March/April 2002

Choosing Hope Over Experience

by David Potorti

Prior to our wedding, my wife and I were poring over quotes and poems about the institution of marriage. We thought we’d arrange these into a handout for the benefit of our guests. Since we were being married under the care of the Raleigh, North Carolina Friends Meeting, there would be lots of time to think in silence.

There’s only one that I remember: a quote from Samuel Johnson, a British author of the 1700s. He wrote about a man who endured an exceedingly bad, and exceedingly long, marriage. But when his wife finally died, he did something unexpected: he immediately remarried. Johnson called it "the triumph of hope over experience."

It was a waggish remark, and one that I’ve remembered. After all, there is no logical reason to get married in any circumstance. We all know our experience of getting along with others, particularly others of the opposite sex. What are the chances that any marriage could survive, or that we could survive any marriage in one piece? But at the same time, we know the advantages of making that leap of faith: the opportunity to have children, a home, a deeper experience of love and commitment.

My parents have been married for fifty-three years, and they’re the first to admit surprise: "I never, in a million years, imagined that I’d be with him (or her) that long." They were married long enough to have three sons, to experience the joy–and hard work–of watching them grow up, go to school, get married. And they lived long enough to see their oldest son, my brother Jim, die at the World Trade Center on September 11.

Still, if you asked my parents, "Would you do it all over again–would you have a child, rock him, watch him grow, see him graduate from college and get married, knowing all along that it would end this way?" –I know what they’d say. They’d say yes. Because they had already made that leap of faith. They knew that the world could be a difficult place, that there were no guarantees of safety and happiness. Dad, after all, had survived the South Pacific theater of World War II, losing seventy-five percent of his company in battle by the time they took Iwo Jima. My parents both remembered the Great Depression. They were young, but they were not naive. They willingly chose hope over experience. You could even say they chose hope because of their experience.

That quote from Samuel Johnson continues to resonate for me. And I’ve come to the conclusion that, even following the events of September 11 that took my brother’s life, I’m choosing hope over experience. I’m choosing peace over war. And I’ve come to another conclusion: if I can do it, so can you. If the countless other family members who have spoken out against war as a response to the September 11 terrorist attacks can do it, so can you.

I emphasize the word "choose." Because we know our initial reaction to being attacked, to having loved ones lose their lives. Anger. Fear. Apprehension. The burning desire to strike back–right away. We’re only human. I don’t pretend to be some kind of saint, or to be speaking from a higher plane of consciousness. But I do acknowledge having choices.

What were those choices? Some of them–like freezing assets of known terrorist organizations–were pursued. Other obvious choices, like immediately federalizing airport security, or providing humanitarian relief equivalent to the massive dislocation and suffering caused by the bombing, proved less successful. Paying our unmet UN dues was a good decision, although the timing–just before the bombing began–was more than cynical. Assembling a coalition of nations for our "war on terrorism" would have been more laudable had terrorist nations not been included in the coalition. Using detective work and special forces rather than full scale, high-altitude bombing would have spared many innocent lives–by one count, 4,000 civilian dead. And our words alone could have created long-lived allies instead of coerced partnerships. Our mere rhetoric and threat of war caused innumerable aid agencies to pull out of the country and turned millions into refugees.

We had, and continue to have, choices: not one, but many. And we don’t need to pursue them one at a time, but all at once.

Yet I continue to hear statements from people that I affectionately call but-heads. "It’s really terrible that civilians have to get killed in Afghanistan, but they started it." "We didn’t want to do it, but they made us bomb them." "I wish there was some other way of putting these terrorists out of business, but what else can we do?" Rather than fostering dialogue and prompting us to examine other choices, these statements shut us down, leaving those decisions to others. And when those others are the US military, we know what those decisions will be.

Still, we must examine those options, because we know the experience of war. We know the results of the endless cycle of violence, of violent acts followed by violent retaliations. Open the newspaper any day of the week and see the violence between Israelis and Palestinians, the growing tensions between India and Pakistan, the civil wars in Africa. We know the experience of reacting to violence with violence, and we know that innocent people are always killed. In fact, The State of War and Peace Atlas suggests that by the end of the 20th century, three-quarters of all deaths in wartime were civilian, not military.

If the war on terrorism is to be, as predicted, a forty-year war equivalent to the Cold War, then we–and our civilian counterparts around the world–are the ones who will do most of the dying. And we are the only ones who can look after our own interests. We are the ones who must choose hope over experience.

As my mother said immediately after I informed her of my brother’s death, "I don’t want anyone else to feel the pain I’m feeling right now." She didn’t qualify that statement; she didn’t say "Americans" or "Westerners" or "Caucasians." I think she knew, instinctively, that war makes all victims equal.

In the weeks that followed September 11, I was surprised to hear her statement repeated–frequently, word for word–by other parents, spouses, and children of other victims. We all wanted justice, but we didn’t want our grief to be a call for war. We didn’t want to avenge our innocent family members by causing equivalent grief to other families.

We recognized that such grief would be long-lived. September 11 and the subsequent bombing will be the signature events of people’s lives for the next seventy-five years or more. These events will have untold impacts on the lives of victims’ children for another seventy-five years beyond that. When you comprehend that the decisions we make today will have implications well into the 22nd century, you begin to see the need for careful deliberation. You also see the folly of swift retaliation, of succumbing to the need to strike back, right away.

As a nation, we seem strangely ignorant of our immense power–both the power of our military and the power of our words. And as individuals, we seem equally ignorant of our own power. The military, after all, is our invention. It exists because of us (although our friends in the military might see this the other way around). If we can be responsible for such military power, then surely we can fashion an equally immense power out of our determination to choose peace over war.

On February 14th, family members of September 11 victims from all over the United States–including California, Montana, North Carolina, New York, and Connecticut–announced the formation of Peaceful Tomorrows (peacefultomorrows.org), a project of the Tides Center in San Francisco. Its mission is to seek effective alternatives to war as a response to the terrorist attacks. By seeking justice without revenge, and conscientiously exploring other options, we choose to spare additional innocent families the suffering that we have already experienced, as well as to break the endless cycle of violence and retaliation engendered by war. These are the group’s goals:

In all of these pursuits, we believe that we are seeking a triumph of hope over experience. And we believe that there are countless people all over the country, and all over the world, who share our goals. The public speaking we family members have done in the months following September 11 has demonstrated that people are hungry for the discussion of alternatives they were denied by our nation’s instant coalescence into one uniform response. It’s a hunger evident in messages we’ve received from peace-seekers in faraway places like Japan, England, and Australia. It’s evident in the international press coverage given to a journey to Afghanistan, sponsored by Global Exchange, made by several members of our organization: family members of September 11 victims meeting family members of Afghanistan bombing victims. It is our dialogue, not our bombing, that captures the world’s imagination. It is these alternatives, these choices that we all seek.

No one claims that these choices are easy. But we must agree that we have choices. And not least among them is choosing hope over experience: the hope for peace over the experience of war.

We hope you will join us in making this leap of faith.

David Potorti is co-director of Peaceful Tomorrows (www.peacefultomorrows.org). He lives in North Carolina.

©2001 Fellowship of Reconciliation