"Where is the War?" - the Reverend Alison Hyder

May 27, 2001 - the Unitarian Universalist Meeting House of Provincetown

Love cannot remain by itself – it has no meaning.
Love has to be put into action, and that action is service.

Whatever form we are,
Able or disabled,
Rich or poor,
It is not how much we do,
But how much love we put in the doing;
A lifelong sharing of love with others.

READING: Michael Hamburger - “Birds and Flowers Return to War-Scarred London”

Twelve houses fell, twelve gardens broke their bounds
Before the lovers, tempted by these fronds,
Brushed by these rambling branches, could transgress
The traffic’s laws and stumbled into peace;
Bedded on grass, felt the green light grow dimmer,
The yellow light grow brighter, but recede…
Or walking here a clerk surprised the summer
Fierce in its narrow cage and, half-afraid,
Dreamed his way back to boyhood beasts and flowers.
Translated into dreams the screech of cars.

Here whitethroats build their nests, a nightingale
Often at early dawn strikes dumb the owl.
And here - a dole of colour to the needy –
Are poppies, buttercups for all to pick;
Or dandelion leaves: a muttering lady
Braves bricks and brambles daily for their sake.
On Sundays round a parliament of mothers
Small girls make daisy-chains or look for feathers,
Snail-shells, dead butterflies and beetles’ shards…

Because twelve houses fell, now timid birds
Return to London and the lovers lie
Among tall ferns in deep tranquility,
Hidden at nightfall in those bushes where
Four hours on end the schoolboys play at war.

SERMON: “Where is the War?” – Rev. Alison Hyder

Another war movie has just come out. “Pearl Harbor” offers us a precise depiction of all the violence and destruction that occurred 60 years ago, the day that the Japanese Military bombed the US Navy base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The movie is apparently rather less than accurate in its portrayal of the history and emotions that motivate the action, but it delivers, says Newsweek, “the poetry of destruction. Fighter planes swoop between buildings like something out of ‘Star Wars.’ A battle-ship flips sideways in the Hawaiian Harbor, the crew clutching to the edge like something out of ‘Titanic.’ Drowning soldiers are shot underwater, enemy bullets strafing the ocean like something out of ‘Saving Private Ryan.’ Violent and thrilling, these images go straight to your central nervous system. But [the director, Michael] Bay isn’t making a movie about war’s horror. It’s more like a roller-coaster ride.” [David Ansen, “Make War, Not Love,” Newsweek, May 14, 2001]
We’ve been hearing a lot lately about “the Greatest Generation” – the men and women who responded to WW2 with quiet heroics and a sense of duty, willing to sacrifice themselves for a great, unifying cause. Millions of men signed up for the US military, millions of men of color and women offered their skills and courage to their country. Every aspect of US culture was oriented in one direction. For four years, it appeared, the challenge was clear. The country seemed to pull together and act in accord, collectively striving for something noble and good.
Our respect for this generation is not without envy. We all long for a feeling of unity, some clear vision that would challenge and motivate us as a nation. We want to feel good about ourselves. We want a sense of purpose. And no succeeding generation has found it. Politicians offer up enemies – communists, dissidents, Negroes, women, Muslim terrorists, illegal aliens, liberals (the list, frankly, is endless) – instead of inclusion and integration. Different groups compete for their rights, all squabbling over the same leftovers. The only compelling vision we have as a country is manufactured on film, by the directors and advertising agencies who show us what we want.
Griel Marcus, a cultural historian, writes,

Pop culture – the folk culture of the modern market, the culture of the instant, at once subsuming past and future and refusing to acknowledge the reality of either – began about 1948, in the United States and Britain. There, where the Nazis never arrived, the war years not only regimented society – through conscription, rationing, curfews, and vastly intensified production – they loosened it, breaking up old ties of social life. For a long moment, an entire level of patriarchal hierarchy was stripped away. Like so many soldiers in combat, on the home front some people experienced a sense of purpose, fellowship, and freedom they never knew before and never would again….Photographs of wartime American female factory workers reveal smiles unlike any to be seen in the photojournalism of the years that followed: strong, almost surprised smiles radiating shared purpose, autonomy, and self-worth.
With the war over, the women who owned those smiles were returned to a subservient life. The project of the postwar West… [as Betty Friedan revealed] was to prove that real life was back, and to restrict the definition of real life to the pleasurable consumption of material goods within a system of male supremacy and corporate hegemony. The new freedoms discovered during the war were cut off from words and cut out of pictures; the most intense and complete days many had lived, at home and away, were turned into an anomaly… [Griel Marcus, Lipstick Traces, p 257-8]

