Article by a Friend

I'm posting this article by my friend, Laura, without her permission. I hope she will forgive me, she's done it more than once. Plus I mostly wanted to show off her work as it's Iowa Gals make good month.

from The Witness, June 2002

'I want to organize and agitate, but I also want to pray'

by Laura E. Crossett

In 1969, a group of students at Grinnell College turned the American flag upside down as a protest against the Vietnam War. My father, then a professor at Grinnell, spent a good part of the next two days standing beneath the flag, hand on the halyard, to prevent anyone from doing so again.

My mother told me this story when I was a freshman in high school and en route to a protest against the Persian Gulf War. I pointed out that, had I been there, I probably would have been one of the people trying to turn the flag upside down. "Yes," she said. "You and your father would have disagreed about a number of things. Call if you need to be bailed out."

Mostly I tell this as a funny story, but in fact I've been thinking about it for many years--turning a flag upside down may not seem like much, but in Grinnell, Iowa, it's a very extreme tactic. As an activist, I am constantly thinking about how to proceed -- about how to make the best strategic decision, about how to be true to yourself and what you believe, about how to reconcile the difference between those who just want to witness and those who want to print everything in Impact font, and how to do this all in the face of what seem like overwhelming odds -- in the face of a system -- call it global capitalism, call it what you will -- that seems relentlessly determined to crush most of what I consider precious in the world.

A few days after September 11, I put Phil Ochs's song "The War is Over" on my stereo on continuous repeat, and I've been listening to it almost every day since.

One might say, quite accurately, that I was being a little premature. But Ochs wrote the song in 1967, when the Vietnam War had not even reached its peak. In those years, the people trying to end the war were going increasingly nuts. They'd moved from protest to resistance: It wasn't enough to rally on the streets; they had to shut down induction centers. It wasn't enough to march on Washington; they had to try to levitate the Pentagon. Eventually, for some, it wasn't enough until they'd given their whole lives to the struggle, until they were fighting in the streets, destroying property, trying to bring the war home.

Yet what Ochs needed in 1967 was to declare that the war was over, and what I needed, even back in September, even as I was helping to build a new anti-war movement, was to hear that the war was a state of mind: that if I believed it enough, the war could be over.
I didn't mention this to the people I was working with: people who believed we just had to write enough letters, or get enough people to a demonstration, or dismantle the war machine and the forces of globalization by any means necessary.

I know kids now who are involved in Black Bloc. I don't join them: I can't. When I can, I try to persuade them that smashing up the windows of Starbucks, while satisfying in a certain way, is not going to help -- and that undoubtedly that destruction will have to be cleaned up by low-wage laborers -- the very people whose side (I'd like to think) we are on. But I know also that there are days when I want to smash things, as much as there are days when I want to move to the mountains, become a hermit, and pray. When we evaluate the actions of others, we must take care to make a very careful distinction between the action and the people behind that action, and we need to try to understand the ways in which the systems which surround that person have led to the kinds of actions they've taken. We must strive as well to try to understand, respect, and deal with the terrible toll that living in this world and working to resist and change its systems can take on us.

I don't know what ended the Vietnam War (supposing, that is, that it did in fact end), or what it will take to end this war, or to stop the global economic forces that lie behind it. I want to get out there and educate and organize and agitate, but I also want to pray: I want to believe that believing in a better world is the best way possible to change it.

Where the balance between these is, I do not know. I know only that we must, if we want to change the world, first change ourselves, and practice forgiveness.

Laura E. Crossett is a 26-year-old writer and activist. Most recently, she's worked with University of Iowa Students Against Sweatshops, with a local anti-war coalition, Iowans For Peace, and with the UI's graduate employee union, UE Local 896-COGS.