Spirit in Action
Peace-Work Quilt - Supporting CO's And Conscience
J.E. McNeil's new book, Peace-Work Quilt, draws on the many stories & experiences from the 12 years she has served as Executive Director of the Center on Conscience & War. The stories are vivid and the thoughts and analysis penetrating - and the spirit is deep.
- Broadcast on:
- 02 Oct 2011
- Audio Format:
- other
[music] Let us sing this song for the healing of the world That we may hear as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along And our lives will feel the echo of our healing [music] Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpes Me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. [music] I've had the privilege twice before to welcome J.E. McNealed my program, and this time is a special honor. What with the recent release of her book, "Peacework Quilt," and her transition from her 12-year post as executive director of the Center on Conscience and War. J.E.'s book and life are filled with nitty gritty, real life stories of peace work and conscious objectors on the ground, in the military, and around it. J.E. tells it like it is, bringing heart, sympathy, courage, and truth to all that she looks at, avoiding easy side-taking and propaganda. If you've ever told or laughed at a joke about lawyers, J.E. McNeal will give you good reason to repent of the stereotype, showing integrity and spiritual depth as good as any we could hope for. Here today for Spirit in Action to discuss the book, "Peacework Quilt," and many other stories of COs in the Center on Conscience and War is J.E. McNeal joining us from Washington, D.C. J.E., welcome back for the third time to Spirit in Action. Well, thank you for having me back. I can't believe it's the third time. I'm always happy to talk with you. I can't believe it's the third time after 12 years at the Center on Conscience and War. I should have had you on a dozen more times. You're at such an important point to address the concerns of those of us who believe that a good connection with Spirit involves not fighting war. Tell me a little bit again about how you got to where you are, because I think you didn't grow up in an environment that was conducive to conscience subjectors. Well, it wasn't totally non-conducious. I grew up in a family that was out of step. A good bit was the Texas surrounding. My family were liberal Democrats in a area of the city of Houston that were all conservative Democrats on those days. So we were considered the bit odd. We had lots of reading, whereas most of my neighbors saw me book they had in their house if they had one. That one was the Bible. I think a lot of what led me to where I was was sort of a very gradual realization piece by piece that A war was wrong. The war in Vietnam war is strong. And then I felt later as I grew older that all wars were evil, but sometimes useful and practical. My mother always said that war was a necessary evil. That was sort of her bottom line. But it was quite clear they were evil. And then it wasn't really until I was in my 40s. Amazingly enough. But I think it's important for people to know that. But I concluded that war was not only evil, but it was just stupid. Fortunately, a short time after I concluded that, I was offered the job at the center on conscience more. Let's fill in a little bit of the history that got you to that point in your 40s when you decided that there's no good in it. You mentioned in your book piece where quilt that you had an experience in ninth grade that started turning your mind. You said you were the last one in your family to realize that Vietnam war was a loser. Yeah, I always felt that I was the last one. When I got older, I understood I was the last one in my family because I was the youngest one. But in junior high, as the youngest of five kids, all of whom were destined to go to college, which again was kind of out of step was my neighborhood. I started worrying about where my parents, who my mother was a teacher and my daddy was a machinist, where they were going to get the money to send me to college. That was when college was so affordable. And so I had tried it that I would join the military to go through college. And I was pretty much the site of them becoming a marine. But in the ninth grade, I had a history teacher who had us have a debate. And there were different topics. But the topic she gave me and another one to pertain to debate was whether or not it was right that we were in the war in Vietnam. And this was about, I don't know, 1964, I guess, '65 in that area. Because I was debating, his brother was a marine. So when we were deciding who got which side of the topic rather than drawing lots, he said that he had to have the right side, which we both understood to mean that he was going to support the war in Vietnam. And I was going to take the moving side, which was the war in Vietnam was wrong. We shouldn't be there. You know, we did the whole debate thing. And it's really one of my great tactile memories in life. It's just almost having sat down and suddenly going, "Well dang, we shouldn't be Vietnam." I often tell people all about this story because I think a lot of people have this notion that, well, you either grow up believing that war is wrong and evil or are you don't. The reality is, and I think it's important to understand this, that for both people it's a process. And sometimes that process unfortunately begins when they're in the military. Other times that process that they're lucky like I was, it begins when they're younger. So I concluded at that point that I could not join the Marines. Well, this new book, "Peace Work Quilt," you capture a lot of moments along the way, both personally and in your work with the Center on Conscience and War. Can you give us a few vignettes of some of the people you've met with who've come to the decision that participation in war is simply wrong, simply wrong for them? A lot of the people I think you've been dealing with have been people in the military who decided they need to get out. One of my favorite stories about a guy who chose against war was an African American from Philadelphia. He was just as young and tough and, you know, liked to beat people up kind of a guy. So he joined the Marines during Vietnam because he