The freedom, the purpose, were denied. “Back to normal” was strictly defined. There was a place for everything, and everyone was put in her place. For a little while, at least. But the times, they were a-changin’.
The military machine continued and found ways to make itself necessary. Between the conflicts in Korea and the Vietnam War, true patriotism was redefined as militarism. It didn’t matter why we were fighting, or who. If you didn’t support “our boys” overseas you weren’t a real American.

How else could a kid prove himself without that ultimate sacrifice? The grand gesture is always compelling: violence, and danger, and death. The sense of pride and destiny that gave the country purpose was directed at economic expansion. But what do we do without that challenge, without the intoxication of war? Will there always be another Desert Storm?
Some people found a purpose in fighting for group freedoms. The various civil rights movements provided participants not only a defining mission, but a feeling of inclusion and intimacy only fortified by the struggle against authority. It was us against them. The foes of decency and humanity were now within our country, instead of outside. “We have met the enemy,” said Pogo, “and they is us.”
Of course, it always had been. The Untied (talk about a Freudian typo!) - the United - States throughout its history has been divided by region, by race and class, by competing immigrant groups, and particularly by the owners versus the laborers in all their accents and guises. Authority has always cracked down on those seeking more autonomy and self-expression. We have never been one people. In fact, that is the very point of this country. We are not homogeneous, with a shared religion or ethnicity. Our needs, our expectations, our visions are diverse.
The irony is that every struggle against authority, against the prevailing culture, is in fact a plea for acceptance and inclusion. We’re not trying to escape, we’re fighting to get in, to be a part of the family, to have a voice in the chorus of this country. But the problem is that this sort of noisy and demanding behavior is rarely celebrated, at least in its time. Agitation is considered unpatriotic and subversive, as if the fight for human rights – for a healthy environment, for clean elections, for bodily freedoms - threatens democracy.
It is hard to maintain the struggle for justice. There are few rewards. There are no ticker-tape parades for labor agitators or whistle-blowers. As Jesus said, “A prophet is without honor in his own country.”
In her book Centering, Mary Caroline Richards wrote, “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the …great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is …the moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice, who prefers a negative peace, which is the absence of tension, to a positive peace…True peace is not merely the absence of war, but it is the presence of justice.
“Love is not a doctrine. Peace is not an international agreement. Love and Peace are beings who live as possibilities within us.”
Tom Brokow’s interviews with WW2 veterans reveal that the soldiers who volunteered for action wanted their sacrifice to be lasting. They were fighting the war to end all wars. Most of them were just a bunch of scared kids forced into a hellish situation. So they fought for peace as much as for democracy. They didn’t want anyone else to have to experience the horrors of war as they had.
That generation set the standard for patriotism and glory and returned in victory. And this country has never gotten over it. Ever since, the United States has tried to recapture that clear sense of righteousness by involving ourselves in civil wars and foreign conflicts, supporting dictators and corporate interests. I think we’d like a cause worth dying for. But cheap gasoline isn’t it. Where is the war that can guarantee peace?
Instead of learning from past experience – from the real lives of individuals - we glorify aggression. We’ve got no other definition for patriotism. We have become addicted to violence in all its forms.
We soak up movies like “Pearl Harbor,” and “Braveheart,” and “Pulp Fiction,” where “the poetry of destruction” acts as a narcotic, stimulating our brains with a buzz of adrenaline. We read Stephen King and Mary Higgins Clark, stories about stalking and terror. We seek out danger as a sport, taking more and more risks for entertainment. We have sex bareback, without restraint. With little else in our lives to challenge and inspire us, we manufacture fear.
In his book, The Sadomasochism of Everyday Life, psychoanalyst John Munder Ross talks about this impulse, and the little, normal acts of violence that surround us. Humans haven’t changed much over the centuries. “Whether they admit it or not,” he states,
Almost everyone is interested in pain and suffering. Scratch the most normal surface, and you will find a little fundamental erotic sadomasochism in just about everybody. Why does traffic…slow down when there has been a car accident? People like to look at the squashed vehicles…Relieved that they are not the ones who are strewn about on the pavement, they are also fascinated by the specter of death and destruction. Doesn’t it feel great, or didn’t it, at least when you were a kid, to pick at a scab? The itch, the dig, the final sting, the blood? Or if not your own scab, didn’t it feel good to sling rocks at innocent little birds or squirrels?
What about those scary games people play with each other – especially parents and children. Most fathers are not actually abusive. But they still go far enough, with their mock roars and lunges and their tickling to excess. And where parents fail to fill the bill, children have found their monsters in the movies or fairy tales. Even before the ..frank sex and violence, there have been creatures like Frankenstein’s monster, the Wolf Man, Count Dracula and his love slaves – the victims who become vampires in their own right….
In other contexts as well, presentations of misery and brutality are obligatory to catch the public eye. So the tabloids and television news lay before their millions of viewers daily spectacles of murder and mayhem from real life.

