Spirit in Action
History of War - and the Alternatives
Myron Buchholz brings real passion and personal insight to his teaching of high school History, particularly as it relates to war. He's spoken strongly against war since the early 1990's, but also brings respect and esteem to how he talks about our soldiers, including his daughter, currently serving in Iraq. He's a powerful, rational, dedicated voice speaking out against the error of war.
- Broadcast on:
- 07 Nov 2010
- Audio Format:
- other
(upbeat guitar music) ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear that song ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ - Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helps 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 fruit in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ - Get prepared to be edified by today's spirit and action guest, Myron Buchholz. Myron has spent some decades teaching high school history, 18 of those years here in Eau Claire at Memorial High School. He's also an associate member of Veterans for Peace and has a daughter serving in Iraq. So he brings deep passion and thorough knowledge to his opposition to war. He's a regular presence at Eau Claire's anti-war witnesses, and it's a pleasure to know Myron Buchholz. Myron, thanks so much for joining me for Spirit in Action. - My pleasure, thanks for having me. - This is the laid back season for you. All you're doing is driving around with kids these days. You missed teaching history in the summer. Is that a thirst or is it just really recuperation time for you? - I like to describe myself to people now as living a French lifestyle. I understand what it means to have ample time off to recharge your batteries. Why I look so forward to going back to school is because I've had time to get away from it and to recharge. And of course, I also have health care. I am fortunate and I describe myself as having basically single payer health care because I don't care who pays for it, I have it. And I have ample vacation time in the summertime. So with the exception of probably not drinking as much wine as I should, I can describe myself as almost French. - Trebien, Trebien. How long have you been teaching history at Eau Claire Memorial High School? - I just finished my 12th year in the building. And we moved here in 1997 and I was an emergency replacement for a teacher and got my foot in the door and they haven't gotten rid of me yet. - Could that be because you're taller than all of them? You're physically intimidating. Is it because you are not a pacifist? - Well, one of the things as a very young teacher, I realized very quickly that this is my 28th year teaching overall was that being abnormally large really does help in a classroom. If you want to pre-requisite for a teacher, certainly a little extra height not looking like the friendliest person in the world sometimes helps. - Of course, the way that I've gotten to know you, my run is by the stand out there, the Iraq moratorium stand. And I've known you to be active, protesting the war, trying to bring some rationality to our governmental politics. How long have you been self-identified as anti-war? Is it just that Iraq war? Is it go back to Afghanistan? Does it go back to previous wars? - Well, it goes back to the first desert storm when I really became interested in the whole concept of what we were really going to accomplish. And I also became very interested in how the media drums it up and makes it look like a video game. And I had some students then who were actually more anti-war than I was and it didn't really occur to me until I was showing video in my classroom in 1991 and the wonderful videos, wonderful and quotes videos that were shot of our laser-guided bombs being so accurate and blowing a building up. And I was showing that to my students and it just occurred to me that there's people in there were all of them bad, according to our military, that building needed to be blown up. And I stopped cheerleading for war. It was never really much of a cheerleader for war but it just really turned me off. And from what 1991, the folly of war has really just soaked in. - You said you weren't a cheerleader for war but evidently you were kind of balanced either way. I mean, you could have gone, yeah, maybe this would be a good war, that's a bad war. You've got a different perspective I think these days. Now when you look back at previous wars, what's your viewpoint? Do you have an idea that, okay, these wars are okay and those ones weren't? - Well, that's a really good question and I have started over the past number of years pointing out to my students that you can find encyclopedias of war which will give an encyclopedia version of virtually every war in human history and they're fairly thick books because there's been so many of them. And my question is go into that encyclopedia, open it up anywhere, read about the war and then ask yourself if this sounds like that made sense. From the perspective of looking back, I say all wars look stupid. When they're a current event, they all seem to be the thing that we