figured here's an opportunity for me to eat people up and kill people and it's okay, you know, it's not on or even. And he was in Vietnam in a bar in Saigon. And at the bar was another Marine and they both drank too much and got into a fight. And he was really good at being young and tough and he almost killed the other person. But the problem was that the other person was blind. So he got arrested and was sitting in jail waiting to hear whether or not the other man died. While he was sitting in jail waiting in many respects for his fate, whether or not this other man died. He started thinking about what his mother would be feeling especially if the roles were reversed, if it was a white guy that had beaten him up nearly to death. And he had an epiphany at that moment. And at that moment he realized that it was wrong to kill. And he basically converted to what he saw as Christianity which was following Jesus' admonition to love the enemy. As it turned out, the other guy did not die. The young African-American guy finished out his term in the Marines and left them and stumbled across the Mennonite when he went back to Philadelphia and found a church home for where he was in his life. That his opposition to war and his clear understanding that killing was wrong. He did tell me once that he went back to the guy he had beaten and apologized to him and he said that the guy looked at him like he'd grown his back up head. He didn't know what he was talking about in the sense of why would he apologize, you know. But his life completely changed and turned around and he spent as long as I've known him, which is a lot of years now, he has spent his life helping young people understand that war and violence is wrong. You must have run into him somewhere along the way. I had read the chair of your board for the Center on Conscience and War. He was a soldier who came to the center and ended up speaking to you. He came for guidance. I believe the name's Dallas and now he is the chair of the board. Yeah, we've actually had several people over the years that I've been at the center go from being in the military to working at the center or working on the board. Dallas is one of them. He's just a lovely guy and it just baffles me how he would ever be able to kill anyone because he's just the sweetest man you could ever want to know. But yes, he has a fairly critical story and some respects in that he saw the military as a route to get an education and especially before 2001, that was a very common scenario. People didn't really think about joining the military because it was about fighting. They thought about it as getting an education. It was later as things changed that he realized that the cost of the education was too high if he was ever called to fight, that he was going to refuse. But fortunately, he didn't end up with quite that confrontational of the situation. Other people's stories are not nearly so happy. I remember for a long time I would get a phone call once a week, a 15 minute phone call from a guy who didn't have a cell phone so he couldn't call back so he was in Fallujah. And he would make us once a week, 15 minute call. He would call the center and I would just drop everything, talk to him. He would relate about how he could come to have a change of heart and how he was pushing forward and his conscientious objector package and how he was being treated. I mean, he was basically being treated really horribly by the fellow Marines and they would sneak into his tent at night and attack him and he wasn't sleeping well. And he was just really ill with all the worry and the harassment. He would call me every week and I remember hanging up from him one time and thinking, "Yeah, the man's going to go kill himself and there's nothing I can do about it." And I didn't hear from him again for a couple of months and I finally heard from him about three months later and I was so glad because then he hadn't killed himself and I just, you know, I had worried about him every day. And I had hung up from that call. And he had actually, a short time after I had talked to him on that call, then sent back stateside and given leave and he called me because he was about to return to the Marine Base and he said, "You know, I just don't know what to do. Every time I pick up my uniform to put it on, my hand shakes so badly that the uniform just flies out of my hand and I can't get it on." Wow. Is that one of the extreme stories or is this kind of typical since the war started since Afghanistan and Iraq? It's almost impossible to say what's typical, but no, I wouldn't want to leave the picture that every person who applied for conscience and objector discharge was harassed to the point of near suicidal position. I would say he's pretty much the exception. It's not like all of them are agreed at warmly, but most of them aren't horribly harassed. And some of them are actually, we got a call from a sergeant in Afghanistan once who called us and said that he had this guy who was a private who was clearly a conscientious objector, but neither one of them knew what to do and would we help him. So, you know, there are situations where people are recognized as being a conscientious objector that something changed them and their fellow soldiers and Marines and sailors help them go through the process or try to find ways to support them so that they can get the discharge, which they are legally entitled to. I think you also end up helping a lot of people who feel that the military system wronged them, not necessarily that their conscience objectors, but their concern is with the system. At certain points over the past few years, there's been concerns about the military recruiters, and you have a story in piecework quilt about one of those recruiters that you had an interaction with. What's your feeling about military recruiters? Are they adversaries? They're just doing their jobs? Are they victims of their situation propaganda? What do you feel about the military recruiters? Well, military recruiters probably have the worst job in the military. They have the longest hours of anybody except somebody, maybe in a combat zone, a new, direct fighter. They are given a mission. And most people would think of a mission as a quota, but it's really slightly different. But