[Update 2:30pm: Just wanna say I love posting about this just as this year’s Safety Fest is getting underway! Safety Fest is an annual weekend of events organized by Communities United Against Violence (CUAV), supported this year by Critical Resistance, on the theme of queer and trans power, anti-violence at the intimate, community, and state levels, and abolition of the prison-industrial complex (PIC). Awesome!]

For the 10th anniversary issue of Left Turn Magazine, anti-imperialist organizer Clare Bayard offers a wonderful look at “demilitarization as rehumanization” work in the US. Her examples are varied and informative, from youth-of-color-led anti-recruitment efforts in Bay-PEACE Oakland, to community-based transformative justice approaches to intimate violence, to indigenous people’s and immigrants’ movements to stop US imperialism at home and abroad. Her primary example, relating to work she herself has been doing with US Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), highlights a thought-provoking and politically visionary approach to war resistor organizing. It’s called Operation Recovery: Stop the Deployment of Traumatized Troops (OpRec).

The underlying strategy is IVAW’s basic model: organizing GIs to withdraw their consent from wars. Its success in stopping deployment of troops with severe trauma would incapacitate the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq by knocking out 20 to 50 percent of the fighting force. It’s a dilemma campaign. If we win, the wars are hamstrung. Or, if the military continues deploying wounded troops, this visible criminal negligence will hurt their legitimacy and ability to keep recruiting. Either way, we also improve our capacity to provide our own community-based care, which is needed far beyond just the veterans’ community. An element of the campaign is developing survival programs, inspired by the Black Panthers, to address the needs of people whose ability to resist their command often depends on access to support.

Operation Recovery exposes the silenced crises of Military Sexual Trauma (MST), Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). IVAW, partnered with the Civilian-Soldier Alliance, has a strategy to win on multiple fronts. Demanding the right to heal is a point of leverage to challenge the institution, as well as a survival need within this community. OpRec has begun targeting base commanders who have the power to make immediate decisions preventing deployments. Here, even “damage control” means fewer lives destroyed.

Amplifying the voices of traumatized troops deepens awareness of the scope of disaster in these wars. After last fall’s media exposure of Afghanistan “kill teams,” IVAW member Ethan McCord responded, “You’re taking soldiers who are on psychotropic drugs for PTSD or TBI, and you’re putting a weapon in their hand and sending them right back to where they were traumatized and telling them to go kill Afghans. What did you think was going to happen when you place these soldiers in that same situation?”

The dual strategy of withdrawing worker power from the war machine while simultaneously building alternative structures for healing and recovery that do not depend on the state represents, to me, a beautiful synthesis of peace work and anti-imperialism. Not a superficial synthesis as in a combination of two stereotypically gendered approaches (macho “war resistors” and feminine “healing”), but the real, dialectical synthesis represented in one of the mottos of UBUNTU, a women-of-color and survivor -led community network against sexual violence in Durham, North Carolina:

To resist, we must heal; to heal, we must resist.

In her chapter of The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, Paula X. Rojas advocates the same kind of approach, modeled in many of the people’s struggles in Central and South America: using politicized horizontal organizations that meet community needs as a leverage point against militarized state power. The politically-infused practice of building people’s power to form their own schools, justice systems, food supplies, squatter organizations, and so on, articulates base building not in terms of recruiting people out of their homes into some new hierarchical organization or corps, but “thinking beyond the state, and even beyond an alternative vision of current institutions, by politicizing every aspect of everyday life and alternative forms of dealing with them.” (202) We can see how this resonates with Bayard’s articulation of using OpRec to “improve our capacity to provide our own community-based care” for traumatized veterans, as well as act as a “point of leverage to challenge the institution.”

Having heard so much hype about using Buddhist meditation practices for healing, it’s so refreshing to encounter this articulation of wellness that names the elephant in the room: ambient institutional violence in a militarized, imperialist culture. Not everyone is impacted in the same ways, or to the same degrees, and yet we are all responsible for transforming this reality. As Clare says, “Affirming everyone’s humanity and centering the importance of healing capsizes the logic of militarism.”

