Jan Willis: "Do Something"

I've started working on the blog for UGA's Invisible Children chapter, so expect a few posts from there. Here's one on Jan Willis' visit to UGA.

On Wednesday, Dr. Jan Willis, professor of Relgion at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, was the guest lecturer for my Religion in Literature class, and later that evening, gave a presentation titled “Buddhism, Nonviolence, and Dr. King”.

Dr. Willis is an amazing woman - an accomplished author, but also an accomplished human being. When she was in the tenth grade, she marched with Dr. King in Alabama. Several years later, she traveled to India, looking for answers, and studied under Tibetan lama Thubten Yeshe.

I had the opportunity to ask her a question after her lecture to my class and, trying - and very likely failing - to not make a fool of myself, asked something along the lines of, “What was it like to grow up in such a troubled time, and especially to be traveling abroad as the US tried to tear itself apart?” An average question to be sure, her answer was more poetic than I ever could have hoped for.

She said, in short, that there was a general feeling of hope. Even though the sixties saw, within five years, the assasinations of JFK, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kennedy, she said, there was a great sense that things would get better. Even as she discussed the Vietnam War, she was quick to point out that her generation, the college kids, were working for the world they wanted to live in. She mentioned that she is asked to give lectures to people her own age, people who have seen the world slowly stop to care, and she gives them this advice: “Do something. Build a house with Habitat, do anything. Do something.”

In the later lecture, Dr. Willis devoted a lot of time to what she discussed earlier in the day. She mentioned the great leaders of her time, all devoted to civil rights, but all devoted to peace, too. And then she mentioned Ghandi’s now-famous quote, used as the motto for “Step Up”: Become the change that you want to see in the world.

Our club has an incredible opportunity. We are at a major university with the resources to reach the entire world. We have the professors to guide us, the students to support us, and the world to challenge us. I look at Sanford Stadium on a game day and ask myself, “What would the world be like if those 90,000 people devoted themselves to something other than the Bulldog Nation?

And I say it’s about time we find out. [Originally posted at: Turning Apathy into Activism]

Rock on.

A Challenge

We have passed the five-year mark in Iraq and we still debate over whether or not the war was justified. And sorry to disappoint any readers who were looking for a debate, but I'm not going to get into discussions on justification. Nor will I allow any comments that start such discussions. That's not the point right now.

Instead, I want to look at the actions of Christian Peacemaker Teams and their operations within Iraq. For those who don't know, CPT has been in Iraq since October 2002. Among the team-members was Christian activist and author Shane Claiborne. I'm actually a really big fan of Mr. Claiborne, despite objections I have to some of his teachings. And I applaud CPT's work in Iraq as a means of achieving solidarity with Iraqis. But I can't help but wonder - why did they not go until 2002? CPT has been around since 1984. Why were they not in Iraq when Saddam Hussein was massacring his own people? Were Iraqis not worth saving until the US became the aggressor? Was Saddam Hussein not worth opposing?

No, the skeptic in me thinks it's something a little more logical. Non-violence is not as effective as they claim. Sure, it works when opposing rational nation-states. Non-violence worked (eventually) against racist institutions in the US, South Africa, and India. But did it work in Tiannemen Square? Did it work in Nazi Germany (Bonhoeffer, a pacifist leader, didn't seem to think so)? Did it work in Bosnia? Or Rwanda?

So now we sit here, five years later, and the CPT has a chance to show that they stand up to all evil, not just the violence of Western powers. Tibet is slipping into chaos as China cracks down on civil rights. CPT, according to their own principles, should be "getting in the way" of Chinese soldiers. If they truly think that non-violence always work, then they should be in Tibet.

Rock on.

Edit: Allow me a brief explanation of my stance on war: I, like all people, believe that war is bad, to put it quite simply. I believe that it is not a sustainable foreign policy, nor should it be resulted to in any but the worst situations, to include the prevention of genocides and other massacres and to end mass violence - known by some as peacemaking. I support self-determination until it leads to violence. As a Christian, I believe in forgiveness, but I also believe in helping others and cannot stand by and watch as others suffer.