THE FIRST UNITARIAN CHURCH OF HONOLULU
A Unitarian Universalist Congregation

"Is THE WAR Over Yet ?"
Sermon by Rev. Mike Young
Preached December 10, 1995, at
The First Unitarian Church of Honolulu

THE WAR.

I remember when it ended. I was living in Imperial, California -- a little burg on the desert in Southern California. I was outside in the carport; I remember I was standing next to the big 50-gallon drum that had the fuel oil in it that fed our old-fashioned furnace. I heard a whoop and a howl inside the house. The voice was my mother's. Wondering what the dickens was going on, I hustled inside -- I was all of five years old -- to find her weeping, crying. That was a little confusing. But I remember it as clearly as if it were yesterday. She had just heard over the radio the word that the war was ended.

And now, fifty years later, I'm wondering, "Is the war over yet?"

The paradigmatic war. For my generation, at least, that war that has set our whole picture of what war is supposed to be about. All subsequent conflicts, all subsequent adversaries are critiqued by reference to that war and that adversary. The cause was just. The enemy truly demonic. The victory complete. And the peace won. And so, we have celebrated every possible anniversary of every possible event. Every battle of it has been refought on celluloid and video. Every possible hero of it has become an American icon. Its immediately following era has become our golden age from which the decline of everything is measured.

And I mean no disrespect to those for whom THE WAR was their life's defining event. But: Is 50 years enough time for us to get over it and to go on to other visions of greatness?

I grew up with loved ones going off to World War II and lived through all of the 50 years that have followed. A part of that paradigm bequeathed to my generation was the notion that the only possible acceptable outcome of any of "our" wars is victory --than which anything else is ignominious, meaningless. Victory--the utter destruction or total and abject surrender of the enemy. And any means to that end is not only justified but required.

World War II did not cause, but did exacerbate for Americans, an ancient human foible: the tendency to see all conflict, all disagreements, all differences in terms of war and battle. All struggles seen in terms of victory and defeat. All disagreements become a fight. The rhetoric infects our language like a viral plague. The conquest of nature. The battle of the sexes. The fight against cancer or death or heart attack. The War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, you name it. Show us anything that challenges our usual habits of mind, and we'll declare war on it!

I worry about the Unitarian Universalist Association's Anti-Racism Project for it, too, smacks of a war. Is there not something truly ironic about committing oneself to hate hatred? My God! We even called the piddling little guerilla action of landing a few men for a few days on the Moon the "Conquest of Space"! Now, if there was ever an adversary that used only passive resistance it is space!

One of the things that paradigmatic war has done to our minds is that in every disagreement we tend to come at the prospect of resolution in a win-lose mode. Somebody has to be the loser and somebody has to be the winner. Isn't it true that if somebody says, "Well, we could compromise," even if the compromise is successful it feels like a lose-lose. And yet, if we always play win-lose games does that not leave even the winners constantly surrounded by a bunch of losers? Often bitter, angry losers.

Witness the ancient enmities. I started to list them and I gave up. All around the world it is too depressing. The enmities have gone on for hundreds of years. Sometimes one side claims victory, sometimes the other. The conflicts have simmered, poisoning the minds and hearts of generation after generation: Jew and Arab, Irish Catholic and Irish Protestant, multiplied on continent after continent around the world.

And yet, it is true that in most of the conflicts, the adversaries will find themselves at some point having to live together! In most adversarial relationships -- whether nations, groups, individuals, family members, friends -- at some point, the nature of those relationships is such that the enemy's destruction closes the game for the victor as well. The enemy is not an alien who will go away.

I'm a retired union man. In conflicts between labor and management, it was always hard for us to remember that if we won and destroyed our enemy, we were out of a job. The habit of mind of war scuttles all possibility of conflict resolution .

Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing, they say. But, too often, winning not only isn't everything, it is no thing.

Yes, there are conflicts that must be won, principals that we abandon at our peril, evils appeased in the name of peace that will not, cannot pro-duce peace.

In the early days of the Viet Nam war I had not given much thought to the issue of conscientious objection to war. One day a young man came into my office and sat down -- I was Campus Minister at Stanford University at the time. He said, "My number's up." I said, "What do you mean?" And he said, "My number came up in the lottery and I'm going to have to go." From his tone of voice, I figured he wasn't very enthusiastic about it, so I said, "Gee, that's too bad. I gather that will disrupt your life considerably." He said, "It's more than that. I can't go." We talked for a while and, indeed, he couldn't go and be who he was. He could not kill someone on command. He could not go.

