MARGINALIA

CRACKING UP
Can Peacemakers Have Humor and Hope?

Valerie Weaver-Zercher

The laughter struck me on a Tuesday evening, around 9:30 p.m., as I sat at my desk and addressed envelopes to George W. Bush, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleezza Rice. Inside were petitions signed by several hundred people who had gathered at the state capitol in Harrisburg on Sunday to protest the U.S. military strikes in Afghanistan. A group of us from area churches had begun planning several weeks after September 11, knowing that although our government hadn’t done anything yet, it was preparing for massive military action. Sure enough, as we sat down to lunch about an hour before leaving for the peace rally on October 7, the president announced the first air strikes.

Talk about timing. We held the rally, impressed with a new sense of the importance of our work. Some 300 people gathered on the front steps of the capitol. Reporters clipped microphones to our jackets. Speakers talked about the political relevance of Christ’s way of nonviolence. That evening we took phone calls from radio stations, counted the offering for New York and Afghanistan, read the names on the petitions we’d circulated, and watched the news.

And until a couple days later, on that evening of addressing envelopes, I had successfully warded off any feelings of hopelessness. After all, it had been a “successful” peace rally by any measure. I felt invigorated by the importance of such work, and, to be honest, rather impressed with myself.

It was writing the names of the president and cabinet members on envelopes on Tuesday that finally brought home the absurdity of it all. Suddenly, helplessness—or was it reality?—knocked over all my activist mental barriers. Opinion polls showed over 90 percent approval for what Bush was doing.

Did we really think our rendition of “O Healing River” (albeit a beautiful one) would convince passersby to become pacifists? That reporters who covered our event would sign off by saying, “So folks, come on down to these people’s next event and learn how you too, can become a voice for peace in our militaristic culture.” That our little petition would show up in Bush’s in-box, he’d read it, then storm into a cabinet meeting yelling, “Stop the bombing! Three hundred people in central Pennsylvania have a better idea!”

“What in the world do I think I’m doing?” I said to my husband, dropping my pen, and suddenly laughing. What could be more absurd than thinking that several hundred people—or even several thousand who were doing the same thing across the country—could change the mind of a commander-in-chief?

Then I stopped laughing, and we fell silent, as the despair that sometimes follows such laughter settled into my bones. Because the bombs were dropping even as I sealed the envelopes. Because my government was killing people as I pressed stamps into the corners of envelopes, gathered them into a pile, dropped them in the mailbox.

I’ve been analyzing my laughter ever since. It was, perhaps most obviously, cynical laughter, which recognizes the irony of small works in the face of gargantuan forces like war, famine, terror. It’s the scene in cartoons where Tweety Bird kicks Sylvester the Cat, or where a scrawny milksop takes on a prizefighter. There’s something inherently funny about the small taking on the big, the weak taking on the powerful and actually thinking they can win.

I think I was also laughing at myself, at the self-importance that had grown in me through the past several weeks of intense planning. While I probably never would have claimed that our peace rally would change national military policy, I would have said something nice about being faithful to Christ despite the odds against us, or that all significant social movements in history started with individuals or small groups of people, or that even a sliver of a chance that we’d make a difference made our work worthwhile. And I would have felt smug about being involved in a cause bigger than myself, and scornful of people who didn’t feel that same passion.

On that Tuesday evening, however, even while I still believed all those things, I realized I needed more than dreams of success—or even fantasies of being a great disciple of Christ—to keep me going in this type of work. After all, this was the first real rally I’d ever helped to plan; I probably shouldn’t be reaching burn-out just yet.

So I began nosing around for stories of hope in hopeless situations, looking for models of peace activists and others who keep working tirelessly for impossible goals. And my “hope” file grew larger by the day.

I went to the library and checked out Jane Goodall’s book Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey, in which she gives four reasons she remains hopeful about the future of our planet. She writes that the human brain, the resilience of nature, the energy and enthusiasm of young people, and the indomitable human spirit are what help her believe in a world “in which there will still be trees and chimpanzees swinging through them, and blue sky and birds singing.”

I read Henri Nouwen’s words in With Open Hands: “Hope includes an openness by which you wait for the other to make his loving promise come true, even though you never know when, where or how this might happen.”

I went to an event where longtime peacemakers spoke about their work. When asked what keeps her going, Israeli peace activist Razia Meron replied simply, “There’s a lot of work to do, so I do it. And I have friends to do it with.” Catholic Worker Chris Doucot added, “If you don’t do this work in community, you either lose your mind or you lose hope.”