they're given a mission, a certain number of people to recruit. I've seen studies that show that it takes contact with 300 individuals to get one potential recruit. So think of yourself. You're 25 years old and possibly back from combat, which is not a common scenario. And you are now told to go get our 20 young men and women and recruit them into your branch of the service. So let's say it's even 20. That means you have to meet, talk to, interact with thousands of young people to meet your mission. And you have to go where the young people are. So you go to schools, you go to video places, you go to malls, you go to hamburger joints. You go everywhere you can. And if you go when the kids are there, the kids are there in the evenings and on the weekends and you're there, you know, it's a job that I've had recruiters actually call the center and say, you know, my wife is going to leave me because I'm recruiting seven days a week and 12 and 18 hours a day to meet the mission. And I don't know what to do. So it's a really, it's a really tough job. On the other hand, even though the written words tell them not to lie. They are also trained very much in target marketing so that they know that if they go to a Hispanic neighborhood, they say one thing. If they go to an upper middle class suburban neighborhood, they say something else. If they go to a poor rural neighborhood, they say something else. They target their recruiting. They target what they recruit the people for. And, you know, I've given public speeches over the years and that most of my will tells the military joke of how do you know when a recruiter is lying and the answer is when he moves his mouth. Every time I've done that in public, I always sort of almost internally went because I think somebody's going to say, oh, how dare you say that. But invariably, if there's anybody in the military in the audience, they come up and see me afterwards and say, oh, you're way too nice to the recruiter. I mean, I've talked to lots of people in the military and made that remark and they've all laughed and said, yes, that's right. I mean, people who loved them in the military would say that. And that's kind of a tad story that they pressure on these men and women. It's so great that they feel like they have to lie to get people in. And it's so great that the recruiters is one of the highest processed suicide rates in the military. Two things I wanted to mention about that, Jay. One is that you have a story in Peace Work Quilt where you talk about, I think, a better or more forthright discussion with a military recruiter. I do hope people read this. This book is a quick read. But also, I think just this past week I heard about the statistics. I saw a graph of the amount of suicides in the military. And I think it's at its highest point since we invaded Afghanistan. How much do you end up dealing with this or encountering this? At the center, we do talk to people who are suicidal. And we try to refer them immediately to psychological and counselors. There are a group of counselors who you can only get to through the GRI timeline. And we refer them on. I have talked to more than one person that I feared was likely to kill themselves. The suicide rate in the military has always been fairly high. It has been, even at the beginning of war, the number one cause of death in the military absence combat death. And it doesn't even count the people who get so blindingly drunk that they run the car into the river or wouldn't count. For instance, the guy outside of Washington, D.C., I guess it was an eight years ago now, when he got the notice that he was supposed to report again to be deployed, got a weapon and basically set up a death by police officer situation. It's tragic. And I think it should tell us something about what it is we're asking these men and women to do that the suicide rate is so high. In fact, the VA has in the last, I think, four or five years adopted a new medical concept called moral injury, which is different from post-traumatic stress disorder. You can have post-traumatic stress disorder where something bad happens to you and you do nothing bad yourself. That can happen to lots of people in the military. Standing, you're watching a friend blow up and thought if you can give you post-traumatic stress disorder, standing in a building and have it blow up and fall on your head can give you post-traumatic stress disorder and brain trauma injuries. But what moral injury is, which is recognized by the Veterans Administration, is that you go into the military with most of us who have learned from childhood that killing people is wrong. We've been taught to use words in some of our hands, not to use violence. And then you go into the military and they say, "Oh yeah, but there's this exception." I've heard story after story, including stories from people who, once again, are very proud and happy to be in the military. But they talk about the change in their soul in the field zone. I was at a meeting with Camilo Mejia, who's a reasonably well-known conscientious objector, and he told the story that he's told on a number of occasions about being up on a balcony roof looking down and that there was some civilians throwing locks at them, but they were really far away and weren't anywhere close. But this one young boy came in the low closer and it looked like he might have a hand grenade. And although the boy probably wouldn't have been able to throw it close enough to the building, that Camilo's next memory was that his weapon had been fired and that people were running up to drag the body of the boy away. And he was at the conference where he talked about moral injury and he had been talking about his own post-traumatic stress disorder. And he heard the description of moral injury and he said, "Yes, I've never heard that before, but yes, that's part of it. I've done something that hurts me personally in my morals and in a soul." And that's a very sad, sad thing to say. I figure that most of the people you meet with J.E. are in the military. That may surprise people because I have a feeling there's a general myth out there that anyone who wants to get out of the military, it's a scam. They had their bread buttered and now they're just getting out because they don't