Saturday, February 22, 2003

Moral Choices I am writing this on Saturday in New Hampshire, watching more snow fall outside our window, on top of the three feet already on the ground.  Yesterday we had some friends up to go cross country skiing in the woods around our house.   This place, a second house for us, is a real retreat.  It is quiet in rural New Hampshire, and even quieter in the woods.  The silence never fails to amaze and inspire me.  At home in Lexington, even in a suburb, noise is a constant presence.  There are airplanes far overhead, the distant hum of highway traffic 24 hours a day, sharper nearby traffic noises, an occasional siren—sometimes the sound of a radio or TV.  It is never truly silent.   In the woods, there is no false sound.  You can listen intently to the silence for long minutes, and you will hear the swish of snow falling from a branch, the soft crackle of snow flakes hitting a tree, the occasional scolding of a red squirrel if you get to close to her tree.  There is no traffic three miles up our dirt road, no planes, no house noises.    Sometimes you can hear shots during hunting season.  During the week, you can hear logging operations, if some one is working within a few miles of you.  Sometimes there are dogs barking, or at night, occasionally coyotes howling.  But the essence of the woods is silence.   I needed the silent day to rest and recover.  The psychological pressure of the impending war is hard to take.  No matter how strong or principled our feelings, we appear powerless to stop the coming killing.   Politically, I know we are having some effect.  But more importantly, I want to have a moral effect.  Moral choices mean action.  Do or Not Do, as the Buddhists might say.   Our local Boston area planning group has come up with a plan to stand out for peace along the entire length of Massachusetts avenue (over ten miles), creating an unbroken line stretching from Dorchester and Roxbury and the back bay in Boston, through Cambridge, Arlington, all the way to Lexington—kind of a modern Paul Revere ride.   The plan is to do this March 15th.    Why is this appealing?  Because every single person who comes out that Saturday morning to stand along Mass. Ave for a couple of hours is making a moral choice.   Just as people did who went to New York, they are saying I will take action to stop this war, it will not happen in my name.   Our duty as organizers is to create public space in which to express moral choices.   Virtually our entire society is organized around the degradation of the individual.  People are treated as demographic categories, as consumers inhabiting some particular marketing niche, as fodder for profit.  When Nike or Ford advertise, they try to sell an ersatz feeling of power.  The message is buy our product and achieve a sense of connection, power, completeness.  But they are selling a lie because the feeling of connection, power and completeness, the real thing, comes from a person’s actions, not from whom they obey, nor from  multiple choice consumption tests.   Politicians, both democratic and republican, and sellers of products, all want to reduce us to a demographic.  Thus, Bush goes out of his way to say that he accepts the existence of the “protest” demographic, just as he accepts a “poverty” demographic, or a Catholic working woman demographic.  Of course, he does not expect votes or support from the “protest” demographic, or from the “poverty” demographic, so he can safely marginalize them.   But, what is powerful about what we are doing, experiencing, feeling as we agitate against the disaster of the Iraqi war, is that we are making a moral choice—ourselves, for what we believe, for who we are.  When people come out and join a demonstration, a vigil, any public action, they are reclaiming their individuality, their freedom, their right to be more than passive consumers and fodder for profit.   If this happened in a mass way, our country would be transformed.  It has happened in the past at particular times in our history.  It happened during the civil war, when the fight for abolition of slavery finally captured the public spirit of the North.  It happened during the civil rights movement, when an activist plurality forced civil rights into our national consciousness and into our laws.   I hope the experience of awakening can be transformed into a movement beyond the Iraqi war, to reclaim democracy and with it ourselves, our sense of collective action, and our sense of public purpose.  11:23:40 PM   comment []

© Copyright 2003 Toby Sackton. Last update: 3/3/2003; 11:24:21 PM.