In these terms, healing is not an “escape” from worldly troubles, just as meditation is not an exercise in stopping pesky thoughts from arising. Rather than chase after some imaginary permanent spa day, a life in the realm of the gods that is also ultimately impermanent, we turn toward suffering and confront militarization as one of the the primary mechanisms for the maintenance of class society. Not only in manifestations of, as Lenin called them, “special bodies of armed men,” but also in the patriarchal, hierarchical, and punitive tendencies — subtle and overt — that we each bring to our organizing collectives.

One last dimension I love about Bayard’s piece, that I think is relevant to the “Socially Engaged Buddhism” discourse, is the focus on GI leadership. Often, it seems to me, in progressive Buddhist thinking, we see strains of liberal logic of “empowerment” or “responsibility” manifesting as a kind of self-centeredness. For example, my friend Maia over at the Jizo Chronicles recently resolved to face her own “hypocrisy” as someone who is against US wars but also pays taxes that support them. Now, I know that Maia wasn’t trying to propose some sort of program for ending the wars — it was more of an exercise in self examination and transformation — but I hear this angle echoed a lot in white liberal anti-war circles. As I understand it, this line of thinking looks at the ways in which we are each individually accountable, through our own actions, and seeks to use our individual power to change our behaviors. Kind of an aggregate approach — if enough people follow suit, there will be a big shift. I respect and admire some of the ideas there, but on strategic grounds I disagree with centering them. What does it mean that such war resistance efforts can happen totally divorced from relationships with GIs? Clare touches on this problem in her discussion of the challenges of veteran organizing, describing not only separation but “friction between GI resistance and majority white and class-privileged peace movements,” also exacerbated by “the carefully designed race and class makeup of the military.”

Now, I hear a lot of emphasis placed on war spending (read: electoral politics) and weapons manufacture as points of intervention for peace/anti-war work, but that doesn’t mean that other organizing tacts don’t exist in Buddhist circles that I don’t know about! Anyone have a lead on veteran-led anti-war work supported by organized Buddhists?

In the meantime, please give Clare’s whole article a thorough read, and feel welcome to share insights, reflections, and disgreements here.

Have a wonderful weekend, friends!

At 12:24pm today, after a sunny Berkeley bike ride, Mackenzie and I were the first ones to arrive at the designated decoy meet-up location, just down the block from the actual target.  We taped up a sign that read: HOUSE BOY SOLIDARITY.  Slowly, people began to trickle in.  Many knew each other through other political work, greeting each other with big smiles and hugs, and “long-time-no-see’s.”  By 12:50, everyone knew the plan, the choreography, and the goal.  The ten of us headed toward the Alpha Omicron Pi sorority house, one leading our chant on the bullhorn: AIN’T NO POWER LIKE THE POWER OF THE PEOPLE ‘CAUSE THE POWER OF THE PEOPLE DON’T STOP!!!

Thus began our first action as the East Bay Solidarity Network (EBSol).

William had been working and living at UC Berkeley’s Alpha Omicron Pi as a “house boy”: a common term used to refer to live-in cooks who help prepare meals for Cal sororities.  He was still receiving training, and had had no serious reprimands or complaints about his performance.  On the contrary, he often received a “Good work” and a fist pound from the other, senior cook at the end of the shift.  All that changed when they fired the dishwasher and made William and the others pick up the extra work. Without extra pay.

After weeks of working extra hours to cover the undone job, and clearly seeing how exploitative this was, William demanded that his manager hire another dishwasher.  They did not; but not long afterward, he was called in for another meeting.  He was told that he was being fired for unsanitary work practices (again, having never been seriously reprimanded or warned about any such failures), and that he had three days to move out of his lodgings in the basement of the sorority.

