Using the Weapons of the Weak -- 2
A Message by Chuck Fager, at the Quaker Conference on Torture, Guilford College, Greensboro NC June 3, 2006
First of all, because in the face of the forces that are establishing torture as an accepted instrument of policy, we too are among the powerless. We – and our votes – don’t count. This realization is very important, and not an easy one for Americans. It maybe especially uncomfortable for us here, because looking around, I see that most of us here are white, middle class, and pretty liberal to left-liberal in outlook.
As such, I suspect that many of us have been to diversity sessions and anti-racism workshops, where we’ve heard a lot about white privilege, and might even be feeling a bit guilty about all that privilege we are told we enjoy.
But how we name things is important, Friends, and here I think we need to be careful. I find the phrase "comforts" more helpful than "privilege." Whites like us have more creature comforts than many others in our society. We benefit from various preferences that are culpably connected with a past and presence of racism and oppression. That’s true enough.
But the term "privilege" connotes to me a connection to power, and this is where the term falls short. Because in relation to those who are truly in power today, especially where torture is concerned, I contend that even the wealthiest and most comfortable among us here is essentially without power. We too are among the powerless.
In fact, almost all Americans are now without real power, or access to power, in this matter, and most others relating to peace and war. Not only are we without real power, we’ve also lost most of the rights we once thought we had. What’s left is mainly pretense and illusion. And of course, creature comforts.
So our powerlessness may be more comfortable than some others, but it’s powerlessness still. If any of you are inclined to doubt this estimate, I propose a little experiment to test it out:
When you get home on Monday, call the office of your senator, or Member of Congress, and ask for an appointment to discuss torture with her or him, face to face, for half an hour. Call again the next Monday and every Monday, and see how long it takes for an appointment to happen.
I suggest it will take a long time. In fact, I have here a check for $100, drawn on my personal account, made out to QUIT. I’ll give it to QUIT’s Treasurer as soon as someone here can verify that you have spent fifteen minutes face-to-face with your Senator or Member of Congress talking about torture as U.S. policy.
One condition: I’m talking here about actual power-holders; so Democrats don’t count. And you know what? I think I’m going to get to keep this check for a long time.
So if Quakers trying to end torture are among the comfortably weak and powerless, I suggest that if we’re to have any hope of success, we set out to learn from the widow of Luke 18 and deploy the weapons of the weak. That’s the second reason the widow’s story is a model for us. And what are these weapons? Remember the initials: TVA
Tenacity, Veracity, and Audacity.
If you look at the history of serious Quaker social witness, that’s what you will find. Take slavery: we worked against it in the US tenaciously, for a hundred years. It wasn’t a fad or a fashion. And in those generations of struggle, Quakers kept telling the truth, that slavery was an abomination before God and man. And they did this in many ways, some as audacious as Lucretia Mott facing down mobs with her eloquence, and others daring to start the Underground Railroad – and they had the audacity to run that railroad right through this campus, by the way.
There are other examples – but that’s the past. What about now? What does TVA mean for Quaker work against torture?
I can be very concrete. Tenacity means that we prepare for a struggle that we expect to last longer than most of us in this room will live. To do that, as we return home tomorrow, we will need to keep our ears open, especially our inward ear, the one that hears the insistent whispers of the Spirit.
We need to keep that inward ear open, because some among us will are going to start hearing some insistent whispers of calling: