Peace by Peace: Risking Public Action, Creating Social Change

Peace by Peace

Movement Rhetoric/Rhetoric’s Movements

Victoria J. Gallagher

Also of Interest

Activist Literacies: Transnational Feminisms and Social Media Rhetorics, Jennifer Nish

The Democratic Ethos: Authenticity and Instrumentalism in US Movement Rhetoric after Occupy, A. Freya Thimsen

Liturgy of Change: Rhetorics of the Civil Rights Meeting, Elizabeth Ellis Miller

Peace by Peace

Risking Public Action, Creating Social Change

Lisa Ellen Silvestri

Copyright © 2024 by Lisa Ellen Silvestri

Published by the University of South Carolina Press

Columbia, South Carolina 29208

uscpress.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024031918

ISBN: 978-1-64336-519-0 (hardcover

ISBN: 978-1-64336-520-6 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-64336-521-3 (ebook)

If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song). Words and music by Lee Hays and Pete Seeger. TRO – © Copyright 1958 (renewed) 1962 (renewed) Ludlow Music, Inc., New York, New York. International Copyright Secured. Made in USA. All Rights Reserved including Public Performance for Profit. Used by Permission.

Cover art: MURRIRA / Shutterstock.com

Cover designer: Emily Weigel

To Jane and Arlo

Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.

—Wendell Berry, Manifesto

Contents

List of Illustrations

Series Editor’s Preface

Preface

Introduction. Crowdsourcing Hope

One

Trust Your Partners

Two

Know Your Limits

Three

See from the Outside

Four

Embrace Maladjustment

Five

Speak Up

Six

Take Risks

Seven

Create Space

Eight

Think Big, Step Small

Conclusion. Doing Peace

Questions for Reflection and Discussion

Notes

Index

List of Illustrations

Figure 1. A Sketch of Practical Wisdom

Series Editor’s Preface

The University of South Carolina series Movement Rhetoric/Rhetoric’s Movements builds on the Press’s long-standing reputation in the field of rhetoric and communication and its cross-disciplinary commitment to studies of civil rights and civil justice. Books in the series address two central questions: In historical and contemporary eras characterized by political, social, and economic movements enacted through rhetorical means, how—and with what consequences—are individuals, collectives, and institutions changed and transformed? How, and to what extent, can analyses of rhetoric’s movements in relation to circulation and uptake help point the way to a more equal and equitable world?

In this engaging and timely monograph, Lisa Ellen Silvestri examines our human capacity for peace by showcasing smaller scale, achievable peace acts carried out by everyday people. She contextualizes this work in relation to the contemporary condition of drift, characterized by dislocation, fragmentation, and disconnection, and phronesis, characterized as the capacity to discern a practical course of action, one that preserves noble or ethical values, in unusual or complicated situations. Each of the cases in the book illuminates phronesis as the capacity to acknowledge the uncertainties and struggles of life and yet be compelled toward positive action anyway. The book is meant to not offer solutions but rather offer templates that introduce alternative modes of engagement in contemporary civic life; that is, modes that can be utilized by all of us. This accessible and hugely compelling book is for academic and nonacademic readers alike and a significant addition to the series.

Preface

Well, I’ve got a hammer

And I’ve got a bell

And I’ve got a song to sing

All over this land

—Pete Seeger And Lee Hays, If I Had A Hammer, 1962

Without knowing it, I’ve been writing this book for a long time. Since childhood, really. Thanks to my parents, I grew up listening to the folk music of Woody and Arlo Guthrie, Lead Belly, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Peter, Paul and Mary. Their songs taught me about the hopes, sorrows, values, and beliefs of ordinary people living everyday lives. The folk tradition recounts our human history as ramblers and tells of our inborn interconnectedness with each other and with the earth. Recurrent themes usually involve love, war, longing, justice, death, and family. Stories like the ones relayed through folk music are ostensibly authorless; handed down from generation to generation serving as signposts to navigate life. As a kid, singing along felt like an exercise in recitation, a way of not forgetting so I wouldn’t get lost.