Until now, the sorority management had been dealing with one lone, vulnerable worker: easy to exploit, oppress, fire for causing trouble, illegally evict, and all that sort of typical thing.  But today, William wasn’t a lone worker.  He was a part of the solidarity network, and he was joined by his fellow members.

Together, we brought his earthly belongings up from the basement (where they had been packed up without his consent and stored in the boiler room, to make space for the new “house boy”) and, after a brief back-and-forth with his back-stabbing co-worker, took up our formation on the front staircase and passed each item, bucket-brigade-style, down the line.  (Wish I had pictures of the bucket brigade, but it’s hard to be photographer and participant at the same time!)  Meanwhile, Ryan played a militant march on his snare drum.  We had discipline, choreography, and musical flair, man. Doubtless we left an impression.

Now that the managers had been made distinctly aware of our collective presence, William delivered to them the official EBSol letter, specifying our reasonable demands of the sorority managers, and letting them know that if our demands are not met within 14 days, we, as a group, will take action against them.

When all his stuff was piled on the sidewalk, William took the bullhorn and told his whole story to an explicit crowd (our group, now 13 total with some late arrivals) and an implicit crowd (the sorority girls, peeping wide-eyed in bunches through the upper-floor windows; and the managers and staff on site).  A manager from a nearby sorority, an in-law of one of William’s former managers, came storming over and tried to shut him down — grabbed at his bullhorn, and threatened to call the cops on all of us for trespassing in a “private home.”  We pointed out that it was not only a home, but a workplace, and William kept shouting out the gory details of how they screwed him over.

With his passion, his technology, and the cheering response of the rest of us in the solidarity group, William (and we) easily drowned out the flustered and angry stand-in-boss, creating quite a spectacle for the women watching from the windows.  (Whom William was quick to remind that it’s the boss we’re fighting, not the sisters.)  For a while the managers even withheld William’s last check, trying to force us all to stay til the cops came in response to the bogus trespassing call, but soon enough they relented and handed over his payment.  We loaded his belongings into cars, and left happy.

There are a million reasons I’m excited about how today’s action went.  For one, it feels great to take up the case of a domestic worker, whose labor is so completely invisibilized and underpaid most of the time.  Second, enthusiasm in the group was really high, partly because everyone was in a fighting mood, partly because a lot of us are friends, and also because this was not a symbolic action: it had both the moral high ground and specific objectives to accomplish (dramatize the moveout with disciplined formations; deliver the demand letter promising more action to come).  Also, I think, we all felt inspired to see William stand up to his bosses (or their stand-ins), express his anger at being exploited, and be emboldened by the real mechanism of our group.  It made me feel, at least, that if I’m ever getting screwed by my landlord or a boss, and I don’t have a fighting union to help me, then I sure as hell want a solidarity network like this!  There’s a lot to be learned just by being there to help other people’s fights.

As with any tactic, this one had its inherent limitations; and there were moments of confusion and things we could have done better.  This week, the five of us who planned the action (William included) will get together to debrief and reflect on how to improve.  But overall, I think we really pulled off something fine today, and I think everyone who participated felt it was deeply worthwhile.  Now, the campaign has begun — more updates to come in 14 days….unless our victory comes sooner!

On a final note, speaking for my own self, there are a lot of messy, fruitful dhamma questions coming up for me as a result of this EBSol organizing.  Is there room for an adversarial organizing premise like that of a solidarity network — united against corrupt bosses and landlords — within the concept of nonviolent, kind, wise boddhisattva action?  I’ve never really heard anything like that, myself.  Usually Buddhist activists point to the universal lovingkindness of a Martin Luther King, who seemed to be able to embrace his adversaries even as he disobeyed their rules and laws.  SeaSol — The Seattle Solidarity Network, from whence our model comes — makes no such embrace across the class line.  Yet, their actions are nonviolent and strategic.  So to me, it seems there’s more overlap than not.  What’s your take?  How does the solidarity network idea sound to you?  Share your wisdom — or better yet, join us for our next action, and then tell me what you think.  ;)