want to do the real work. Have you had that impression? Are there scammers who come through your door, you talk to? Or maybe that just isn't a judgment you're prepared to make or is the judgment that society sometimes puts on people who come to a clearness that military is the wrong place for them to be religiously, spiritually? Is that what is most often wrong? I'm enough of a real ask that I would never say that no, there's never been a scammer who just decided he wanted to make more money in someplace else. Well, he didn't want to do the dirty work or whatever. I mean, that's certainly. We had somebody come into our door and follow us, come and change his objector application and I read it and it seemed pretty good. And I turned to my colleague and I said, "Hey, this application is really a good one." He read it and he said, "Yeah, I've read it before." He copied so-and-so's conscientious objector application. So I gave him the benefit of the doubt and wrote him a note saying, "You need to have your conscientious objector application in your own words." He sent it back and he changed three words at which point we wrote him a note saying, "You know, we're not going to help somebody line to get out." That's not what we're about. We're about people who we, to the best of our ability, tell, have really had a change of heart. And so I'll be refused to help him. I'm often asked if we've ever refused people. It didn't happen often because mostly we're willing to give people a benefit of the doubt because even if sometimes they can't articulate what they've been going through. I mean, I talked to a well-known cartoonist who was a conscientious objector in Vietnam and I asked him to tell his story for the center's newsletter. And he said, "That's a very personal story in the news. It's a very hard story to tell because you're not just talking about, you know, I went down this road and I did this and I did that." You're talking about your death. You're talking about your soul. You're talking about the essence of you. And sometimes it's so hard that I can think of a couple of guys that I helped with their CO applications and their applications were okay. But it was only like two years after they had gotten out of the military and I had known them and continued to work with them on our socialized or whatever with them for two more years that I heard the real story. The story that they couldn't bear to right now, the story they couldn't bear to tell about the damaging things they had seen and done that they couldn't bear to share us. It took them years after. So their initial application might have seen, you know, it was a good application. It was clear the guy had a change of heart, but it was also clear something there was more there to it. And it was just a description of, "I went to this place and while there it changed me." It was never a real discussion of what it was that he saw or felt precisely. You know, I saw things that I thought were evil and it changed my heart and I came back and I started writing my CO application. And then like I said, it took two years of healing after they got out to come to the point of saying the evil they saw. You're listening to Spirit in Action. I'm your host, Mark Helpsmeet of this Northern Spirit Radio production. Our website is NorthernSpiritRadio.org. On the website you'll find all of our archives for the last six years. Links to our guests, like today's guest, J.E. McNeil of the Center on Conscience and Ward. Their website is centeronconscience.org or you can follow the link from my site. You can also leave comments and I especially appreciate comments. Like to hear what you're thinking, reacting, what you like, what helps leads you to the deep places. Because that's what this show is intended to be about. Not just sound bites, not just a recitation of facts, but where is the deep space that these concerns come from. As I said again, we're visiting with J.E. McNeil. She served for 12 years as the Executive Director of the Center on Conscience and Ward amongst other things. And I want to ask you about that in a moment, J.E. They help conscience subjectors either before they go in the military or after they get in the military. She's done trainings all across this nation and I imagine beyond. One of the things that's kind of unusual for you in terms of a peace worker, often there's a divide, J.E. between those who are protesting war and those in the military. They don't really interact too much. But I think you have a lot of contact connection, interaction with people in the military. Can you talk about how that changes your perspective compared to maybe your typical on the street war protester? Yeah, I've had to be very unfortunate conversations with peace people about some of the work I do. One of the things we did at the center was we supported a group called down the Peel for Regress, which was mainly professional military personnel, people who were proud of their job in the United States military. But they opposed the war in Iraq and they wanted to speak to Congress and to the country about their opposition to the war in Iraq. They did not confuse that with broader opposition to war in general. And they were also really clear that their job was military. And if they were ordered to Iraq, even though they thought the war was wrong, they would go. And they would do their job because it was their job. And they felt very loyal to them. And we supported them and they were on 69 months and they went to Congress and they got into congressional records. And I got a phone call on a couple of notes from people saying, you know, how can you support those murderers? I'm not going to give you any, any again. And I said to them, the center, and I personally support anyone who says no to war at any level. Because we are not all in the same place and this is to me the most important legacy if I leave any legacy. The concept, the conscientious objection is not this one point where it's defined by the federal government that you must moral ethically and religiously have a sincere belief in your own participation in war in any form. And that's one point on the line. But there are people who they don't want to participate in the form of paying taxes, for example. And if they feel the best