I met with my spiritual director. We talked about reading the works of people like Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King Jr., meeting with like-minded people for support and prayer, and connecting all action with a deep spiritual life continually refreshed by a sense of God’s presence.

And I found lots of pretty stories told by people who are working for change and trying to convince themselves that they’re being successful: the throwing-the-starfish-back-into-the-sea one, and the one about how many snowflakes it takes to break a branch.

All of these things helped offset the despair that was waiting in the wings of my spirit that week following our rally. And there’s no doubt activists and others doing “impossible” work need spiritual and communal resources like these to maintain their energy for such work. But I’m beginning to think my laughter, cynical as it was, contained the seeds of another important resource for peacemakers: a sense of humor.

Laughter seems exactly the wrong place to start, especially when the issues we as peacemakers are working on are as far from funny as you can get. It’s no wonder activist-types get the reputation of being sour-faced, angry folk who go around chanting slogans and making the rest of us feel guilty. When you’ve seen starving children in Iraq—or like me, you have an overactive imagination that puts my son’s face on an emaciated body—you’re allowed to walk around scowling or cry yourself to sleep at night. And then, when you realize that your government is to blame—not indirectly, or in some existential way, but directly to blame—for the slow deaths of half a million children under the age of five in Iraq, you’re allowed to walk around angry.

But I’m coming to believe that the work of peacemaking, especially activist peacemaking in times of war, needs our humor nearly as much as it needs our grief. We need to appreciate and communicate to others the sheer absurdity of the facts such as these: Military spending will eat up at least 47 percent of the federal budget in 2002. Since 1940, the U.S. government spent $21 trillion on its military; during the same period, it invested only $4 trillion on health care and less than $2 trillion on education. Indeed, these statistics and others would truly be funny if they weren’t so sad.

We also need to laugh at ourselves, and to admit that some of our peacemaking efforts are just downright funny. A friend told me about a peace rally she went to recently at which the group was going to march to city hall. Problem was, they started out on the plaza right in front of city hall to begin with, which meant their march lasted all of 20 seconds or so.

The same friend told me about a friend of hers who works for the American Friends Service Committee and was part of the demonstrations against the Republican convention in Philadelphia in 2000. The demonstration space allotted to AFSC was so far from the convention center, however, that he and his coworkers didn’t see any Republicans the whole week. Instead, they spent their time talking to the “Save the Greyhound” folks parked next door.

Even if our protests and rallies and vigils go smoothly, there’s an element of the absurd in each. I mean, really: signs, chants, and songs in the face of B-52s, smart bombs, and special elite forces? It sounds like a scene from a cartoon.

But if it’s all a joke, and if what we’re laughing at is the sheer absurdity of action in the face of the seemingly insurmountable, then what’s the use of doing anything? How can laughter—whether at the idiocy of the world or our own action in it—sustain an activist any more than ego or anger or prayer?

Indeed, by itself, laughter can’t sustain us for the long haul. But a sense of humor, combined with grief and prayer and community and even pretty little stories about starfish, might.

Just as I was nearly finished writing this essay, I read a statistic that made me disagree with myself and want to junk the whole thing. Five thousand Iraqi children die every month as a result of the U.S./UN sanctions: that’s 5,000 little people as precious to their parents as my 10-month-old Samuel is to me. What could be more wildly inappropriate than laughter in the face of such carnage?

But strangely, almost impossibly, it’s exactly in those moments of despair and hopelessness that laughter comes in again. Because the only way I have found to deal with those times, when in my imagination I become an Iraqi mother whose child was killed by sanctions—or an American mother whose child was killed when a plane slammed into a building—is to believe that eventually, in ways I cannot now fathom, the holy laughter of God wins.

Indeed without my belief in the final victory of God’s laughter, the wars our country is fighting and the attacks of September 11 would drive me into depression or insanity. The pain of our planet, and of my simultaneous complicity and helplessness, is simply too much to bear.

So I choose to believe in laughter, my own and God’s. I choose to believe that in God’s eyes, the absurdity of these days lies not in our lame little peace rallies and our measly petitions but in the war-making machines that kill in response to killing. I choose to believe that in the end, whenever that is and whatever that means, God will have the last laugh.

And I think God’s laugh won’t be cynical like mine was on that Tuesday night. I think God’s laugh will be hearty and full-bodied, the kind that rolls from the belly into the throat and then bursts out from between the lips. I choose to believe that some distant day, far beyond the tears of September 11 and October 7, God’s healing laughter will cover us all.

—Valerie Weaver-Zercher, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, is the mother of an infant son and assistant editor and columnist for DreamSeeker Magazine.