Working Together

When I started this posted, Diary of the Worm, I was inspired by my experience with Growing Power, a national non-profit here in Milwaukee helping to provide equal access to healthy, high-quality, safe and affordable food for people. Besides the use of worm power the motto of Growing Power really impressed me. It is ‘Together We are Growing Power’.

I often thought that motto should be adapted by peace and justice groups. These days there are so many issues and so many groups working are them, often separately, sometimes competitively and rarely together.

When I was a community organizer in the 70’s we were taught that the real power of people was when they came together and worked together on a specific issue. There were many neighborhood concerns and issues but only when we worked together and took action on one specific issue or concern we were effective.

One of the ideas behind our base community of Breaking the Silence, our base community, was not to form a group or organization but a movement of persons that around some fundamental issues of Teach War No More and No More War Spending would work together and take nonviolent action on specific issues.

The temptation has been to look at our movement as another group with our own agenda. I certainly feel guilty of doing that. But now I am see our movement, small as it may be, as that of people coming together to work together on specific issues under the general banner of resisting militarism. We can get specific, like closing the base school of the Army at Marquette or requesting Congresswoman Moore not to vote for more war spending, but we do it together.

My deceased son, Peter used the military as a model of coordinated action. Actually, St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus, Jesuits, and former soldier did the same thing. He considers his companions and himself as ‘soldiers for Christ’ rather than soldiers for some civil authority. Some of the language we used in Breaking the Silence is military language like our “Hit and Stay” actions.

Working together we are Growing Power and the Power of Nonviolence and Love.

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