Living and Learning Nonviolence

WHAT LIVES THESE two authors have lived and what lessons they can teach us! Reading David Hartsough’s lively memoir immerses us in the great peace and justice events of the last several decades. Colman McCarthy’s fascinating interchanges with high school and university students propel us into a hopeful future as we see how young minds are stretched and carry lessons learned into the world.

Hartsough’s FBI file started when he organized his first anti-nuclear protest at age 15, and it may be growing still as he directs Peaceworkers, a nonviolent training and accompaniment NGO based in San Francisco. In between are 60 years of peace work in the U.S. and the flashpoints of the world, always bringing the message of the necessity and efficacy of nonviolent direct action. In Waging Peace he relives the adventurous life of a professional peaceworker as well as the silent efficacy of his family’s tax resistance and tradition of simple living.

Whether disarming with words a knife-wielding segregationist opponent at a Virginia lunch counter, blockading with a canoe a weapons ship bound for Vietnam, or traveling to war zones, Hartsough has faithfully carried forward his commitment to nonviolence. Sometimes visiting conflict sites before they reach the radar even of other peace people, he writes of going to Cuba, Russia, Yugoslavia, and the Berlin Wall while still a college student, to Central America during the ’80s, and later to Gaza and other war zones.

In 1999, after trying unsuccessfully to persuade the world to support nonviolently the beleaguered Kosovars and thus avert a Serbian bloodbath, Hartsough attended a peace conference in The Hague. There he met Mel Duncan, and together they founded the Nonviolent Peaceforce, now the largest of several worldwide movements of accompaniment for nonviolent activists.

In California, Hartsough worked to launch the huge Abalone Alliance against the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant and campaigned against the development of nuclear weapons at the University of California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. In this century, Hartsough was one of the first to be arrested for protesting drone warfare at Creech Air Force Base.

The highlight of this engaging memoir is his deep involvement with the 1987 Concord, Calif., blockade of trains carrying weapons to Central American dictatorships. He writes movingly about the day the train didn’t stop and fellow activist Brian Willson lost his legs below the knee (among other serious injuries).

Waging Peace is not only a compelling memoir, it’s a useful peace manual, with a section of resources for further study and action.

McCarthy’s Teaching Peace is a manual of a different kind, an epistolary narrative in the tradition of the Catholic Worker, where questions and answers contribute to a clarification of thought that often moves people to action.

McCarthy, like Hartsough, excels at making connections, both between movements for justice and peace and between people who embody them with their lives. In 1982, McCarthy, then a columnist for The Washington Post, wanted to see if nonviolence could be taught, both inside and outside the classroom. This book shows that it can and inspires all of us to not only walk the walk, as we are shown by Hartsough, but to do what is often harder—to talk the talk.

We need to talk about nonviolence as McCarthy does, to everyone, not just the ones who agree with us or with whom we feel comfortable talking.

His answers to student letters are full of riveting and sometimes wry details, as we learn of his career as a teacher, first at one of the poorest high schools in Washington, D.C., and later at suburban high schools and colleges such as Georgetown and American University. In 1985 he founded the Center for Teaching Peace, and he remains an advocate for peace studies programs. As McCarthy frequently says, “Unless we teach them peace, someone else will teach them violence.” His reflections on teaching remind us that reading and conversation develop student minds. Both abound in McCarthy’s classrooms, as I witnessed when I visited one several years ago.

His letters continue the teaching. For example, he gives straight talk to a former student who writes him from the Naval Academy: “You are being trained to ... kill people and destroy property if the order is given.” Then he invites her to sit in on his seminar at Georgetown Law on “Law, Conscience, and Violence.” She comes, commuting between Annapolis and D.C., and later completes her naval commission while attending law school at night. One day she returns to his class, this time as a guest lecturer, describing how she gathered evidence from torture survivors so war criminals in Somalia could be prosecuted.

Particularly interesting are letters that span several years, such as between McCarthy and Ryan Hehman. After meeting McCarthy at Catholic University, Hehman is inspired to go to a Catholic Worker house in Phoenix.

Five years later, he writes to his former prof, reflecting on that experience and his life in an intentional community. Hehman made the connections, as do the Peace Corps volunteers who write to McCarthy from their posts abroad and the students who thank him for inviting peaceworkers from many fields to speak in his classes.

Both books ask provocative questions, as all good lessons do. Read them and let answers grow in your heart as you move toward your own peacemaking decisions.