--from Petersburg
by Phil Berrigan

February 1998

Dear Friends,
The graphic celebrates "a place and a name" yad vashem! YAD VASHEM is the name given to the memorial to the dead of the Holocaust.  But a memorial as well, a place and a name as well for the "righteous ones of the nations of the world" who acted to save the Jews.  To be called righteous, it is not enough that one live as a theoretician but as an activist - one must do positive deeds: "Execute justice in the morning and deliver from the hand of the oppressor the one who has been robbed." (Jeremiah 21:12)

In so much of human experience we are forced to distinguish among the victims, the victimizers, and the bystanders.  The bystanders are the most curious; they are the ordinary human article who stay home - safe enough if compliant enough.  They can't be charged with taking part in any evil act; they watch as evil proceeds.  They create the norm, define what is common.  When a whole population takes on the status of bystander, the victims are without allies.  How is it that indifference, which on its own does no apparent harm, ends by washing itself in the very horrors it means to have nothing to do with?  The act of turning around - while carrying a club or gun or bomb - is an act of brutality; but the act of turning away, however empty-handed and harmlessly, remains an act.  Indifference grows lethal.

A sober reflection for a sober time, my friend!  The reflection is sober because of what friends face and deal with - without adequate allies, which is to say, without a movement for justice and peace worthy of the name.  Why else is this government able to imprison so many for so long; to tie up people's lives with fines, restitution, probation, refusals to return to their homes, refusal status in prison?  Michele Naar-Obed and her family are not allowed to come home.  Steve Baggarly and Mark Colville and their families and communities are about to face thes ame censure.  Each of us in prison now labeled with "REFUSAL" status are likely to face the same censure upon release.  How has this come to be?  And where is the outcry?  And what are the implications?

A sober reflection for a sober time, my friend!  The reflection is sober because of what our world has to face and deal with - the spiritual and social consequences of prostituting power into something it is not sows bitter, poisonous seed - spiritual dislocation, moral paralysis, epidemic war and ethnic bloodshed, global pollution, corporate supremacy, usury and profitgrubbing, urbanization, drug consumption, vapidity of religion, foolhardy biological research.  Virtually everything in modern society screams of egotism and rebellion against God.  Little wonder that the Gospel authors wrote of Christ's temptations to false power - economic, religious, and political.  His temptations and ours.  Idolatry is our fundamental sin, and false power is the idol's spurious muscle.

Christ resisted his temptations.  In this time of prison, I am learning to resist mine.  And that is time worth living.  I am well and more than surviving.  Reading, writing, praying, exercising, being, reflecting, watching, waiting.

[Phil Berrigan is serving a two year prison sentence for disarming an Aegis-class destroyer on Ash Wednesday, 1997, as part of the Prince of Peace Plowshares.]

next:    Writings from Jail, by Carl Kabat
back to Reflections
back to The Nuclear Resister, #112

last updated July 10 1998