For forty years I’ve been singing the same songs, revisiting the same ideas, dog-earing the same pages, writing the same notes to myself, and coming back to the same realizations. This book is an outcome of that process. It’s not the end of it, of course, just another one of my attempts to build a cairn of temporary understanding about what it is we are supposed to be doing here. Now, I don’t claim to be a troubadour, but I wrote this book in honor of the folk tradition.¹ In it, I tell you about some people I’ve met who are carrying out the human project in ways that align with a folkloric invocation of the human spirit. They are regular people engaged in localized, right action on behalf of a greater good. The book captures the conversations I had with those people, but the process of writing it has felt more like a conversation with myself. More specifically, an imaginary conversation with my kids. It is part personal reflection, part critical theory, part ethnographic account, and part prayer. A medley, by heart.

As you read, you will notice that I use the word person as opposed to "individual. That is a deliberate choice. The individual is an isolated unit—what academics call a neoliberal subject—functioning and acting alone. The person, however, can never be properly understood outside the framework of social relationships and obligations. Theologian and peace activist Thomas Merton writes that a person’s reason for existence is not survival, efficiency, or competition, but truth, justice, love, and liberty. In his words, fulfillment comes through being called to collaborate with others in building a world of security and peace."² Leave it to a monk to point out how much we need each other. In this respect, I occasionally refer to we and us to denote the generalized human person. I know generalizations are fraught, their implications presumptuous, unfair, and even hurtful. Please forgive me. I appreciate your generous reading.

I also owe a heap of gratitude to the scholars, activists, artists, and changemakers who I reference in these pages. I hope my representation of you and your work reflects my esteem. If I could, I would formally reference all the people who sourced my motivation for this book but many of those ideas came out of conversations over beers, in car rides, on hiking trails, in phone calls or by electronic mail. Nonetheless here’s my attempt—Mike Briggs, David Depew, Beka and Charlie Wilkins-Pepiton, Ron Large, Robbie Newell, Carol Myers, Kathryn Wehr, Mat Rude, Aubrey Purdy, and Renu Pariyadath. I hope you can hear some of yourself in this book. To the LDP: Caitlin Bruce, Heather Woods, Emily Winderman, Michaela Frischherz, and Kim Singletary, and to my friend Casey Schmitt for your honest feedback and for pushing me to bring my voice forward in my writing. I haven’t published anything in the last five years without your support, so thank you for being my first audience and my security blanket. To Emma VanderWeyst for your help transcribing the interviews. Thanks to Aurora Bell and Victoria Gallagher for listening to my idea and taking a chance on this uncommon project, to the anonymous reviewers, and the whole production team. And finally, this book wouldn’t exist without the people I interviewed for it, especially the ones who became chapters—Shawn, Curtis, Gidon, Estelle, Nawal, Ralph, Shannon, Drew, and Keith. I think you are amazing. You are doing the type of work we should all be doing. Thank you.

I am also deeply humbled and enormously indebted to the people who have had to live with me during this book’s creation. Jane, my stated muse. Thank you for making me laugh every day and reminding me about poetry. Arlo, you came in clutch, right when I needed you. Thank you for your tenderness and good listening. And Peter, my compass, and my co-conspirator. Thank you for helping me travel, tolerating my moods, taking me on walks, and indulging my midnight soliloquies. What would I do without you?

Introduction

Crowdsourcing Hope

Out on the edge of darkness there rides a peace train.

—Cat Stevens, Peace Train, 1971

In the summer of 2018, I became a mother. Those who are familiar with the gamut of parenthood might remember well the early days of fatigue, isolation, and throat-choking vulnerability. From the window of our milking bunker (my droll reference to the nursery), my newborn and I looked out onto a particularly bleak world. Forest fires engulfed the western United States where we lived at the time. Everything outside our window appeared in an eerie sepia tone like an old-timey photograph. There were no birds, no squirrels, just trees holding their ground and struggling to breathe. The smoky haze made it difficult to see our mailbox at the end of the driveway. The city issued an order for residents to Stay home, Stay safe.¹ These were the years leading up to the global pandemic when everyone would come to experience the bitter taste of confinement.

