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Shadow and Act

Paul Olson
UNL Professor Emeritus

I do get discouraged. I became blue when Nebraska’s junior senator (then our governor) described Nebraskans for Peace as “Nebraskans for Publicity” (at about the same time he was speaking up for the rights of Whiteclay beer dealers).

But Senator — then Governor — Johanns is not alone in dismissing NFP. Recent radio call-ins when I spoke out in defense of academic freedom addressed me as president of “Nebraskans for Socialism.” We were either treasonous or fluff. The vehemence of the epithets grew again when we called for an end to U.S. aid to Israel to limit the massive attacks on Gaza and Israel’s neighbors. (We also, incidentally, called for an international embargo on weapons sales to the nations bordering Israel.) To seriously speak of seeking the path of peace is to invite marginalization through epithet. The current political climate calls for blood.

But was the governor right? Are we only publicity hounds?

If we are, we certainly fail miserably at our putative essential mission.

Nebraska newspapers generally do not rush to publish our op eds or news releases unless we take rather conventional positions. When we take nonconformist Peace & Justice positions, to get our voice heard, we usually have to communicate by email, website, the Nebraska Report or public gatherings — even though the positions we espouse later become the centrist position of political discussion and action…

(See, for example, our early support for Senator Ernie Chambers’ legislative resolution on divestment in South Africa, our early response to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, our work on Whiteclay, and our leadership role in promoting ‘anti-bullying’ legislation.)

We are often alone — at least at first — in espousing new directions for society. When we went after LB 775 and its unexamined tax breaks for Big Business, except for a union or two, we had almost no allies. The cause was worth discussing, but no one had the guts to tangle with the business lobby head on. When NFP went after Whiteclay, we were pretty much ridiculed — until Mark Vasina produced his film showing Nebraska’s rank indifference to law enforcement for Pine Ridge Indians.

When we proposed anti-bullying rules to the Nebraska Board of Education and the Legislature, we were derided as sissy-makers. When we challenged StratCom’s new offensive mandate and its slender threads of presidential control — circumventing Congress’s authority to declare war, we were ignored. (StratCom is the state’s third-largest employer and, according to the Bellevue and Greater Omaha Chamber of Commerce, annually pumps $2.4 billion into the Nebraska economy. Politically and economically beholden to such largesse, we of course have grown shy about even dreaming of biting the hand that’s so generously nurturing us — even if the future of the human race is at stake.)

So are we really Nebraskans for Peace?

I hope so, both in our organizational and our personal lives. At every level of human interaction, we should believe that faith in violence as a tool (whether interpersonal or international) is a poor substitute for decency, negotiation, care for others, empathy and self-sacrifice.

We believe faith in violence needs countering on the whole continuum of human experience. NFP begins with violence at the individual and family level. Hence, we have worked on (and contributed to the passage of) the Legislature’s anti-bullying and the anti-dating violence bills, and throughout our history have mounted many other informal efforts to diminish violence in Nebraska society.

Moving up the continuum, we have acted against the state-supported violence-and-addiction mechanisms that ghettoize African Americans, destroy Native Americans, and imprison Hispanics in unsafe work environments and jeopardize their home lives, as evidenced by our human rights, Whiteclay and immigration work. Our Whiteclay activities now have the attention of the state attorney general, some liquor commissioners and some legislators. We — and others with us — stopped the worst of the anti-immigrant legislation and preserved the “Dream Act” promising educational opportunity for Hispanic students.

We early on challenged the myth that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction and we supported Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel’s similarly bold challenge. Today, the substance of these challenges is the conventional wisdom.

As you can see from this and recent issues the Nebraska Report, we are laboring to place the StratCom issue before Congress and the United Nations and are strengthening the resolve of those in South Korea and the Czech Republic who oppose StratCom’s global reach.

At a macro level, NFP opposes the violence against our environment that is now creating global warming and will soon begin displacing people everywhere (until some military locks them in or out). We are working closely with state legislators like Sen. Ken Haar to promote renewable energy solutions — and already (as the article on p. 9 indicates) can point to significant legislative gains on wind development.

In summary: to paraphrase Othello, “We have done the state some service and they know it.”

We do seek publicity because we seek peace and the diminution of violence.

We have a strategy and a substance. As Gandhi said, “It is not only generals who can plan campaigns.” Our offensives are under way. We have mounted them with about 1700 members (about 1 in every 1000 citizens of Nebraska), and all with a budget that in most years paid our staff only a little over the minimum wage.

But we could falter in these hard times.

If you ever sense that Nebraskans for Peace is becoming Nebraskans for Publicity or Nebraskans for Socialism or Nebraskans for Silliness, you can empower us by telling us what you sense. If you sense that we are getting things done, please ask your neighbors and friends to become members and local chapter activists. (We need more than one in one thousand.) Ask ten like-minded people this month. Send us $25, $50, $100, $1000 to enable us to complete what we have started. Tell us what you want us to spend it on. Your voices (and those of the members you recruit), your pocketbooks (and those of the contributors you snare for us), will mean the difference between shadow and act.