Perspectives from readers

I came to the Mennonite church late. I was 51. I loved the church’s emphasis on simplicity and service.

Pacifism was harder. It wasn’t a matter of fealty to my father, an army sergeant in World War II. He was no glorifier of war. He was wrecked by it. “When he left for Europe, he was a sweet boy,” my mother says. “When he came back, he was a hard man.”

Rather, pacifism was hard because, reason told me, one well-placed bullet in Hitler’s head around 1935 might have made a difference to 6 million Jews—plus many warriors and civilian bystanders. (Think Hiroshima and Nagasaki.)

But I’ve changed. Already 64, I’ve spent a lifetime—except for a brief spell between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the first (failed) attack on the World Trade Center—as a citizen of a nation at war, sometimes cold, sometimes hot, never just right, a nation menaced by enemies, real or imagined. I’m sick and tired of it. Sick and tired of all violence.

I’ll forgo the moral problems invoked by war. You all know those.

Let me be businesslike instead: The cost-benefit ratio of killing people, to be brutally frank and frankly brutal, has declined sharply. One well-placed bullet in one sociopathic skull in 1935 might have saved millions of lives. Today we spend mountains of dough stalking phantoms in mountain caves.

What do we get for the bucks? Little bang. At best, the result is a nonresult. Goshen or Newton don’t get nuked.

In the April issue, the editor asked why Mennonites aren’t resisting the current war and posited five reasons.

The reasons I don’t see on his list are these.

1. The young don’t have a personal stake in war. War is executed by professional soldiers recruited from neighborhoods unfrequented by most people reading this. Protest against Vietnam came about because the young, even the sons of city council members, had some skin in the game. Most of today’s young people don’t.

2. People don’t think they can do a thing about war. I have been alive for wars or military actions in Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Iraq (twice), not to mention the more psychologically corrosive Cold War and dread of Al Queda demons. But what can I do? Or you? Or you?

I want to suggest an event. Pure whimsy, this. It’s inspired by the Tea Party stuff. Whatever else you think about the partiers, they’re leveraging their message through media.

We need an alternative tea party, one that says taxation and big government aren’t the problems.

A sense of powerlessness is the problem, the chasm between our leaders and us.

My fantasy for this group is a made-for-TV, You Tube-worthy event called “Walk for a Change.” Somebody young starts walking toward Washington, D.C. Then somebody else joins that person. Then more somebodies. Old gaffers, even. The unemployed. Even some tea partiers. We’re all walking for a change that empowers more of us to feel connected to leaders. Even if we have to rewrite the Constitution and change the electoral system to achieve that.

Can’t you just see it? The flyovers by helicopters of the ever-enlarging crowds trudging east, permitting broadcast on the nightly news?

The systemic change we seek will allow us to dislodge leaders who think they own their elected positions because, well, they just about do, thanks to a toxic blend of well-heeled special interests and an enervated electorate.

The walkers all talk to each other, left wing and right, and find out what understandings they share about the problem, even if they disagree on solutions. In Washington, they sit outside the White House and keep talking until they arrive, by a consensus decision-making process, in good old Mennonite fashion, at a set of measures designed to up the impact of nonpoliticians on government decision-making and dilute the impact of money.

Even if this involves rewriting the Constitution. Even if it peels 10,000 points off the Dow. Even, that is, if it turns my Golden Years to Leaden Ones.

Mennonites who don’t stand up for peace may be absenting themselves from the debate because they feel their words and deeds won’t matter.

But a sense of power is like an unused muscle. It atrophies if it’s not exercised. Exercise demands engagement, a willingness to strain after a result. That straining after results demands vision. So Mennonite resistance to war must begin with vision.

If you don’t like “Walk for a Change,” then convene a group to cook up a vision you do like. Turn off the TV. Do it today.

Roger Martin is a member of Peace Mennonite Church in Lawrence, Kan.