I listened to news on the radio as I traipsed from room to room in an exhausted beast-like stupor. I will tell you this—the news was not good. The Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy on immigration meant US authorities were separating thousands of children from their parents at the southern border, Robert Mueller was investigating possible collusion between Trump and Russia during the 2016 Presidential election, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford was alleging that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers, Facebook got caught in a data mining scandal involving Cambridge Analytica, there were mass shootings in high schools in Florida and Texas, a bar in southern California, and a synagogue in Pittsburgh (just to name a few), and, of course, the devastating wildfires out West raised grave concerns about the state of the climate. And this was just the national news.²

I looked at my daughter’s wide, expectant eyes then out at the trees. What have I done? As quickly as it surfaced, I rejected the thought. It was brief, but it served its purpose. It was asking me to confront what I felt too tired to admit—This will simply not do. I thought of those mothers who lift cars off their children. Did you know it’s called hysterical strength?³

Listening to the news was draining so I switched it off and jumped online. I needed to see and hear some good things. I wanted levity and hope. I had heard of people who watch cat videos for this reason.⁴ But I already had a cat. And, as if he knew what I was thinking, he lifted his head and squinted at me from across the room. No, cats weren’t going to save us.

I decided to reach out. I opened my email account and clicked new message. At first, the blinking cursor taunted me because I had no plan. All that came to mind was the line from Rufus and Chaka Khan’s 1974 hit single, Tell Me Something Good. Okay, so I had a subject line. Then I started populating the recipient list. I found myself smiling as I cobbled together some of the most artful, poetic, and engaged people I knew. To me, they were a merry band of hell raisers. They were people who asked big questions and listened hard for small answers. I wondered—Did they know of anyone doing cool things? Positive things? If so, could they tell me about them? I wanted to hear about radical, world-making projects. I needed to hear about them. I clicked send and waited.

And that’s basically how it started—my plan to crowdsource hope. I admit I didn’t have a specific vision of what I was looking for, but I had a general idea. For fifteen years I had written almost exclusively about war. It’s a destructive enterprise, the absolute lowest expression of our humanity. At the heart of my fascination with war is its onset. What drives humans to war? More than that, knowing what we know about the horrors of war, why do we keep doing it? I’m not sure I will ever arrive at a satisfying answer to the latter question but spending so much time thinking about the former helped me turn a corner in my scholarship. Motivations for war became quite boring and ultimately predictable after a while. Fear, power, and competition pretty much sum it up. Not to mention, war itself has become ordinary. America, after all, had been at war in Afghanistan for two decades. War was starting to look like any other large-scale government project—expensive and long term with no firm end date.⁵ The routinization of war made peace, as a subject for study, all the more compelling to me. As a conceptual counterpart to war, peace is not the mere absence of war; it is a positive condition, one that is actively built from the ground up. To make peace—to construct conditions that support human and planetary flourishing—requires engaging with the world in a way that is imaginative, collaborative, and sometimes even quirky, or mischievous.

To my delight, once I stopped giving my attention to war and our capacity for belligerence, I started to see evidence of our capacity for peace. The contexts I studied were still bleak—endless war, joblessness, and, eventually, the pandemic—but I kept finding bright spots; the playful ways humans were muddling through. I even tried my hand at cultivating some of these conditions when, together with community veterans, we enriched the cut-and-dried war story by introducing alternative storytelling formats. Veterans voiced their war experiences through poetry, comic strips, mixed media projects, and six-word short stories.⁶ It was powerful and honest. In hindsight what the project did was reveal the dynamism of veteran voice and presence in our community beyond park statues, parades, and bumper stickers. It was some of the most challenging and, therefore, meaningful work I had ever done. I wanted to do more work like that and the next time I hoped to experience less nagging imposter syndrome and creative burnout. I wondered how others doing this type of work maintained their endurance and dealt with feelings of insecurity. These were some of the answers I was looking for when I opened my laptop on that sad summer day. I thought that if I could find projects like these and meet with their creators to learn from them, I could delineate a set of imitable characteristics.

I didn’t have a specific outcome in mind. My imagination conjured some sort of guidebook for do-gooders. Publication seemed like a given because I knew the stories would be worth sharing, yet I was open to possibilities for what that could mean. Maybe a podcast? Or a graphic novel? A playbook or travel log? An academic monograph just didn’t make sense. The stories needed to exist in the open air, circulating and percolating among people who need to hear them; everyday people trying their best to do right in the world.⁷

So, I hope you find this strange little book instructive, invigorating, and inspiring. It uncovers, through interview-based storytelling, some recurrent attributes of people who went ahead and did a good thing when they didn’t have to. One person you will meet, for example, is Estelle Brown, a woman in her seventies who became so fed up with her town’s food scarcity that she began planting fruits and vegetables in unused lots, in median strips along the road, and even in the town’s cemetery. Each chapter, eight in all, showcases a story like Estelle’s—a story about an ordinary person who built something new and lifegiving in the world. What the people in this book do is deceptively radical. That is, their approach is not especially difficult; but it somehow fundamentally transforms an existing paradigm. Instead of telling the stories of political icons like Martin Luther King Jr. or Mother Theresa whose mythic status through Santa Clausification has rendered them inimitable, this book showcases smaller-scale, achievable peace acts carried out by everyday people.⁸ Because they are everyday people, their efforts are not perfect. The idea here is not to offer solutions but to offer templates that introduce alternative modes of engagement. Then we use those examples as opportunities to think through questions of access, mobility, voice, identity, knowledge, and authority. This book, like the people and projects it discusses, emphasizes process over outcome.

My hope is that these stories act as a lighthouse amid a dark sea of negativity, pointing past the inaction fostered by cynicism toward a rational real-world optimism that change, good change, is not impossible. In the words of feminist poet Adrienne Rich, We cannot wait to speak until we are perfectly clear and righteous.⁹ And we cannot know everything before we take action. Each of us struggles every day to define and defend our sense of purpose and integrity, to justify our existence on the planet, and to understand, if only within our own hearts, who we are and what we believe in. The people featured in this book talk about how they were able to squint through the smog of adult life and do something real. What we take away are vital lessons about the value of humility and delegation, the role of positional knowing and tacit forms of knowledge, the merits of practicality in the wake of structural instability, and the importance of investing in possibility.

Crowdsourcing as Method

In the last decade, scholars from across the disciplines have begun exploring the merits and limitations of crowdsourcing as a research method.¹⁰ The term itself emerged in 2006 from Wired magazine writer Jeff Howe who used the term crowdsourcing to describe the increasingly popular business practice of outsourcing to a large crowd of people.¹¹ Today crowdsourcing can take many forms including crowdfunding (e.g., donating money to fund a project), crowd labor (e.g., digitizing out-of-print books), and crowd research (e.g., responding to surveys). Due to its wide application in a variety of fields, crowdsourcing today refers to a digital process employed to obtain information, ideas, and solicit contributions of work, creativity, etc., from large online crowds.¹² Generally speaking, the crowd (which is a contentious topic in scholarly circles because of its ambiguity) refers to a large group of people accessed through the internet.¹³ There may be unbounded crowds and bounded crowds—the former consisting of anonymous individuals, the latter describing a known group. When I wrote an email to a curated list of recipients, I solicited a bounded crowd.

My attraction to crowdsourcing stemmed from the nature of my inquiry. I felt overwhelmed by the litany of what I perceived to be human-created (and -sustained) problems. More than that, I was disheartened by what I experienced as apathy among family, friends, and students. Didn’t anyone care? Shouldn’t human-created problems be met with human-generated solutions? Surely someone somewhere was doing something. So, I turned to the crowd; specifically, a bounded crowd of scholars, activists, and artists who could tell me if they knew anyone or if anyone in their networks knew anyone positively responding to the world’s problems. From a methodological perspective, crowdsourcing is an efficient way to