Editor's Introduction: Shelley Douglass and her husband Jim Douglass were among the co-founders of Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action, which purchased 3.8 acres bordering Bangor’s Trident nuclear submarine base in 1977. As members of the Pacific Life Community, founded in 1975, they began a campaign of nonviolently resisting the Trident nuclear weapons system. They were inspired by Robert Aldridge’s resignation as a missile designer for Lockheed-Martin (the manufacturer of the Trident submarine launched ballistic missile) following a crisis of conscience as he recognized the first-strike capability and accuracy of the Trident missiles. The Douglasses currently live at Mary’s House Catholic Worker in Birmingham, Alabama, offering hospitality to homeless families and acting for nonviolence and peace.
As we approach the Fourth of July holiday, Shelley offers us a reflection inviting us to nurture our nonviolent heart, and discover (and celebrate) our interdependence. Happy Interdependence Day to all.
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The Butterfly and the Submarine
By Shelley Douglass
This morning I’ve been remembering the beginning of the
campaign against Trident submarines in the Pacific Northwest of the USA. Can it really be almost 40 years ago? Such a raggedy band we were, twenty or so
activists, burned out after our work against the war in Vietnam, not wanting
another issue to address – and challenged by Bob Aldridge, who had helped to
design the Trident missile. Bob had left
his job because he could no longer in conscience help build Trident. It was his analysis of the arms race that
informed us, but it was his moral action that inspired us.
By the July 4th weekend in 1976, we had done
months of research, self-education, and public speaking. We had formed a small community, which we
called Pacific Life Community. Our
commitment was to learn how to live nonviolently, with the campaign against
Trident as the political arm of that commitment. We had all suffered from the personal
violence of our own activism – our marriages had suffered, our frantic activity
had drained us. We had all been inspired
by some of the people who were on the other side of the issue – like the Air
Force men who asked us to raise the issue of targeting civilians during the
bombing in Vietnam. We wanted to
struggle against our own complicity in violence at all levels, and to emphasize
that everyone is part of the problem and part of the solution – that we can
only live, or perish, as one.
The Trident issue made obvious what is deeply true: none of us are actually independent. Trident is home ported at Bangor Washington.
To cruise the oceans it needs to leave the Strait of Juan de Fuca through
Canadian waters, returning on the US side of the border. The Trident system is a product of years of
research and effort that escaped our notice as peace people living within miles
of the proposed base. It was a Trident
missile designer who raised the issue for us all. Trident cruises the Pacific, the same ocean
used for testing of nuclear weapons by the US and the French – testing which
prompted a movement for a Nuclear Free Pacific.
Deploying Trident is an international project; stopping it is also. (Since those early years of the Trident
campaign, Scotland has become a center of opposition as well, to the British
Trident.)
A very early demonstration against Trident saw an
international community gathered at Peace Arch Park, the border crossing
between the US and Canada just above Blaine, WA. We gathered from the US and the Canadian
sides of the border to celebrate INTERdependence Day during the 4th
of July weekend. Citizens of the US and Canada and perhaps other countries
began by affirming interdependence at the border, and continued by going to the
site of the base itself and reclaiming the land for all people. Of course, there were arrests and trials and
some jail time, which further raised the issue.
Interdependence: a
good thing to celebrate, especially at this time of fracture and
hostility. During the years that have
passed since the Trident campaign began, it has only become clearer that the
issues are not national but global.
Corporations and governments think globally; more and more often,
movements do, too. In this sense we’re
living into Dr. King’s vision. King’s
hope for the Poor People’s Campaign was that as poor people tied up DC calling
for legislation to end poverty, the peace movement would encircle the Pentagon
calling for peace, and then that peoples around the globe would join in similar
nonviolent blockages until global peace and justice became a possibility.
I was having a good time at morning prayer this morning
remembering those early actions of ours, and thinking that our commitment to
nonviolence as a way of life and our understanding of interdependence are both
as valid now as they were then. The
ubiquitous butterfly fluttered into my mind – you know, the one that changes
the weather in Bali by fluttering its wings in England? Interdependence is a scientific fact now
too. Life is a mystery, and so is our
linkage to each other, yet that linkage is there, strong as life.
It occurred to me that the linkage symbolized by the
butterfly, or more grossly by the Trident navigating global waters, is the
basis for the hard sayings of Jesus that we’ve been reading in church over the
last few weeks. What if not only my
actions but my thoughts affect the world, just as the butterfly’s wings
do? What if my hatred or impatience or
fear affects the “weather” in other people’s psyches? I have certainly experienced those effects in
a local way – when someone in the house is grouchy or touchy, for example,
everyone’s spirits are affected badly.
What if that’s just as true on a larger, less visible level?
As I sit thinking, it becomes obvious – ill will generates
ill will, distrust generates distrust.
Lack of respect calls forth an answering lack of respect. I see it in our political arena all the time,
as civility and reason fly out the window.
I feel it in my own heart, where I battle cynicism and hostility daily
as I read the paper or watch the news.
All too often my interior response to hostility is a mental “back atcha”
or “so’s your mama”. It doesn’t get said, but it has an interior
effect, a kind of gunk of the soul, that stays with me for hours. What if the hostility that I harbor affects
not only the people here in the house, but the web of life in the world? What if my ill will helps impel a Syrian
soldier to pull a trigger?
All of which brings me back to the spiritual disciplines
represented by morning prayer or scripture reading or examination of
conscience. Jesus wasn’t telling us to
love our enemy so that we would be nice people, or even so that our enemies
would be nice people. He was setting out
for us the very difficult way to change in the world. Those examinations of conscience that require
us to list our lies, or lack of charity, our hateful actions – perhaps they
aren’t so much intended to guide us to personal perfection as to point out to
us the ways in which we ourselves foment war and injustice. Perhaps it isn’t so much that my anomie or my
resentment hurts me (although it does), but that it hurts us all. It fosters disturbance in the delicate
balance that would be peace in the world, peace in our minds.
Gandhi told people to BE the change they wanted to see in
the world; Peter Maurin observed that if everyone would be what they wanted the
other person to be, the world would be a better place. What if we took an examination of conscience
seriously, not as a litany of our sins, not to be perfect in following rules,
but as a guideline to the ways in which we ourselves are responsible for the
evil in the world? What if we took our
own sin seriously?
The butterfly’s wing, the hateful thought, the submarine,
the hands across a border – all signs of our interdependence, which could be
our salvation.
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| Shelley & Jim (at right) with friends at the Y-12 Complex in July 2010 |
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