Last Saturday, I went to Nashville’s Centennial Park to attend the peace rally organized by the Nashville Peace Coalition. I went, armed with a tape recorder, a camera and a notepad, to try to find some logical answers to important questions of plicy. I didn’t discover much in the way of plausible foreign policy solutions, but I did uncover a world previously unbeknownst to me: the wacky world of the peace rally-goer.
I was indeed unprepared for what I found, but my collection of pictures, quotes, and observations should sufficiently tell the strange tale. So, if you think you might enjoy a tale about confused pastors, crunchy hippies, gender-ambiguous nuns, sit back and relax.
I. Hippie Boy
Michael Thomas from Summertown, Tennessee is the quintessential hippie, lost in a bygone era when “earthy” clothes and ugly hats donning sewn-on peace signs were acceptable. I rightly guessed this “first stop” on my adventure would be low on substance but high on comedy (and perhaps other substances).
Sure enough, Hippy Boy did not disappoint. When I asked what he hoped to see in the future, Thomas replied, “personal peace and world peace.” When I asked him to suggest some sort of policy, he responded with the first of many jaw-droppers on that cold, wet Saturday.
“The journey to world peace begins with the commitment to inner peace…When everyone is making an effort for internal peace, the immediate result is peaceful communication…Then, there can be no concept of war.”
What a phenomenal policy suggestion. Here’s how I imagine it might play out:
Hillary Clinton: Mr. President, I believe I’ve come up with a way to be the administration that accomplishes the eradication of war for good.
President Obama: A tea party with terrorists?
Hillary Clinton: Even better!
President Obama: Oh my!
Hillary Clinton: It’s simple.We just need to find our inner peace.
President Obama: (Long pause)…What?
II. The Nutty Professor
While Hippie Boy and I were discussing the potentiality of inner peace, I noticed a kind-looking man come up and hold his umbrella over me, as I had forgotten to bring one and my recorder was getting wet. I was quite appreciative and decided I would solicit a response out of him next. I introduced myself as a writer for the Torch, and this peace-loving, non-confrontational, open-minded member of the left declared, “Oh, so you’re the enemy.”
Delighted to hear that this man was familiar with the Torch, I discovered he was a Vanderbilt math professor Eric Schechter. Schechter had slightly more specific (but still nutty) policy prescriptions than Hippie Boy.
“(We need) people to get along better with one another” Schechter said. “More people should talk to each other.” That, says Schechter, is the way to “turn enemies into friends.”
I asked for more specifics, a laborious process that became a sort of theme for the day.
“If you get to know people better, you’re not as likely to fight with them,” Schechter said. “I would be pleased if a lot of world leaders would spend weeks at each other’s houses and bring along the wife and kids.”
Naturally, the day at the anti-war rally would have felt incomplete without a socialist rant. Professor Schechter duly delivered, ending with a nutty little definition of capitalism.
“Every man being a hermit trying to protect his own hoard.”
III. Sister So-Am-I
Next, I met an older protester dressed in a pink nun’s garb. He introduced himself as Sister So-Am-I from the Sisters of the Perpetual Indulgence, an order of so-called “21st century nuns.” The all-male group was at the rally in solidarity with the peace movement, dressed in drag and donning face paint. Sister So-Am-I told me he was here at the rally to present a “rosary against U.S. terrorism.” On the subject of the “long history of U.S. terrorism,” he declared that it “started when the pilgrims came over.” The mental image of a pilgrim with an M-16, jumping off the ship was more than slightly amusing. The sister then tried to explain the purpose of his special rosary.
“The rosary (is for) remembering the Goddess, to honor and read the beads of ongoing governments in this country who somehow keep participating with the banks of the world and an ongoing war-economy,” he said. “Some day let green energy guide us into supporting the mother and retooling our economies into peace economies. It’s so simple!”
If anybody finds any of that simple, I’ll have what they’re having.
IV. Sister Enya Face
I asked another member of the group named Sister Enya Face what he was doing at the rally.
“My mission as a sister is to spread peace and love wherever I can,” he said. “I’d love to see the end of the war in Iraq.”
I asked what he felt the best way to accomplish this legitimate goal was, and I wasn’t entirely prepared for the rather interesting suggestion.
“Open our hearts,” he said, and “recognize the spiritual in all of us.”
Maybe that one would play out better than attempting to find internal peace. I told Sister Enya Face that I wanted to know about more specific policy ideas.
“I’m not a policy person,” the sister said, in what was perhaps the most honest self-appraisal of the day. “You know, I may look pretty, but I can’t always come up with the details, but I trust there are people that can.”
