman, too old for field labor. For what [purpose] this separation is done, I do not know, unless it be to hinder the development of the child’s affection toward its mother, and to blunt and destroy the natural affection of the mother for the child. This is the inevitable result. I never saw my mother, to know her as such, more than four or five times in my life; and each of these times was very short in duration, and at night . . .

[My master] was a cruel man, hardened by a long life of slaveholding. He would at times seem to take great pleasure in whipping a slave. I have often been awakened at the dawn of day by the most heart-rending shrieks of an own aunt of mine, whom he used to tie up to a joist, and whip upon her naked back till she was literally covered with blood. No words, no tears, no prayers, from his gory victim, seemed to move his iron heart from its bloody purpose. The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped longest. He would whip her to make her scream, and whip her to make her hush; and not until overcome by fatigue, would he cease to swing the blood-clotted cowskin. I remember the first time I ever witnessed this horrible exhibition. I was quite a child, but I well remember it . . . It was the first of a long series of such outrages, of which I was doomed to be a witness and a participant. It struck me with awful force. It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass.³

When I was growing up in Alabama, I heard people say that black slaves living two hundred years ago had better lives than the poor in America today, because slave owners kept all of their slaves well fed and properly clothed. But this is not true. In fact, many plantation slaves were kept on the verge of starvation in order to break their spirit. Frederick Douglass described how the slaves on his plantation were starved, barely clothed, and treated worse than farm animals:

It was the boast of slaveholders that their slaves enjoyed more of the physical comforts of life than the peasantry of any country in the world. My experience contradicts this . . . Children under ten years old had neither shoes, stockings, jackets, nor trousers. They had two coarse tow linen shirts per year, and when these were worn out they went naked till the next allowance day—and this was the condition of the little girls as well as of the boys . . .

[As a young child] the insufficiency of both food and clothing was a serious trial to me, especially the lack of clothing. In hottest summer and coldest winter I was kept almost in a state of nudity. My only clothing—a little coarse sackcloth or tow linen sort of shirt, scarcely reaching to my knees, was worn night and day and changed once a week. In the day time I could protect myself [from cold] by keeping on the sunny side of the house, or, in stormy weather, in the corner of the kitchen chimney. But the great difficulty was to keep warm during the night. The pigs in the pen had leaves, and the horses in the stable had straw, but the children had no beds. They lodged anywhere in the ample kitchen. I slept generally in a little closet, without even a blanket to cover me . . . My feet have been so cracked with the frost that the pen with which I am writing might be laid in the gashes.

Our cornmeal mush, which was our only regular if not all-sufficing diet, was, when sufficiently cooled from the cooking, placed in a large tray or trough. This was set down either on the floor of the kitchen, or out of doors on the ground, and the children were called like so many pigs, and like so many pigs would come, some with oyster-shells, some with pieces of shingles, but none with spoons, and literally devour the mush. He who could eat fastest got most, and he who was strongest got the best place, but few left the trough really satisfied . . . I have often been so pinched with hunger as to dispute with old “Nep,” the dog, for the crumbs which fell from the kitchen table. Many times have I followed, with eager step, the waiting-girl when she shook the tablecloth, to get the crumbs and small bones flung out for the dogs and cats . . . [During my teenage years on Thomas Auld’s plantation] so wretchedly starved were we that we were compelled to live at the expense of our neighbors, or to steal from the home larder.⁴

Commenting on the brutality that Frederick Douglass experienced before escaping from slavery, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison said:

The experience of Frederick Douglass, as a slave, was not a peculiar one; his lot was not especially a hard one; his case may be regarded as a very fair specimen of the treatment of slaves in Maryland, in which State it is conceded that they are better fed and less cruelly treated than in Georgia, Alabama, or Louisiana. Many have suffered incomparably more, while very few on the plantations have suffered less, than himself. Yet how deplorable was his situation . . . how like a brute was he treated, even by those professing to have the same mind in them that was in Christ Jesus!

[Frederick Douglass] relates two instances of murderous cruelty—in one of which a planter deliberately shot a slave belonging to a neighboring plantation, who had unintentionally gotten within his lordly domain in quest of fish; and in the other, an overseer blew out the brains of a slave who had fled to a stream of water to escape a bloody scourging. Mr. Douglass states that in neither of these instances was any thing done by way of legal arrest or judicial investigation . . .

Let it never be forgotten, that no slaveholder or overseer can be convicted of any outrage perpetrated on the person of a slave, however diabolical it may be, on the testimony of colored witnesses, whether bond or free. By the slave code, they are adjudged to be as incompetent to testify against a white man . . . Hence, there is no legal protection in fact, whatever there may be in form, for the slave population; and any amount of cruelty may be inflicted on them with impunity. Is it possible for the human mind to conceive of a more horrible state of society?⁵

Although state-sanctioned slavery has been abolished, many people in the world are still living under terrible oppression. However, it would be difficult to find a population today that suffers from the many horrors of statesanctioned slavery, where people were beaten, murdered, raped, worked relentlessly without pay, separated from their mothers as infants, bought and sold as property, and given no legal protection against these assaults. Illegal slavery still exists, but imagine if the role of American law enforcement officers was not to punish people caught with slaves, but to return their escaped slaves to them. According to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, any U.S marshal who refused to arrest a runaway slave should be heavily fined, and any person helping an escaped slave by providing food, shelter, or any form of assistance should be heavily fined and imprisoned.⁶

The fact that a descendant of slaves is able to write these words today is proof that progress does happen, yet I cannot forget about those still living under oppression. For many years, when I heard about the injustices still occurring in our world, I wanted to kill those who profit from oppression, injustice, and war. It might sound surprising to hear a peace activist admit to having violent tendencies, but violence is the reason why I began walking the road to peace.

My personality was forged in the fire of violence. I grew up in a violent household and had a traumatic upbringing, and I experienced racism as a child in Alabama. I owe my life to an ongoing spiritual transformation that is helping me heal the agony and hatred in my heart. When I use the word “spiritual,” I am not referring to a supernatural spirituality, but an intellectual, emotional, and philosophical spirituality. Spiritual change allows us to heal our psychological wounds, and when we heal these inner wounds we become more effective at healing the outer wounds of our society. If we ignore our psychological wounds and allow them to fester, they can infect and destroy our human relationships, ability to savor life, and efforts to create a better world.

Martin Luther King Jr. taught us that peaceful ends require peaceful means, and if we want to be effective at creating peace in the world, we must first strive to create peace within ourselves. According to King, the love that arises from spiritual change gives us immense power in our efforts to wage peace: “Hatred and bitterness can never cure the disease of fear; only love can do that. Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illumines it.”⁷

The art of waging peace allows us to create not just societal change, but also spiritual change. When we understand the secrets of this art, we become empowered to not only reduce the suffering in our society, but to heal the suffering within us. To explain how we can all achieve spiritual change in our lives, this book will translate the language of trauma.

Trauma has its own language and logic. Behavior that seems destructive and illogical to others can make complete sense to someone trapped in the distorted logic of trauma. When a person does not speak or understand the language of trauma, it can be difficult to comprehend why human beings are capable of doing such terrible things.

By discussing the causes and consequences of my trauma, I hope to help those who have shared similar experiences, and help those who haven’t experienced trauma to better understand its true nature. Many of the painful experiences I describe in this book are actually quite common in our society, and people suffer from these problems in varying degrees. By translating my rage and self-loathing into a language that can be understood, I will shed light on the many truths that lie hidden in the heart of darkness, where people seldom look.