participation, well, that's a different point on the line. And there are people who don't want to participate in particular war or who object to particular wars. Just like when I was in the ninth grade and sent them a love of some new college, I objected it to the war in Vietnam. I didn't object to all wars. But there are also people who object to wars that are still willing to do what they consider their job. And I think it's wise of us to reach our hands in both directions along the line, the continuum of conscientious objection. Not only because it makes us stronger, because in fact there's probably no one on earth who at some point doesn't object to some war somewhere. But because it helps people move along that continuum. I mean, I started from objecting to war in Vietnam to thinking war was evil, but still expedient to eventually coming to the conclusion that war was not even expedient. One of the young men from the kill for redress, we had dinner together one night at a restaurant and he was saying, well, you know, it is so hard to get a restaurant because I'm a vegan. And I actually, I pretty much dropped my job and I said, I'm sorry, you won't kill animals, but you'll kill people. And he had a funny look on his face. And I said, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, forget that said anything. And we continued our conversation with other stuff. But about two years later, he applied for conscientious objector discharge in the military. And he finally made that connection. So, I mean, I think when you start closing doors on people saying, oh, no, you're not pure enough. Well, that's, you know, the perfect as the enemy of the dead. Again, we're speaking with Jay McNeil amongst other things after 12 years of service to our nation, to our world, I think, with the Center on Conscience and War. She's finally moved on from that position and part of the fruits of that work have been a book she's just produced called Peace Work Quilt. And that's peace as in not war work quilt. You'll find a link on northernspiritradio.org. We're visiting with her out in Washington where she's resident has been for quite a while. She's had a number of careers over the year, I think. I don't think you've chosen the most lucrative area to go into, Jay. I mean, I think as an attorney, you could have made better money elsewhere. What was it that pushed you in this direction? Why didn't you go more lucrative? What was that path like for you? That's a very difficult question to answer. When I graduated college, the one thing I was sure of is that I didn't want to be an attorney. So I ended up spending a summer as an intern in Congress. In fact, hung out with Charlie Wilk from the Charlie's War, because I was in Texas too. And then I was trying to figure out a job and I got a job as a paralegal because I was really happy to do for a while. It was really kind of intense being the second banana in a law firm. But the job just got narrower and narrower and I got discontent and decided, "Well, I guess I'll get a law school after all." And while I was in law school, I couldn't find any area of law that really caught me except tax law. And there didn't seem to be much of a space for tax law as a liberal. But I stumbled into it and I said, "Well, all right, well then what I'll do is I'll represent low-income taxpayers. I'll just figure out a way to make a living in that, and I'll represent some nonprofits too." And that's what I did for quite a while. And I started my law practice in Washington, D.C., where I live now. And that was when I stumbled upon Quaker, sort of a second time in my life. You know, the first time I went to the Quaker meeting in Washington, D.C., it was just, it was heaven. You know, how it is when you've been on a long road trip and you come back to your house and you lie down in your own bed. That feeling you'd get a "I'm home, it's my bed," it was that kind of feeling. And I just was completely enraptured by the religious society of friends. And I'm still today, even though now I know all of it works and problems. But I still, it still speaks to my condition, as we say in Quaker. And that really just, I was lucky, and my choice of husband, Rick was just a wonderful man. And he was a terrific criminal trial attorney, and he was willing to go out and kind of earn the bread and butter while I spent a lot of time on boards and committees. And still practicing law and still trying to do the good work. I remember him coming home once and getting a nice fat paycheck from a case that he had finally completed. And saying, "You know, I earn the money so you can go represent both of us doing the good work. I was blessed by him." Yeah, it's fortunate to have that kind of situation. I know that you were raised Methodist. Did you're drifting away from being a Methodist? Did that have to do with things about the war, were there other factors? Could you be a Methodist now? I mean, where your beliefs are now? No, I actually left the Methodist Church long before I found friends. I left the Methodist Church when I was in college. There were several factors. Part of it was because the Methodist Church, as I knew it, in Texas, I felt did not follow Jesus' definition to love your neighbor because they were very supportive of the war in Vietnam. I later found out that George Will, who was a Methodist who was a conscientious objector during World War II, was a fabulous guy. But the Methodist Church was actually very anti-war, very much understood as an entire church that war was not the answer. But going up, I had no vision of that. You know, it's not so much that I reject Methodism as being a Quaker really speaks to myself. That the silence, the interconnectedness of service, you know, is a Quaker. It's one of my favorite ones because the young man comes to the Quaker meeting on program meeting the first time. And he sits in a kind of waiting and waiting for something to happen. He finally turns to the guy next to him and says, "Excuse me, when does the service begin?" And the old Quaker next to him turns to him and says, "Right after the war should end." And that, to me, is being a Quaker in a nutshell. Earlier you were talking, J.E., about different people on the continuum, what they oppose in terms of war, you know, a particular war, or