need to do at the time. Somehow we have to reconcile the difference between those two things. So in America's wars, as an American history teacher, I even argue that the revolution, the American revolution didn't have to happen. The Canadians got their freedom. They have the same rights that we do now. They didn't fire a shot in anger. And I understand that speaking about the revolution can cause some people to sit up and take notice because that's supposed to be one of our great wars and truthfully, we did get some good documentation out of it that stood up the test of time. But the actual war itself was really foolish. World War II is an interesting discussion. One of the things that I try to point out to people is that, especially in this modern era, where almost everything is compared to World War II. Every war is compared to World War II. And I like to tell people that not every war is World War II. When our greatest pilots come back from the areas that we occupy and describe the fact that these other countries have the greatest militaries and the greatest air forces and the greatest technology, I might sit up and take notice. But, and of course, I was Charles Lindbergh in Germany before World War II. We came back and we didn't have any airplanes like the Germans did. And there were people that were trading with Germany and they were best buds. And then you have this bizarre leadership take over and convince a significant percentage of their population that going on a war of conquest is a good idea. And of course, it backfires something fierce. But in our current sense, we compare everything to World War II. And then on that same topic, I always ask that if World War II is so great, ask yourself, how did it work out for young Germans and young Japanese? And then all of a sudden the conversation changes quite a bit. From our history book, we do nothing but glorify World War II. For the Japanese, they're still struggling with it. Many Germans still struggle with it. You know, we look at war through such rose-colored glasses and through such a narrow, narrow view. And once you expand that view a little bit, it starts to look, I think, more realistic. - When you say that the war looks stupid, and you also said in there that you think about a building being hit by one of our smart bombs, and then you realize that there's people in it, some of who are probably not bad folks. What is it that makes it stupid? I mean, obviously, you've got something like Germany, and they decide to go on this war of conquest. Stupid idea on their part. Do people who are facing aggressors have another alternative? Is there an option that we could take that says we've got to preserve our lives or our freedoms or our well-being in some way without going to war? - Well, I'd like to see it as try. I mean, we only have one answer for any perceived threat of aggression and that's to attack. And using World War II as an example and using other wars as an example. When I say stupid, obviously that needs to be described in many different ways, but one of the problems that I have is how easy it is to convince young people to go and die, put themselves in harm's way, and the people doing the convincing frequently never experienced anything like that themselves. So we are led to war. We are convinced to be afraid when in reality, there probably isn't that much to be afraid of, and we do it over and over and over again. So when you take a look at any of the wars in human history, you kind of see that same pattern. You have a bunch of wealthy leaders at the top convincing people from peasants on up. The right thing to do is to go march off to war and somehow win the day and this war will solve everything. That's another part of my stupid answer to the war is that we hear that we have to do this because not doing it will mean our world is worse. I don't think you can prove that to me in history books that wars actually really improved us as a people. Now again, World War II being an exception. Gandhi said, "Every tyrant fails. "Every tyrant throughout human history will fail." And how do we go justify World War II? Well, especially when it rolled over right into the Cold War causing millions more deaths as it expands into Korea and Vietnam. All you can do is speculate, all you can do is wonder, but I really get tired of hearing World War II being described as our good war. When all other wars take into consideration like that seem to look pretty foolish. Of course, Marin, you're a teacher. You're a teacher in a public high school. You're a teacher in public high school in the Midwest, which means that there's middle America looking at you. And middle America tends to shy away from saying things so clearly as war is stupid. But you're standing up in front of students and talking to them, are you teaching them sedition? Is this okay? How do you talk about these things with your students? Well, I ask questions. You know, we're supposed to live in the information age and we have so little information. One of my favorite cartoons that I remember looking at from the run up to this present war in Iraq