It Runs in the Family (15 page)

It was so hard to watch. Seamus, ten months old at the time, lay asleep on my lap through much of the film, as kids hit, mocked, poked, strangled, punched, and threatened other kids who didn’t fit in because of their looks, race, or sexuality. Seamus is already strong and determined. Will he grow up bullied or become a bully? Or neither? Or both?

Besides the loogie in the hat incident, I was not bullied as a kid. I was hassled and mocked and ganked (when big kids steal from little kids). Once a boy asked me what time it was and when I stopped to tell him, he ganked my Walkman. These were not personal attacks and they were not hateful. It was almost natural, the way lions eat gazelles, weeds choke out lettuce, or Starbucks supplants the local coffee shop. They were just bigger, stronger kids wanting something and taking it.

As a boy, my brother suffered a little bit more. Sometimes, he got hit for no reason, mostly by people he did not even know. While he waited for the bus one day, a car full of guys pulled up to the curb. A boy who was smaller than Jerry got out of the back seat, ran at Jerry, and punched him in the face. Then the kid climbed back in the car and it pulled away in a squeal of tires and a whoop of dangerous elation. Jerry told me that as a kid he had a few deep fears—the bomb and the Pentagon and people who acted out their anger at the world. “Dad’s guidance was helpful here. He didn’t ever make me feel like I deserved such treatment, he was clearly sorry that it had happened, and he didn’t act as if his concern was actually going to solve anything, which it didn’t. It was my cross to bear, and I had to bear it. He couldn’t do it for me.”

Perhaps in response, Jerry got bigger and stronger and more imposing and more gentle all at once.

My favorite “getting ganked” story involves a hat (when you cut your own hair, as I did throughout middle school, hats do come in handy). My brother and I rode our bikes to the school playground on a Saturday. Somehow we had cobbled together enough money to buy a can of Pringles potato chips and were riding around eating them. These older boys showed up and chatted us up. And they pulled our bikes out of our hands and rode away on them.

As the boys rode away, I pulled off my hat and yelled in frustration—I might have said something like, “Not again!” And then all of a sudden the boys were coming back. One of them looked at me carefully. “You a girl?” he asked.

“Yep,” I replied, wondering where this was headed.

“We don’t steal from girls,” he said. Then he and the other boy handed us back our bikes.

“She your sister?” he asked Jerry. “You shouldn’t let people steal from her, you should protect her.”

The thought that Jerry should be protecting me had never occurred to either of us. Hmm. We shared our Pringles, chatted about this and that, and then the boys went off. Jerry and I could hardly believe our good luck. We lived to ride another day!

Nonviolence means more than not being violent. It means more than being meek and turning the other cheek. Being nonviolent means digging for the root causes of behaviors, policies, and attitudes. It means understanding, addressing, changing, resisting, and converting. All of that begins with asking why.

But that is not enough. Watching the film
Bully
, I was struck by the helplessness of the adults—the parents, heartbroken and angry; the administrators, cautious, equivocal, and overwhelmed; the police, ready to lock someone up. It is so easy for everyone to cast blame—parents blame schools, schools blame parents, and everyone blames the media and video games.

What is the answer? Smaller, better-funded schools for one, where kids don’t get lost and aren’t invisible, where teachers and administrators are accountable. We also need more involved parents, which means a living wage and fair working conditions for all. Daily anti-violence and conflict resolution education in schools would also help, by providing a bulwark against the violence endemic to our culture, giving kids the tools to articulate their feelings and resolve problems as they arise.

Of course, all of these common-sense responses come down to resources. But maybe, if we disarm the biggest bully on the block, the military-industrial complex, we will have the money we need to de-bully our schools.

Once, when Patrick was a kid, he and all his friends were sitting under a big table in a circle. They were talking in emphatic and verbose gibberish—each taking a turn and getting more and more animated as they went along. Finally, one of the adults had to ask, “What are you kids doing?” “We are having a meeting,” one of the kids declared with that no-duh kind of voice that they perfect at such a young age. I read not too long ago that if kids get to see their parents at work, they will mimic that work in their play, as Patrick and the play-group kids did. It is evolutionary. Since the dawn of time, kids have learned how to hunt, forage, farm, and worship by playing. They try on different roles within family and society through their play and learn how to navigate the world.

When we were little, my brother and I played “Protester.” We would fill baby bottles with water (the water was pretend blood), close the massive front door of our house, eye it from the bottom of the stairs, and then run up as we unscrewed the bottle, closed our eyes, and flung our water at the highest part of the door, while loudly decrying war and militarism. The other sibling would play the part of the police officer, wrestling the “protester” to the ground—which was tricky on our marble front steps—and carting them off to the paddy wagon. If the game was good, the protester would continue to testify throughout the arrest, maintaining a noble and nonviolent dignity during the police manhandling. But most of the time the game devolved into simple, plotless, unredemptive roughhousing.

Other times we would dump ashes that we had gathered from our woodstove. It was harder to throw ashes than the adult protesters at the Pentagon made it look. You had to get the ashes out of the bag smoothly (hard) and fling them just right (harder). If you did it wrong, it was neither haunting nor evocative—it was just a pile of ashes on the steps. Either way, it was a pain to clean up, so we only used ashes occasionally.

We learned these games from watching our mom and dad, friends, and community members mark the Pentagon with blood and get arrested so often growing up. We had doctor friends who took blood from anyone who was willing to give it and then we stowed it in the freezer alongside the ice cubes and frozen, concentrated orange juice. The blood was supposed to remind the workers of the Pentagon that even though they went to work in clean, antiseptic offices every day, the work they did shed blood all over the world. Often, they walked right through the blood on their way to work, tracking brown stains down the hall.

