THINKING FOR OURSELVES

Violent Spring

By Shea Howell

Michigan Citizen, April 22-28, 2007

Spring is usually a season for renewal. It is a season of hope and rebirth. But this spring seems to be bringing into focus the failures and follies of the dark policies that have gripped the American landscape over the last few years.

Making a mockery of the administration’s efforts to deny global warming, the most intense storm in nearly 150 years swept through the northeast last weekend, flooding homes, businesses and schools, disrupting travel and ultimately claiming at least nine lives in five states. The level of moisture in the air in late spring, combined with warmer temperatures and fierce winds, deluged the entire east coast with water.

Meanwhile, as people in the northeastern U.S. prepared for the coming storm, scientists released a troubling report documenting that the Great Lakes are warming up, more than four degrees in the last 25 years. Wind and water demanded our attention, warning us of the consequences of our continuing abuse of the Earth.

Then gun blasts killing 32 people shattered the quiet campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute, once again reminding us of how much violence stalks our daily lives. In spite of all the homeland security restrictions, red alerts, questionable arrests, and violations of rights, violence is still more likely to come to us from our classmates, our lovers, our neighbors or our coworkers than from some faraway threat. Violent, brutal force to achieve what we want or to solve our problems has become our first response to most situations.

We are painfully learning the costs and limitations of this approach to personal and political situations. The faces of the young people lost to violence on a university campus, the grief of family and friends are hauntingly like those we are losing, and those who mourn their loss, in a faraway war. The hole created in a community, in a family, in hopes for the future, are shared in Baghdad and Basra, as families grapple with the loss of those they love.

One of the hidden costs of this horrible war is that it has accentuated the American capacity for violence. It has justified the belief that shattering force is a legitimate response to human problems. And it has created a magnitude of death and destruction that has desensitized us.

Long ago, after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X spoke a bitter truth. “The chickens have come home to roost,” he said. Malcolm understood that the lines we draw to justify and contain violence are false divisions. A society that kills abroad will kill at home. A people who commit violence against one group of people will do the same against another. Malcolm understood that violence, like wind and water, is a force that cannot be ignored. Nor can it be easily contained and directed. And he understood that violence and terror were as American as apple pie.

One of the main reasons why neither the Congress nor the President can figure out how to get us out of this war is that neither is willing to look at how low we have sunk in accepting violence as normal. They cannot imagine the possibilities of peace.

Yet in many places around the country, people are finding ways in their communities and families to create new responses to tragedies. They are facing the values that have led us to this moment and imagining new ways for us to live. These small, local acts of affirmation are our best hope this spring for a future that blazes a trail toward life.

Email Shea Boggs Center,