V. The Peaceful Pastor
I was pleased to be able to speak with Pastor Sonnye Dixon of Hobson United Methodist Church in Nashville, who attended the rally to spread his religious message of peace. By comparison, Dixon was one of the less bizarre characters I encountered, albeit with a radical perspective on government policy. He complained about the failure of the United States government to pay for the treatment of diseases while we spend a great deal on defense.
“That’s terrorism,” he said bluntly.
I followed up by asking how Dixon might respond to someone who believed that our large defense budget contributes to the eradication of violent forces and the subsequent preservation of peace. His answer was nothing short of confusing.
“If we’re talking about an attack and how it is that we’re defending ourselves against the attack,” he said. “How is it that we defend ourselves against the attack of our own ambivalence toward people who are dying here?”
VI. The Skipper
Next, I came across Karl Meyer, who was dressed in a full yellow rainsuit and was holding up a homemade poster, which depicted a map of Europe and Asia riddled with arrows and pictures of oil drums. The map, Meyer explained, showed the true motives of President Bush and President Obama for leaving troops in the Middle East: oil lines. After a lengthy explanation of each individual line and how it somehow contributed to an international crisis, I complimented his creativity and healthy imagination (It was uncanny how the arrows managed to conveniently curve themselves through the Ukraine and Georgia).
I pressed Meyer to consider the possibility that Bush’s only true motive was national defense. Unexpectedly, he responded by providing a justification for the attacks of September 11th.
“The attack on the World Trade Centers reflects the fact that because of the policy of military domination in the Middle East, and military and political control of the Middle East and Central Asia, that’s the only reason that people from those countries are interested in attacking the United States,” he said “It’s their only defense against the immense U.S. military power. The imbalance is so great between any tactic that they can use and the military power of the United States.”
He also told me he believes that “we’re manufacturing terrorists by our military presence,” and that because of their low budgets, we cannot blame them for their “improvised” methods of warfare. By improvised, I assume Meyer means the deliberate destruction of innocent civilians.
VII. The Captain
I eventually spoke with Chris Lugo from the Nashville Peace Coalition. Lugo organized the event and serve as its emcee. He shed some light on the purpose of the event by noting that it was to commemorate the sixth anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq.
“The point is to send a pretty short message out to the community,” Lugo said. “We would like all of the troops out of Iraq and we are opposed to the escalation of troops in Afghanistan.”
The responses took on an ironic quality as Lugo continued.
“Whether you think the mission has been accomplished or not accomplished, I think what really matters is the will of the Iraqi people and Iraq has voted for us to leave,” he said. “It is important to respect every country’s democratic process.”
I asked Lugo whether or not he was aware that Iraq had no democracy before our intervention.
“Iraq is much worse off now than when the war began,” he said. “That would be my answer. It kinda skirts the question a little bit, but it kinda doesn’t.”
At least Lugo and I are on the same page about something. Kinda.
VIII. The Libertarians
I was able to speak with Daniel Lewis, the chairman of the Nashville and Davidson County Libertarian Party, and Lisa Kleis, the vice chair. As they explained, Lewis, Kleis and other Nashville Libertarians attended the rally in support of peace and opposition to the war.
“As libertarians, we do not believe in initiation of force and certainly a war is an initiation of force and we don’t believe in that and we believe in doing things peacefully without using force.”
I asked how they separate themselves ideologically from the other peace activists.
“Some of the more progressive people here would want to implement social justice by using the force of government to do that,” David said. “We on the other hand would rather have people left free to make their own choices and have justice taken care of in that way.”
Daniel and Lisa staunchly support bringing home not just the troops in the Middle East, but U.S. armed forces all around the world. Their justification for this stance amounted to a simple proclamation of their libertarian beliefs. I asked Daniel if they thought there would be any negative ramifications of immediately withdrawing troops from an instable area.
“No, not really. We shouldn’t have been there to start with and basically military troops causing more harm,” he said. “Just because we made mistakes six years ago to go in there…no reason to continue those mistakes.”
Lisa believes we are in the Middle East for oil.
“It’s the big money oil people who got this going on,” she said. “This is why Bush went into Iraq, this is why Bush went into Afghanistan, this is why Bush is an idiot. It’s all about big, big money.”
With that, I put away the recorder and left this quirky little community of peace activists. In all honesty, much of what I heard and saw was entirely too zany to make a great deal of commentary about. In over an hour of tape, not one individual could give me a response that was able to reconcile the importance of national defense with a desire to end the war for sensible reasons. While it is difficult to draw conclusions from gender-confused nuns and nutty professors, it is this very disservice to their own cause that is the overall most important observation of that weird and wet Saturday.
Mike Sandler is a sophomore at Vanderbilt University. He can be reached at michael.j.sandler@vanderbilt.edu