just where they are on the continuum. My understanding is that other countries define conscience, objection differently than we do. In the U.S., it's opposition to all wars. It's supposed to be unqualified, I think. How does that vary in other nations? What's the best, or shall we say, most liberal interpretation of conscience, objection that's been implemented in another country? The most liberal one that's on paper is in Great Britain, which provides for people to refuse to get a particular war. It was actually recently invoked about, not this last summer, but summer before last, as a soldier, invoked it to avoid being deployed to Afghanistan, I believe. But he went before the commission there, and he was turned down. But it does exist. A tiny blare when he was Prime Minister wanted it wiped out of the policy, but did not give a play. So allowing for people to refuse to participate in particular wars is actually compared to the somewhat workable system. In Israel, of course, it's not on the books. However, there are yescha bells. It is enough soldiers, some of whom are professional, who refuse to fight in the occupied territories. If there's bombing from Lebanon, they'll go into Lebanon and fight, but they won't agree to be sent in to the occupied territories to fight. And it's not official, but it exists. In fact, a few years back, when there was a program at Riverside Church in New York City that I was lucky enough to be part of, it was pretty thrilling to be standing where Martin Luther King gave his speech beyond Vietnam, which is to me. I never can quote from, because every sentence is better than the last one, and better than the one before it simultaneously. That evolved into a truth commission, which finally gave a report in, I believe, 2010 to Congress asking for and supporting a bill that the Center on Conscience and War has been working on for allowing for selective objection, among other things. It would result in a selective projector being booted out of the military, so it would limit the number of people who would be willing to do it, because if you are a career soldier objecting to war, getting you out of the military is not an outcome you want. So it's actually more limited than the system in Great Britain. But it is an issue that has been taken up by the Christian Peace Witness, a group that was founded to witness against the war in Iraq, and now has gone into other things. And they are actually doing regional trainings, and I recommend people looking to Martin, finding out about them that their web page is Christianpeacewitness.org. They're doing some good work on that. They took Conscience and Wars 13 through 2011. You've done a lot of training yourself, and one of the places you trained was right here in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where I live. Of course, you've been all over the nation, and again, I think you've traveled even internationally for this. But when you came to Eau Claire, we had a special event, shall we say, when you went and talked to the media here, and I think it's such a delightful little story. I'm wondering if you wouldn't recite it while I'm recording so that I can carry it into perpetuity with me. Actually, it's a story I often tell. In Eau Claire, they have three radio stations in one building. Apparently, they're all in one company. One of them is a news talk show kind of station, and one of them is a rock and roll station. And I never went to the third station, but I was asked to kind of speak on two of the stations, and I was on the radio station talking about how it's going to get the station. About how it's going to get the seats that night, about conscientious objection to war, and that the war was wrong. And it was a calling show, and then the guy called in and started saying nasty things to me. And in particular, he said I should go back to France, which I personally always thought was an improvement over going back to Russia. But having never been from either place, I said that he could take this country away from me when he cried at my dead cold hands. And his response was, "Well, I'd like to be the first in a long line of people who'd like to arrange that." And my response was, "If it makes you feel big and strong to threaten a 55-year-old woman, come on ahead." And his response was, "Click and hang up the sun." And so the broadcaster was going, "Well, John, I was seem to have been cut off. But you can meet J.E. and Eau tonight at such and such a place at such and such a time where she'll be speaking. And we've got to conclude the show and the show ended like that." So he turns off the radio and he says, "So what are you going to do if he shows up?" And I said, "I'm going to look in front of the eye, and I'm going to say call 911." I'm brave and not stupid. So I went out into the hall, and the radio executives were running up and down the hall going, "That was real radio. That was real radio." I enjoyed that. That was fun. That is not an uncommon response when you call people on being a bully like that. It's not the first time somebody threatened to beat me up or kill me or whatever. And I've always said, "Well, you know, it makes you feel big and strong to kill an alightie. Come on ahead." I don't think you fully capture the energy with which you did this. You're not one of these pussyfooting type of people. I mean, you've got a lot of energy to you, J.E. And I think that's one of the things that makes you particularly well suited for the job that you've been doing for 12 years. You're not a shrinking violet. And I think most people think of flower-carrying, conscientious objectors or anti-war activists. One thing I remember is you rattling off your home address and said, "Come and get me." I think he was so stunned. He hadn't expected a peace activist to be that confrontational. Well, I've always believed that, you know, if you're going to stand up for something, you have to stand up for it. And sometimes one of the things that I talked about and has talked about many times every year is that, you know, being a conscientious objector or being a peace advocate doesn't mean that I'm not willing to die for my country. It means that I'm not willing to kill for my country. And that's the thing that I think a lot of people don't