I knew absolutely nothing about the process of applying for conscientious objector status. I knew there was such a thing, but that's about all I knew. His questions and anguish prompted me to go and find out. In the process I learned a great deal. Over the next couple of years I ended up doing a great deal of counseling and lecturing and, finally, training of C.O. counselors. I even tried to become a conscientious objector. I sent my draft card back to the draft board. They sent it back to me. I tore it up in little pieces and sent it back to them. They sent me a new one. I burned it and sent them the ashes. They sent me new one. No matter how hard I tried I could not pick a fight.

Again and again, the question asked of those young men was "If you're a conscientious objector, wouldn't you have fought Hitler?" The paradigm of conflict.

The habits of mind appropriate to violence, to conflict, when it has gone out of control, are not the habits of mind appropriate to resolving all disputes. In fact, not very many disputes are amenable to those habits of mind. The "take no prisoners" mentality of all-out war, for example, cannot work in politics. And yet, what we are seeing in the Congress today is just such a separation into warring ideological camps. In order for one side to go into a room, and seek either a compromise or a new foundation for agreement, means that they come out of that room looking to all of their constituents as if they had surrendered, failed or been defeated. That makes decision making rather difficult.

In most adversarial situations, when the adversary's loss becomes the only acceptable alternative, resolution must come at some other level. This is a leap of imagination at which human beings are not really very adept. Still, I have seen it happen in conflicts in churches, in conflicts in marriages, even -- as a union man -- once in a while in conflicts between labor and management. In the years in which I've been a political activist, the only useful resolutions of those conflicting points of view have come in the following way: we push on each other, we probe at each other; we push for the concerns that are real as opposed to the concerns that are bumper-sticker rhetorical. Out of the mess of conflicting interest and concern laying there on the table we find a whole different way of seeing and approaching the issues that separated us. We are both changed by the process.

In the early 1980's the LRY, the teen program of the Unitarian Universalist Association, had acquired such an aura of sex, drugs and rock 'n roll that many UU churches all across the country refused to permit LRY groups to meet in their churches. My daughter was part of the group of teenagers that killed off the old LRY and recreated a UU teen program that could receive support from the denomination. The conferences at which this was accomplished were called "Common Ground."

For the first time that I know of, a major conference of that kind used a consensus-building decision-making process. It wasn't the adults that created it; it was the teenagers that created it. The process involves a "fair witness." A "fair witness" may be hard to find when people have drawn the lines and selected the weapons, but the role is an important aspect of that process. They had fair witnesses who sat in on all discussions. It was the fair witnesses' job not to listen for solutions, but to listen for the problems. Then all the fair witnesses got together and reshaped and shuffled their perceptions and came back with a new set of questions and continued to re-pose the questions. The questions themselves became transformed in the process of its being asked in this way. Out of it has come a youth program that doesn't scare adults quite so badly.

Unfortunately, they got just a little bit flip when they applied a name to the new organization. They had tried all kinds of differing names, and some wag in the back of the room said, "Well, why don't we call it 'Why are you you ?'" (YRUU: Young Religious Unitarian Universalists). Of all the possible acronyms, a smart-aleck acronym at that, they picked it . . . by consensus.

That's the only way that the deepest issues that divide us are ever resolved. It is a process of asking the questions together until the questions themselves become transformed by our commitment to living with them. The asking of the questions together takes us to a new level of awareness and perception. Unfortunately, they often take generations to accomplish. We often have to go through war after war after war until we have finally learned how to ask the questions more usefully. The rhetoric of war has become so much a part of the very air we breathe, the unconscious assumptions we bring to disagreement, that it becomes incredibly difficult not to have a fighting mind.

When you hear the rhetoric;
when you hear the enemy talk;
when you hear the words that presuppose the
inevitability of conflict;
especially, if you find yourselves responding
--
whatever the issues, whatever
the context;

Remember and know for sure that,
however persuasive the logic,
however deep the feeling evoked,
however clear the apparent threat,

There is something crucial that is being left out.
Something vitally important is not being seen and heard.
The questions are not yet the right questions for resolution.

Life has its battles; but life, unless we make it so, is not a battle.

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