Ross says that our everyday environment is made of minor cruelties and violence, from the childhood bullying of siblings and friends, the sneers and put-downs and harassment at school, to the petty tyrannies of bureaucrats and shop clerks, sexual harassment and other forms of dominance and power from teachers and bosses and lovers alike.
We identify with both the victim and the victimizer. Like a child who misbehaves to get attention, we learn to find pleasure in aggression, in the effect of stinging words and the slam of a door.
Personally, I try not to go into banks. There is something about all the rules and numbers that makes my blood boil. I know that some of the system exists to safeguard my money, but when I have forgotten my passbook or get thwarted in some function I immediately become overwhelmed with rage. I don’t always succeed in being civil and have to storm off to cool down.
It always shocks me, the amount of physical violence I feel. At that instant I really want to lash out, cause damage, hurt someone. And I’ve never been in a fight in my life, not even as a kid or with my brother. I don’t know where it comes from, but it’s mine all right. I have to own it.
We all need to deal with our attraction to violence and the part it plays in our lives, whether its coming into us via movies or novels, drinking too much, or aggressive driving. Or the little sneers and slights we direct at others, the insolence that we think makes us seem smart and superior. Who are we really trying to hurt? Where is the war in our hearts? Why are we trying to separate ourselves from other people?
It is not that I think life should be all sweetness and light, made of pastel shades and Hallmark greetings and illusions of harmony. There are reasons why we can’t all just get along. Turning a blind eye to others’ suffering and misfortune, even their faults, or stomping down on our own need for autonomy and honesty only makes us feel powerless and afraid. We need to have standards, to be able to stand up for our own needs and values against indifference and injustice.
No, it is the depths and shadows that give life definition. But the ravages of loss, the natural calamities of illness and disappointment, the risk of a challenge unattained are sufficiently dramatic and real. The question is not whether we are violent or aggressive. It is how we will use this impulse. I think we can make life enough of a struggle without contributing even more cruelty and sadness. We are here to create ourselves wholly and truthfully. We don’t need to destroy things to prove we exist.
In the 6th Century, Lao-tse wrote:

If there is to be peace in the world,
There must be peace in the nations.
If there is to be peace in the nations,
There must be peace in the cities.
If there is to be peace in the cities,
There must be peace between neighbors.
If there is to be peace between neighbors,
There must be peace in the home.
If there is to be peace in the home,
There must be peace in the heart.

Despite all of Mr. Bush’s claims, I think it is pretty obvious that we do not have a leader with a vision that can unite us and inspire us. The late, lamented election proved that this country is growing more and more divided, by region and by culture, between those who want to learn from the past and those who want to wallow in it.
Maybe we aren’t as brave or dutiful as our forebears. We’re cynical and self-entitled. But we have the same challenge – to find an ideal worth dying for, a cause worth living for with integrity and purpose and courage. It is a fight between humanity and meanness, between generosity and fear. The war is within us. God give us strength.

CLOSING WORDS: by Lynn Ungar “Food Chain”

Give up pretending.
Everything, you know,
everything, sooner or later
gets eaten. Little fish,
big fish, no difference -
the world's mouth
is on you. Outside the personal,
it even has a certain glory.
When the mouse, in its last
short dash to the grain,
feels the great rush of wings,
in the flash before
the crushing beak descends,
it is finally, luminously, airborn.
In the broad, voiceless
hours of the night
you have always known
the red beak of
your consummation
awaits you. The choice,
very simply, is this:
What will you give
your own beloved
bones and blood to feed?

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