was of a, look like a middle class living room and a man sitting in a chair with newspapers and magazines and a child laying on the floor watching TV. And there seems to be all kinds of information in the panel. And the child says to the parent, why are we attacking Iraq? And the parent says, because Iraq attacked us on 9/11. And a caption was something about so little information in the information age. Here's a family that was surrounded in the cartoon, granted, but we know this happened for real. Surrounded by information and a significant percentage, almost all that information was bad, information. Again, being led to war, being manipulated to go to war without thinking about it. So, you know, my challenge to my students is just to, first of all, do multiple sources. When you look back at the run up to Desert Storm and the run up to this war in our Afghanistan, you look back and you see the same pattern over and over and over again, that there was just a simple rush to war. The dissenting voices were quieted. They were almost completely shut out of the press and people bought into what the leaders were saying. After the fact, the leaders say, well, we didn't know and that doesn't do much for the 5,000 plus dead soldiers and let's do 100,000 wounded at this point. And the fact that we are almost bankrupt because of our wars of aggression. So, it's a challenge to, you know, fine, you can be for a war. But make sure that you have looked at all of the pros and cons and made an informed decision and not just parrot talking points that Saddam is a bad man. - So, from your point of view, with the information you've garnered, you've looked all around Myron and you said, we didn't go to Iraq because they attacked us in 911 'cause they didn't. We didn't go there in order to get weapons of mass destruction. We knew we didn't have them. After you've eliminated these, what is the reason we went to Iraq? - Well, I think George W. Bush wanted to somehow avenge his father. I think he had that, you know, a real complex about that. Oil, I mean, the first name for, it was Operation Iraqi Liberation, which, of course, is oil and they changed that to Operation Iraqi Freedom. It's power, you know. When you come right down to it, it's greed and power. And the greedier and the more powerful the society gets, the more likely they are to end up in a war. I mean, look what the British did in India. You know, you look at Germany. I mean, Germany was rebounding from the depression and they became, their leaders became incredibly full of themselves and became incredibly greedy and assumed a tremendous amount of power. Leadership left unchecked, you know, in greed and power invariably leads to war. How do you get more powerful? You've got to take over more people. And we have no concept of the history of the Middle East as a people. You know, we look at them as, like we saw the Vietnamese, as little people in our black pajamas, little brown brothers. And we have this superiority complex and this American exceptionalism that, you know, doesn't hold up well in history because everybody comes crashing to a halt. And one of my favorite things to remind people is that the nickname of Afghanistan is the place where empires go to die. Because there have been a lot of powerful empires that have tried to get their foot in Afghanistan at the last, of course, being the Soviet Union. And for all the cheerleading of how, you know, the Reagan era ended the Soviet Union, I always think it's quite an omission to mention that the Soviets got bogged down in Afghanistan for about 10 years and bankrupted themselves and then left. And shortly after that, their empire fell apart. - You've taken what I think is a pretty public stance. I mean, coming up here in front of your house, you've got two very prominent signs. One bring the troops home and the other one saying a big peace sign. Have you taken hits as a public school teacher, as a public persona for standing against the war? - Oh, definitely. When the students walked out of Memorial in the spring of March of 2003, there was a student-led organization and they got together and over 100 students got up and walked out in protest of the impending war. They had asked me to be their advisor because in order to organize as a group, they had to have a teacher on as an advisor, even though I didn't do anything, but I said, I will support you in that. Do you want to walk out good for you? Oh, yeah, there were teachers who were incredibly angry. There was editorializing in our local newspaper. There was no different anywhere across the nation. I don't think there's any worse or any better here. But that media drum beat that in a time of war, you have to support your president and you have to support your military was just curious to me. Said, I'm not in the military. I don't have to support a commander-in-chief and I'm free to stand up and say, no, I think this is a wrong idea. I think in Christmas of 2004, I made one of the signs that says, "Bring them home now." And I lit it up with some Christmas tree lights attached to my basketball backboard and my