The Beloved Community

Franklin, NH Unitarian-Universalist Church, January, 2003

A generation ago, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, who would have been 74 years old on Wednesday, said that after seeing the brutality of the war in Vietnam "I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government." I believe that we face this same moral imperative today – how can we reject the violence of Columbine, the violence of gang warfare, the violence of suicide bombers, the violence of the World Trade Center bombings if we do not also reject the larger violence of bombing and invading a nation?

Dr. King said that "A time comes when silence becomes betrayal." His words echoed in my mind early Wednesday morning as my roommate drove me to the New Boston Air Station where three friends and I had agreed to block the entrance to an access road as the morning shift came in to operate the computers that send and receive the signals used to guide weapons and order soldiers into battle.

It was a cold morning, well below zero. And a plethora of local, state, and military police had gathered at the gate to meet us. Part of me panicked and wanted to turn back. But I thought of the silence and secrecy that shroud this military installation hidden in a sleep town, and of how history judged those who never dared to admit what happened in the concentration camps at the edge of small German towns that must have seemed just as quiet and just as beautiful as New Boston on early January mornings.

If that comparison seems extreme or leaves a bad taste in the mouth, think of the Trident submarines that lie beneath the ocean waiting for a signal from a satellite to launch their missiles – each submarine capable of launching missiles that could destroy 24 cities. The death of six million could be completed not in years but in hours. And though the missiles have yet to be fired they are used every day just as a gun that is never fired is used to rob a bank.

Nestled in the forests and fields of New Boston, New Hampshire, which are home to brown bears and deer and spotted salamanders and dozens of other species whose claim to this land is far older than our own, the New Boston Air Station is a critical link in this global system of satellites that gives our military a global reach. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times has written that "The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist -- McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force Navy and Marine Corps" The New Boston Air Station is part of the neural network that allows this fist to strike, protecting profits at the expense of the integrity of the web of life.

This station relays signals used in the frequent bombing raids against northern and southern Iraq. When war begins it will relay the signals that will send bombs falling on water treatment plants and electrical plants in Iraq, just as it did in 1991. It will relay the signals that will send an army of young, mostly poor and working class men and women, off to wage war against a people already starved and brutalized by ten years of economic sanctions, a people plagued by the depredations of both a cruel dictator and a superpower out of control, forces that claim to oppose each other but resemble each other in the way they place power above life. One of the soldiers who will be sent to fight is the brother of a close friend – a good soul who should never be exposed to the horrors of war.

Aldo Leopold, the founder of modern ecology, said that "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise."

Seeing the concrete and steel domes of the satellite receivers rising from fields that used to be farms, it becomes immediately clear at a visceral level that something is horribly wrong in New Boston.

It was our hope and our intention that by interrupting business as usual, by breaking the rhythm of the morning, we might cause someone driving onto the base to open up the heart enough to sense this simple truth, to pause to reflect on the work that is done there and ask whether it is really helping to shape the kind of world the people who work there want to live in. That perhaps our bodies standing in the way of the cars might bring to mind the bodies of those who live and die beneath the bombs, awakening compassion, making the deep suffering of the people of Iraq and the small suffering we ourselves risked truly redemptive.

I believe that somewhere deep inside, all of us know and remember that there is another network far older and more powerful than the Pentagon’s global satellite network -- the web of connection between all living beings and the lattice of energy that forms the very fabric of the universe. I think of the words of my favorite song by the Grateful Dead – "Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world." An invitation to all of us to remember who we are, to remember our true allegiances not to empires that rise and fall in the course of a few hundred years, but to the Earth and the universe that gave birth to us. This is our true identity, beloved children of the universe, formed of earth, air, water, fire, and spirit, inhabiting these forms for but a little while until the elements again disperse and reform. Let us use the time that we are here wisely and lovingly to create the Beloved Community Dr. King envisioned.