Ann Medlock on Public Radio
The Compassionate Warrior
My name is Ann and I'm a recovering pacifist.
So many friends, people with whom I've worked and marched, these good people were out there these last weeks, demonstrating against the war. I love them, but I was not with them, not in body, not in spirit.
I still abhor violence, still think there should be better ways to solve our problems. But I learned a hard lesson about the downside of pacifism, and it has stuck with me. The lesson came from my elder son, whom I raised from birth to be non-violent. No war toys, no hitting, no punch-em-out movies. He helped picket the White House when he was three. I taught him to run, not fight when he was hit up on the street for his lunch money—his watch—his bike.
But there came a day when he had something to teach me. He was a freshman at Hunter College, living at home, when he came to the breakfast table one morning with a bandaged, furious face. The night before he'd been badly cut up in a street fight that he'd plunged into to save a man set upon by thugs. 'They almost killed both of us and it's your fault!" he shouted. "I had to help that guy and I didn't know how to fight."
There are things worth fighting for and my son had found one—defending a fellow being. I agreed to karate lessons.
There is evil in the world and it isn't going away. What then must we do? Most of what was behind this war was oil, waste, greed, testosterone and jingoism.
But somewhere in that nasty morass, there was also standing up to evil—extending to strangers in peril our willingness to protect. A predator was on the loose, one with an arsenal, a stranglehold on the world's economy and a willingness to commit not only genocide, but geocide as well. I don't want anybody's sons and daughters to die so that we're all free to overheat our houses and drive too much. Or so that we can chant "U-S-A" and thump our chests. But the warrior instinct is not entirely to be sneered at or ashamed of, not by me anyway. I can see that warriors also leap into gang muggings to save the helpless. Warriors protect families from harm. Warriors liberate concentration camps and return refugees to stolen homelands. Our government couldn't honestly tell us this war was purely a rescue mission. You don't have to be a great cynic to think that if it hadn't been for economics and machismo, we'd have stayed out of it. And still... and still... I could not respond with my old automatic pacifism. It's too simple an answer, too much an invitation for the evil that persists in the world to prevail. There is a heroic, compassionate spirit in our species that sometimes must resort—when no other recourse would save the day—to violence. Accepting that spirit, I can honor the compassionate warrior, dukes up, or all guns blazing. --March 1991 |
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