garage. Anonymous complaints then to the city had me take it down because one, it was a roof sign and two, it was a few square inches larger than is accepted by city statute. So I trimmed it down, so it is now a proper square footage and it's now in front of my house and I just simply decided now with Afghanistan becoming Obama's war. Then instead of just waiting for the Christmas holiday, I just leave it up because I'm so thoroughly disappointed as to what's going on in Afghanistan and that we're just gonna continue. And I'm also surrounded by people in a neighborhood who are very gung-hole about war but none of their kids are in harm's way, which is typical for the nation because what is a statistic? There's only a small one-tenth of a percent or something like that of people who actually have soldiers in their family who are serving close to combat or in combat. And so people don't get it. They just, they don't think about it. They volunteered, you know, I hear that a lot. Well, they volunteered. So yeah, we've definitely taken some hits. We had the peace sign got ripped off my wall on the 2nd of January in the middle of the night and I had it wrapped as a Christmas wreath with some lights on it. I assume it was young men walked up in the snow and I yanked it off my wall. I immediately replaced it with another one and I screwed it to the wall with a lot more screws. So if they're gonna take this one off, they're gonna work a little harder. - Do you have a real sense that in the neighborhood that most of the people are thinking in a different direction to you? Are they all saying support the war while your signs are saying, you know, bring them home now? - Oh, I know that exists with a few people in the neighborhood. Is it would all across the nation? I mean, you still see, you know, poles and so on that demonstrate a significant percentage of the people think that we're still doing the right thing or at least they hope we're doing the right thing. One of the things that I was telling my students in 2003 was that I hope my country is right, but I fear it's wrong because as a citizen of a country you hope that your leaders make good decisions. There's still some of this, you know, certainly some of this attitude, although it's a lot easier protesting the war now than it was in 2003, 2004. I know that I'm a regular member of our Peace Corner crew in Chippewa Falls in our unofficial poll of how many times we get flipped off and yelled at somewhere around on the spring of 2007 where we could stand for an hour and frequently, on a Saturday, never see a negative comment where we would always have three, four, five, maybe 10 in an hour before that. Most people just ignore you. They look straight. We call them straight aheaders, people that drive past us and look straight ahead, like if they look straight ahead we're not there, which I think is kind of an example of how we approach the concept of war. If we don't think about it, if it's not affecting us directly, then somehow it really doesn't matter. No, it's easier now to be opposed to the war because the polls have completely flipped flopped. In 2003, the numbers were somewhere around 30 to 70, about 30% of the people opposed the war, about 70% of the people when they asked were, we would support it. And somewhere around 2007, towards the end of 2007, those numbers have flipped flopped like 60, 40, something like that. And I think that's from what I can tell if we're standing out in the street, that would be fairly accurate. - You have another aspect that really involves you with concerns about Iraq, and that is that I think you've got a daughter over there. Could you talk to me a little bit about that? When she went in, did she know that you were anti-war? Why'd she go on the military? Was this static between you? I think that makes it a little bit complicated and it also makes it cleaner, 'cause I've seen you standing out there on the corner when we're doing a rock moratorium. I see you stand out there and I see people yell like, "You're so immediate and you don't care about our soldiers." And you say, "I've got a daughter over there." And all of a sudden they say, "Oh, I just put my foot in my mouth, didn't I?" - Well, certainly there's been, we've seen lots of examples about that. My daughter was being recruited for sports, for basketball and the number of schools that had contacted her and one day it was the United States Military Academy at West Point. We ended up visiting and this is in 2000. She graduated in 2001, was bringing 2001 before 9/11, 2001. The rigor and the challenge and the prestige and when we visited there I'm a history guy and of course the history just oozes out of every corner of the place. It was a challenge, I mean, I understand the military, you know, being that and providing a tremendous challenge of physically and mentally and the training and so on. And she chose to go to the Military Academy at West Point and I supported that partly because I thought, well, she's not war like. In fact, I think it's very accurate to say the only weapon I believe she ever held her hands up to basic