We've been at the task earnestly
for the last six years. Each Hiroshima Day, Pax Christi New Mexico and
friends gather at Los Alamos, birthplace of the bomb and every succeeding
generation of nuclear weapons, to pray, vigil and repent as best we
can for the mortal sin of war and nuclear weapons.
In recent years, we have adopted
the method of the people of Nineveh and donned the accoutrements of
sorrow and regret: sackcloth and ashes. And like the Ninevites, we beg
God for the gift of peace, for nuclear disarmament. Save us, O God,
from ourselves!
This year two Nobel Peace Prize
winners -- Jody Williams of Vermont and Mairead Maguire of Belfast --
will join us. Indeed, they asked to come. Jody won the 1997 Nobel for
her work to ban landmines around the world. The International Campaign
to Ban Landmines was the fruit of her work. It began in 1992 with a
staff of one and over the years mushroomed into a network of 1,300 affiliates
in 95 countries.
She served as chief strategist
and spokesperson for the ICBL during the Sept. 1997 diplomatic conference
in Oslo where an unprecedented cooperative effort between government
leaders, U.N. officials and the International Red Cross led to the signing
of an international treaty banning antipersonnel landmines. In
2006, she co-founded the Nobel Women's Initiative, comprised of women
Nobel laureates serving women around the world in their struggle for
justice. She organizes, agitates and teaches.
At bottom her message is simple:
each one of us can make a difference and change the world. All we have
to do is join the struggle and do what we can for disarmament and justice.
Joining us, too, will be Mairead
Corrigan Maguire, a clarion voice for Gospel nonviolence. She was awarded
the Nobel peace prize in 1976 after suffering a series of losses to
rend the heart. Her niece and two nephews were lost to the vortex of
violence during Northern Ireland's "Troubles."
But she responded with neither
vengeance nor despair. Rather she entered the breach with a proffer
of peace. She organized massive peace rallies, much to the astonishment
of the (male) warring factions. And later she founded the Peace People
Community and dedicated her life to promoting creative nonviolence.
In 1997, while living in Derry, Northern Ireland, I gathered her best
speeches and essays together into a beautiful book, The Vision of
Peace. She remains one of my teachers.
Mairead has traveled to the
bloodiest corners of the globe: Iraq, Israel, Palestine, Bosnia, Rwanda,
Burundi, and Burma. And at every stop she appeals to human conscience
-- put an end to war, adopt the ways of nonviolence.
Peacemakers, however, often
provoke ambivalence; it's in the nature of things. Here and there
they welcome Mairead with joy. But she finds she's not welcome everywhere.
Just last week, Homeland Security detained her at Houston's George
Bush Intercontinental Airport. (An experience I know well, too.)
She was on her way back to
Belfast, having just spoken with other Nobel laureates at a women's
conference in Guatemala. But during the layover, authorities detained
her and whisked her off to a side room, took her fingerprints and a
mug shot and sat her down for two hours of interrogation. A culture
that can't discern between nonviolence and terrorism is in grave danger.
The blindness, if not downright stupidity, of such officials is telling.
She was only released because of pressure from the Nobel Women's Initiative.
Unintimidated, she responded
to the press:
I stand in solidarity with
many human rights defenders, who stand for the dignity and rights of
everyone to life, freedom and human and civil liberties. I have traveled
to the U.S. many times in the past 30 years to share the message of
peace and reconciliation. I have also undertaken my world citizenship
responsibility to join with the American peace movement in protesting
U.S. foreign policies which are causing much suffering in the world.
I have always been inspired by the American peace movement and consider
it an honor to be able to support them in their work for a peaceful
world.
Mairead keeps Nobel laureates
from resting on their laurels. On May 17th, she prevailed on seventeen
of them to sign a letter called "the Hiroshima-Nagasaki Declaration."
Released in Hiroshima, it calls upon world leaders, and all people,
to eliminate nuclear weapons. And it warns that unless humanity fails
in that endeavor, "the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki" will be
repeated.
Such weapons, she says, belong
to the tragic past. They belong to a time when the world lacked the
wisdom to realize that each culture needs the other to survive. Governments
which still hold such weapons violate the prohibition of war in the
UN charter. But more than that, she says, they're operating anachronistically.
They're out of touch with the insights of the times. Nowadays our
enemies aren't across the border. The enemies of humanity today are
poverty, environmental destruction, militarism, and war. Our security
nowadays lies in nonviolence and love. She insists that we all need
to heed the wisdom of nonviolence and apply it institutionally, internationally,
globally.
Mairead and Jody are determined
to do what they can for the abolition of nuclear weapons, especially
in this pivotal year as treaty renewals, threats, and proliferation
are back in the news. And so our Pax Christi group has rented the Santa
Fe Convention Center for the evening of July 31st to hear
these great women speak to us about the task at hand, before we all
journey up the mountain to Los Alamos the next day.
Ours is a modest gesture, but
we're doing what we can to raise consciousness and keep the movement
moving. We invite everyone to join us, to reignite the spirit of nonviolence
within, to lift high the vision of a nuclear-free world. Wherever you
are, plan now to remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki this August, and organize
locally to put new pressure on the U.S. government to abolish its nuclear
arsenal and turn those boundless resources to meet the staggering needs
of suffering humanity and our endangered planet. If you can, join us
on July 31st and August 1st. (For more, see www.paxchristinewmexico.org)
As Mairead concluded in
The Vision of Peace, "Everyone of us has a role to play in the
creation of a new culture of nonviolence."