Let It Shine
By Kathy Kelly
August 25, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" -
“This little light of mine, I’m gonna’ let it
shine! Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.”
Imagine children lustily singing the above lines
which eventually became a civil rights anthem. Their innocence and
happy resolve enlightens us. Yes! In the face of wars, refugee
crises, weapon proliferation and unaddressed climate change impacts,
let us echo the common sense of children. Let goodness shine. Or, as
our young friends in Afghanistan have put it, #Enough! They write
the word, in Dari, on the palms of their hands and show it to
cameras, wanting to shout out their desire to abolish all wars.
This past summer, collaborating with
Wisconsin activists, we decided
to feature this refrain on signs and announcements for a 90-mile
walk campaigning to end targeted drone assassinations abroad, and
the similarly racist impunity granted to an increasingly militarized
police force when they kill brown and black people within the U.S.
Walking through small cities and towns in
Wisconsin, participants distributed leaflets and held teach-ins
encouraging people to demand accountability from local police, and
an end to the “Shadow Drone” program operated by the U.S. Air
National Guard out of Wisconsin’s own Volk Field. Our friend Maya
Evans traveled the furthest to join the walk: she coordinates Voices
for Creative Nonviolence in the UK. Alice Gerard, from Grand Isle,
NY, is our most consistent long-distance traveler, on her sixth
antiwar walk with VCNV.
Brian Terrell noted what mothers speaking to Code
Pink, as part of the Mothers Against Police Brutality campaign, had
also noted: that surprisingly many of the officers charged with
killing their children were veterans of the U.S. wars in Afghanistan
and Iraq. He recalled past national events, such as the NATO summit
in Chicago, in 2012, whose organizers tried to recruit temporary
security officers from amongst U.S. veterans. Former soldiers,
already traumatized by war, need support, healthcare and vocational
training but instead are offered temp jobs to aim weapons at other
people in predictably tense settings.
The walk was instructive. Salek Khalid, a friend
of Voices, shared “Creating a Hell on Earth: U.S. Drone Strikes
Abroad,” his own in-depth presentation about the development of
drone warfare. Tyler Sheafer, joining us from the Progressive
Alliance near Independence, MO, stressed the independence of living
simply, off the grid and consuming crops grown only within a 150
mile radius of one’s home, while hosts in Mauston, WI welcomed Joe
Kruse to talk about fracking and our collective need to change
patterns of energy consumption. The ability to withhold our money
and our labor is an important way to compel governments to restrain
their violent domestic and international power.
We weren’t alone. We walked in solidarity with
villagers in Gangjeong, South Korea, who’d welcomed many of us to
join in their campaign to stop militarization of their beautiful
Jeju Island. Seeking inter-island solidarity and recognizing how
closely they share the plight of Afghans burdened by the U.S. “Asia
Pivot,” our friends in Okinawa, Japan will host a walk from the
north to the south of the island, protesting construction of a new
U.S. military base in Henoko. Rather than provoke a new cold war, we
want to shine light on our common cares and concerns, finding
security in extended hands of friendship.
On August 26th, some of the walkers
will commit nonviolent civil resistance at Volk Field, carrying the
messages about drone warfare and racial profiling into courts of law
and public opinion.
Too often we imagine that a life swaddled in
everyday comforts and routines is the only life possible, while half
a world away, to provide those comforts to us, helpless others are
made to shiver with inescapable cold or fear. It’s been instructive
on these walks to uncoddle ourselves a little, and see how our light
shines, unhidden, on the road through towns of our neighbors,
singing words we’ve heard from children learning to be as adult as
they can be; attempting to learn that same lesson. The lyric goes
“I’m not going to make it shine: I’m going to _let_ it shine. We
hope that by releasing the truth that’s already in us we can
encourage others to live theirs, shining a more humane light on the
violent abuses, both at home and abroad, of dark systems that
perpetuate violence. On walks like this we’ve been fortunate to
imagine a better life, sharing moments of purpose and sanity with
the many we’ve met along the road.
Kathy Kelly (Kathy@vcnv.org)
co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence (www.vcnv.org)