understand, I mean, including some peace activists. I think some peace activists think it means, you know, running away from conflict. The reality is that conflict is always with us. They're always going to be the needs that conflict with each other. My need versus your need, my country's need versus your country's need. Those things are never going to go away. But what we have to do is find ways to projectively deal with those conflicts rather than trying to pretend they don't exist. And I'm saying, "Oh, we can't confront evil. We can't confront the form of the modern. We can't confront Saddam Hussein. They're over there. Let them do what they're going to do." I'm no more of an advocate of that than I am of an advocate of going over there and shooting them. You have to find a way to engage with things that we don't agree with and find a constructive solution. And that doesn't mean that by engaging that no one's going to get hurt, no one's going to die. You know, often people will say to me, "Well, if we don't send over 100,000 armed people to dark war, what should we do?" And I said, "Well, let's send over 200,000 unarmed people." And I said, "Well, people will die." I said, "Yeah, I send over 100,000 armed people. People will die too." It isn't that there's a solution where no one dies, no one gets hurt. But if you try to find a constructive solution that moves us forward, moves us beyond the "you shoot my brother and I shoot your brother" system that we've had for so many centuries, and that's actually why, after I left the center, I started working on a masters at Eastern Nanite University on conflict transformation on peace building. And it's been a very exciting program, and I'm happy to do it. I don't know where it's going to take me, but it does seem to be the next place to go. You've had these 12 years with the center, and so I thought maybe you'd already have the solution for the world, since you're doing continuing studies about peace conflict resolution. Maybe you don't have the answer, but I did want to ask you. If someone gave J.E. McNeil the almighty power to do whatever you wanted about the U.S. military, what would you change if anything? That's a hard one. I think that President Hubert Hoover, who was Quaker, he had to face that, I think, when he rose to the presidency. What would you do? Do you have concrete ideas of what you would advocate for or lead in the direction of if you were a president, if you had the power somewhere? Well, actually, I have some ideas. I don't know how practical they are. I mean, obviously, I'm one person who has an imperfect knowledge of the world and the military, even with all my contact over the years and all my conversations with people in the military, people very high in the military, some of them, and also people in government and internationally, but I would think that any change would have to be gradual, but that the very first change that you would have to do is to not assume that the military is the solution and that rather than sending in military, use increasingly the money for the military for foreign aid, the average US citizen says that we should keep our foreign aid about 10% of our budget or less. When, in fact, our foreign aid is less than 1%, it's a drop. It's such a drop that when, during the tsunami, when countries with gross national products, one tenth of ours would be giving 20, 50, 100 times more than our country did to the tsunami relief, that it actually got so embarrassing that Congress had to go back and up what they were giving. We view ourselves as a generous nation, but we're actually a person on this nation, and while I think that some of that money for the military needs to go into strengthening our own infrastructure, our own needs at home, we should also be using a lot of that money to strengthen the needs of people around the world. It's when we realize in a clear way that we are all in this together. This isn't that one room where only one of us can stand in and we won't lock the door and keep everybody out. The reality is that we're all in the same room. We're all in the same planet, and your needs affect me. Your needs, if your immediate, if it hurts me, even if I think it doesn't, because it means you're going to be looking for a solution for your needs and your solution may not be helpful to me. So if we work together to fulfill your needs, we can both move forward, we can both come out ahead. And to me, that's a lot of what peace building is about. It's about your needs, my needs, how can we meet both sets of needs in a constructive, imaginative way, so that maybe it isn't going to be that we will never disagree or have competing needs again, but that we increase the likelihood that what happens is positive in the country, the world, lose school, not backwards, and that we've learned to share the ever-decreasing resources of the world together. Well said, Jay. A lot of us have come to respect you. Jay E. McNeil, who's done this tremendous work that you've just finished with Center on Conscience and War. At other times, as I've said, you don't mince words very often. You're not afraid to take an unpopular position with respect to the general population or with respect to the peace crowd. At one point, you kind of crushed, I'm not intentionally, I'm sure, but you crushed my belief that if a draft were enacted, that we'd have strong, effective work against the war, that is my perspective still, that if a draft were enacted, that a lot of people who are just ignoring the war would have to sit up, pay attention, and say, "We've got to stop this war." And yet, you addressed the other side of that issue. I want to give you the forum to crush my hopes again. I'm being happy to, because I think that is really a ridiculous position. It cannot mince words. It's a selfish position too, because it's generally held by people who are not in a position to be drafted. In fact, it very recently came up in Finn's Journal. There was an essay in which an older Quaker said, "We need a draft so that our children will know and have to confront the issue before." And I thought, "Well, isn't that convenient? Our children, who we know, odds are pretty good. They won't have to be drafted today. We'll get a conscientious objector status, because pretty much