The ashes were used to remind the workers of the people turned to ash in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the United States dropped nuclear weapons in 1945. The bombs incinerated tens of thousands in an instant.

The pillars of the Pentagon are made of white marble. The blood, thrown from a plastic baby bottle, splashed bright and red and nearly indelible, soaking into the cracks of the stone like water into a sponge. The workers would spray bleach and water and soap, and scrub with long-handled brushes. They had a whole team of people tasked with protest cleanup. They wore green jumpsuits. I remember that one of the men on the team only had one arm and he would pin his arm flap to his shoulder, giving him a sort of lopsided, martial look.

They were grim in the face of their task. After the AIDS crisis struck, they also wore hazmat suits complete with booties and head gear. Sometimes protesters would try and block them from cleaning up, chanting, “You can’t wash the blood away.” But the blood always got washed away, and it made me uncomfortable that we were most often pitted against the janitors instead of the generals.

When the police knew we were coming to protest, they wrapped the pillar in plastic. It was unsightly and probably a lot of work, but it protected the pristine marble from being marred and stained by blood. Over the years, the pillars got marginally thinner, worn down by so much blood splashing and spray painting, so much power washing and scrubbing. This was seen as a minor victory. We were making an impact! Like drops of water carving rocks over millennia, we were changing the Pentagon with our actions and our presence. Eventually, however, they treated the marble with some sort of polymer that made it easier for the maintenance workers to clean the blood and paint off.

Blood and ash. Basically, we made a big mess. I don’t remember if we just outgrew our game or if our folks got tired of the spectacle and mess, but we stopped playing Protester at some point. That kind of protesting at the Pentagon also came to an end. Not even the most intrepid protester can get anywhere near the Riverside entrance to the Pentagon anymore. The redesign of the whole Pentagon complex after the destruction on September 11, 2001 makes most of the building unapproachable to all but workers with IDs. I think our game reflected our parents’ and friends’ seriousness about their work. But by switching back and forth between protester and police, we each got to experience the affrontedness and exasperation of one side as well as the outrage and rectitude of the other. The game did not make me want to throw blood at the Pentagon, and it also did not make me want to arrest people.

And now I am forty and I haven’t done either of those things, but I have risked a lot for peace and justice. Not as often or as intensely as my mom and dad, and not since I have had kids, but I have been a brazen lawbreaker within the context of community.

In 2005, I helped to establish Witness Against Torture when twenty-five of us flew to Cuba with the hope of gaining access to Guantánamo Bay, the U.S. naval base where more than seven hundred men, called “enemy combatants” by our government, were then detained. We were only taking up an invitation that President George W. Bush made to European Union leaders in response to allegations of torture and human rights abuses there. “You’re welcome to go down yourselves…and tak[e] a look at the conditions,” Bush said.

So we did. The naval base authorities denied our requests for entry and so we fasted and vigiled for five days, before returning home to organize a movement to shut down Guantánamo, and to end torture and indefinite detention. The first “unlawful enemy combatants” arrived at Guantánamo on January 11, 2002. The American people have since learned the truth—the vast majority of these men were not the “worst of the worst,” as Bush administration officials claimed. They were chicken farmers, illiterate tribesmen, and well-traveled, well-meaning students: 93 percent of the men at Guantánamo were captured by bounty hunters or allied governments such as Pakistan and handed over to U.S. forces, according to a study by Mark Denbeaux, a professor at Seton Hall Law School.

Our walk began in Santiago de Cuba on December 7 and over five days we walked about seventy miles, camping on the side of the road at night. Sometimes we walked in silence, meditating on the stories of prisoners in Guantánamo. I walked, thinking about Mohamed and Murat, two teenagers who were inside Guantánamo.

Mohamed el Gharani was fourteen when he was arrested in an October 2001 raid on a religious school in Pakistan. Transferred to Guantánamo a few months later, he was subjected to routine abuse. According to his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, the Chad-born teenager had been singled out for mistreatment because he vocally objected to being called “nigger.” Mohamed is not the only juvenile imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay. There were thirteen other young men who came to Guantánamo as teenagers. El Gharani was repatriated to Chad in 2009.

Murat Kurnaz was born to a Turkish family in Bremen, Germany. After September 11, he traveled to learn more about Islam in Pakistan, where he was arrested. He was eventually sent to Guantánamo. As the son of “guest workers,” Kurnaz does not have German citizenship, even though he was born there. For a long time, Turkish officials maintained that Kurnaz was German and therefore not their problem. Even after conceding their responsibility, Ankara did not pressure Washington to release Kurnaz. His mother begged “for a sign that my son is alive, that he is being treated justly, that he has not been tortured.” Kurnaz was released on August 24, 2006. Like other released Guantánamo captives, he was transported by plane in shackles, wearing a muzzle, opaque goggles, and sound-blocking earmuffs. He was reported to have been denied food and water during the seventeen-hour flight. He now lives with his parents in Germany and has a desk job, which he enjoys. He says he does not hold ordinary Americans responsible for the abuse he endured.

Inside the huge base, which straddles both sides of Guantánamo Bay, is Cuba’s only McDonald’s, state-of-the-art recreation and sports facilities for American soldiers and their families, two airstrips, and a desalinization plant, because Cuba cut off the base’s water supply. Also somewhere in the far-flung slice of strip mall Americana were Camp Delta, Camp Echo, Camp Iguana, and Camp V, where Murat, Mohammed, and five hundred other men were imprisoned.

We set up our camp along the Cuba fence, five miles from the prison, closer than Mohamed’s father or Murat’s mother have been to their sons in years. The dust and scrub brush next to the fence was our home for the next five days as we prayed and fasted.