Kathy Kelly at SJA
Kathy Kelly at SJA
While the incessant drums of war call for more death, Kathy Kelly, a tiny Irish elf with curly hair careening down her back, traverses the world telling stories; stories that call for nonviolent solutions toward a more peaceful world. These are not fairy tales, but stories of how war wounds ordinary people: mothers, their husbands, older sons and daughters, and sadly children, thousands of whom in Iraq never reach their 5th birthday. ”Save The Children” reports that 122,000 Iraqi children under the age of five died in 2005. The majority of these deaths were caused by waterborne diseases.
Kelly speaks with authority. She has the statistics to illustrate her points: 27,000 American soldiers injured in Iraqi. while close to 4,000 have already been killed. 750,000 Iraqis have fled their country and taken refuge in Jordan, another one million poured into Syria. At the same time, the US has taken in less than 700 seeking resettlement here. Kelly has been a Nobel Peace Prize nominee three times, and has made 24 trips to Iraq starting in 1996 when she and others co-founded Voices In The Wilderness. She is also cofounder of Voices for Creative Nonviolence and has spent time in federal prison in this country as a result of her nonviolent protests.
Numbers are one thing. Stories springing from her direct involvement with the suffering are quite another.
She tells the story of a young Iraqi woman whom Kelly met in Amman, Jordan, where Kelly has been living for the last two months. The woman, because of her circumstances, took a job with the American military in order to survive. After 2 months on the job, she was shot in the face one morning on her way to work . She lost an eye as a result, and her sight in the other. She fled to Jordan, isolated from her family and her homeland. She has hopes of coming to the US, but knows that could be a long, difficult, and in the end, maybe fruitless, endeavor. She is only one of the many thousands of Iraqi citizens scraped raw from war. We will probably never hear all of their stories.
Kelly tells of the Irish jury, “steely eyed” she called them, who acquitted 5 Irish peacemakers accused of damage to public property. (This, ironically, shortly after an antiwar speech that Kelly gave in their country, but for which she claims no credit.) Soon after the US invasion of Iraq our military needed a neutral place to refuel bombers on their way to battlefields in Iraq for the “shock and awe” phase of the war. They chose a landing strip in Kildare, Ireland, for this purpose. The defendants, unable to talk in court about the faith-based beliefs that prompted their actions which damaged a US Navy warplane parked on the tarmac of that airport. They were saved by their defender who described a scene where Irish children played on a grassy hillside in peace, without fear. What parent, or human for that matter, would not do whatever they could to make sure that their children would always have that basic right, he asked. And didn’t Iraqi children have that same basic right, he questioned.
The audience who heard this story clapped when Kelly told of the acquittal. It was her skillful telling of it, hard to convey in these words, that moved them.
Kelly tells other stories that reveal the fact that she is a US citizen and therefore privileged, unfairly so, she believes. She came to know two bright young boys in a remote village of the desperately poor country of Haiti who loved to read but had no electricity in the small shack they called home. They found they could sit on the sea shore on certain evenings and read their books by the lights of a ship when it docked twice a month, something they loved to do. At that time Kelly contracted malaria, which she described as an unrelenting ache that clenched her whole body and headaches so severe as to be almost unbearable. At about the same time, her two young friends also came down with the disease. She described seeing them holding their heads in agony as they slumped slowly down a wall that supported them.
What hurt her more than her body’s aches, was the fact that she was able to take the medicine, chloroqine, that eased the effects of the disease. The same medicine could not be given to the boys because of the rules that predicated her group’s presence in Haiti. She couldn’t help but think, Why are my needs being met? Because I’m white?
In telling her stories, Kelly uses such phrases as “radical unfairness,”
“outlandish consumption of the world’s resources,” describing the refugee situation as a “humanitarian catastrophe,” speaking of “corporate greed,”
asking the question “What can we do with our disproportionate wealth and our disproportionate ability to kill?” She tells of the Tigris River as being swollen with bodies of those civilians murdered in cold blood every night.
She has words of encouragement for those desperate for what to do in the face of all this horror.
“Continue to tell the truth,” she states. “Name the names of those who have perished in this war: We remember you. . . .We remember you. . . . We remember you. . . .”
Don’t try to make things right on your own, she cautions. Join with others in speaking in person to your state and national representatives. Make them see that our national security does not lie in weapons or numbers of our troops abroad. This is something she feels strongly about, and we should, too, she says. Find ways to stand together for strength and solidarity.
Doing these things will give us our chance not to lose hope, Kelly contends. If we persevere we will be able to “beat our weapons into plowshares” if not in our lifetimes, then those of our children and grandchildren.
She is asked how to answer the charge that if we pull our troops out now, before victory is achieved, a blood bath will certainly ensue. “There is no bloodless solution to Iraq,” Kelly insists, “however, the risks we take by not taking action are tremendous.”
When asked in an interview how she sustains her courage, she says first that there has never been a thought to walk away from the kind of life that she has always craved. Through her work for peaceful nonviolence she has met some of the “finest” people in the world whose presence has blessed her many times over. She says she is walking along the path of those great ones she admires, while at the same time standing with some of the world’s poorest and most humble. She says, too, that she is influenced by her belief in the Mystical Body of Christ and those who are a part of it; those who have gone before and those still to come. Wanting to be in their company encourages and energizes her every day, she says.
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