everybody knows this Quaker user conscientious objectors, and it's fairly easy for Quakers to get that status." So we want to draft somebody else's kids who managed to avoid the recruiter, so that our kids can understand that war is wrong. We want somebody else's kids to go to war, so that we can get other people to say, "War is wrong." And that is such a selfish position to me. And aside from that, it doesn't even work. People have this myth. The myth is that the anti-war movement was strong because of the draft and the bent anti-war movement, and people who opposed to draft stopped the war in Vietnam. But if you look at the secrets of events and you look at the facts, you'll realize that that's simply not true. First place, we had a draft since October 1940. The actual draft started in January 1941, but the system started on October 1940 until 1976. How many wars did we have in between there? We had World War II, we had Korean War, we had the Vietnam War. Did having the draft stop any of those wars stop us going into them? No. In fact, having the draft allowed the military to say, "We've got plenty of people. If we don't have enough people, we can draft more people. We've got tons of people to be canon fodder. We don't have to worry about if we're going to have enough people to recruit." So that's the first part of it. The second part of it is Nixon believed, in fact, that the draft was the driver of the anti-war movement. And the reality was he got rid of the draft. He got rid of the draft before the end of the war in Vietnam. But the anti-war movement, you know, some people may have dropped out of it, probably some didn't. But anti-war movement was still clear, the war in Vietnam was wrong. It wasn't the people who were, quote unquote, afraid of being drafted to drove the anti-war movement. And it isn't people now who are afraid of being forced into the military that drive the anti-war movement. There is an anti-war movement, and it has, in many respects, been very strong. There was a huge outflow before the vote to support President Bush's invasion of Iraq. There was huge, there were phone calls and visits and telegrams and e-mails. If you are on the hill that week before that vote, every office, the phone for ringing off the hook would constituents saying, "Don't invade Iraq, don't invade Iraq, don't vote the support of President on this." It was a huge outpoint. And many members of Congress just chose to ignore it. I was actually in Barbara Boxer's office one day, Senator from California, and her staff. And she was saying, "Oh, she's going to vote against it." And she went in and voted for it, even though 98% of the people who called her office the post-it. It isn't anti-war movement, it is harmless, it's a little point here. And just because we march up and down Pennsylvania Avenue does not necessarily play Congress, it's what we do in the ballot box that plays Congress. I want to take exception to one thing that you said, and it may be accurate as to the person who wrote the letter to Friends Journal, but if I would welcome at all the imposition of the draft, it would only be so that no one would be drafted. And that would be my hope that people as a general will rise up, go to the ballot box and say, "No, we're not going to vote for these pro-war people because our kids are all threatened." So I wouldn't say it would be selfish for a Quaker to think that activation of the draft would help us oppose the war. I want no one to be drafted, I want no one to die in war. My only hope would be that somehow the silent majority out there, the people who haven't taken a strong verbal stance about the war and in the ballot box, that their consciences, their concerns, their self-interest would be activated, so that this horrible destruction, both of our people, our resources, but of course, our neighbors and all of our fellow humans on this world are being destroyed by this war. Almost anything we could do to stop it would be a good thing in my view. And your points still stand, and I think people deserve to research into this and start this out. You and I can have a long argument over coffee sometime. And now that you're no longer working with the Center on Conscience and War, maybe you have time for coffee, but I don't think you really do. I think that Jay McNeil doesn't go in just first gear. I think you're usually an overdrive doing massive changes for the world. I'm a classic pipe a personality, so I'm going to school full-time and I'm still very active with the French United Meeting and with Baltimore Yearly Meeting, which are both Quaker groups, and I'm still very active with things in my neighborhood. I have to sit down with my datebook every morning and figure out what I'm doing for the day. Well, I'm so glad that you took the time to write "Peacework Quilt" and assemble it. I can't tell you how thankful I am for your years of service with the Center on Conscience and War. You know, you really stand out for me as a person who's inspirational for me personally, so I thank you so much for joining me for the third time now for Spirit in Action. Well, thank you for having me, and thank you for your sweetheart. That was J.E. McNeil, author of the newly released book, "Peacework Quilt" available at centeronconscience.org. Filled with powerful stories, deep thoughts about what really makes for peace, witness, and integrity, and drawing on J.E.'s 12 years as Executive Director of the Center on Conscience and War. It's well worth reading as one more way you can, and as Pete Seeger sings, "Study War No More." ♪ I ain't gonna study war no more ♪ ♪ I ain't gonna study war no more ♪ ♪ I ain't gonna study war no more ♪ ♪ I ain't gonna study war no more ♪ ♪ I ain't gonna study war no more ♪ ♪ I ain't gonna study war no more ♪ ♪ I'm gonna talk with a Prince of Peace ♪ ♪ Down by the riverside ♪ ♪ Down by the riverside ♪ ♪ Down by the riverside ♪ ♪ I'm gonna talk with a Prince of Peace ♪ ♪ Down by the riverside ♪ ♪ And study war no more ♪ The theme music for this program is "Turning of the World" performed by Sarah Thompson. This spirit in action program is an effort of Northern spirit radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is spirit in action. ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ (upbeat music)