training was nerve fencing and she was about four or five and the nerve fencing things and they were kind of fun and that was about it. And so no, she was pretty much a pacifist, pretty much artistic but athletic and wanted to take the challenge. And so here she is enrolled at the United States Military Academy and September 11th happens. And so I'm counting on my fingers, you know, four years to graduate. Well, this nonsense has got to be over in four years. And of course, graduation comes around in 2005 and we're still listening to the same pontification from our leaders about how great and how important it is that we continue the effort in Iraq because we can't cut and run. We are leaving, we'll dishonor those who are killed and so on and so forth. So she ends up deploying to Iraq. She was never a trigger puller, she has not been a trigger puller. The first year, for her first deployment, she was extended to 15 months and her base was routinely mortared and things like that. And of course, it was one of the bloodiest years of the war and then she was home for about a year and then redeployed again in November of this past year. And so she has, I think she's in week number 38 of the second tour and this one 52 weeks because they stopped the whole extension going from 12 months to 15 months. So this tour will be over in 12 months, come around November. So it's made it, it's made it really interesting, really difficult and one time when she was home, she even came with us and stood at Peace Corner and Chippewa. And one young man, it's usually young man who heckles the most, drove by and yelled, "Why don't you all go to Iraq?" And my daughter was staying there and she yelled back, "I've been there." Which I have always thoroughly enjoyed. You know, she's a good soldier. She does her duty. Like all of us, she hopes that this works out for the best. But knowing what we know. - If you just tuned in, this is Spirit in Action. And my name is Mark Helpsmeet. I'm your host for this Northern Spirit Radio production. You can always listen to our programs again over and over via the web. The website is NorthernSpiritRadio.org and you also find links on the site. That'll help you connect with the documentation and the groups that are related to my guests. I'm speaking today with Myron Bucholz. He is a teacher here in Eau Claire, Wisconsin in the high school, in Memorial High School. And he's been a very prominent figure on the streets speaking out against the war. And what I'm wondering Myron is, you understand that war is stupid. That's what you said. You think it's really bad decision. You're a history teacher so you've looked at the mass of evidence. A lot of people make those decisions and then they stay home. They say, "Yeah, I think it's stupid, "but I'm not gonna get involved." What is it that made you different? Made you willing to stand out there? It made you, I think, compel to stand out there on Saturdays, once a month on Fridays and going to Wednesdays vigil against the war? Why is it that you're putting your life into prominence? Well, the folly of it all. We've been lied to and there's so little on a national scale covering how ridiculous this war is, that it just seemed to me that somebody has to stand up and at least demonstrate their disagreement. And of course I wasn't, never stood by myself. There's a significant core group of people who are just willing to stand out and we hold our signs and we always feel that at some point as hopeless as it is. One young man, Joel, passed us once at Chippewa and he yelled, "You're wasting your time." And I yelled back, "I know." But we stand because I think the biggest reason is that if we're not there, there'd be nobody. And there's got to be somebody that is demonstrating to at least the children that you just don't have to get in line. And I always feel the best when I see a carload of people go past us on a Saturday and there's little children looking out the window. I always hope that that matters somewhat to them in the future, that maybe they'll remember this, that it's okay. Peace is an interesting concept. It is very profitable. Peace is very profitable for the majority of people and somebody has got to stand out there and say that whether we're wasting our time or not. - And of course, Myron, some of the young people that you're affecting are the ones that are in your classrooms, the people in your school. And you mentioned when you had to walk out at Memorial, a hundred or so students who walked out against our going into Iraq. When you did that, they came to you and said, "Hey, we need someone we can trust to do that." To stand on our side to say, "Yes, I'm the representative for this group," or "I'll take the hits, I think for it." My question is you've been asking these questions of your students. You're trying to make them think, have you seen it have an effect? Have you seen perhaps the students who say, "I'm going in the military?" And you say, "Look at this question, look at this question." And they say, "I've done the research "and now I'm going a different direction." - Well, I know there were young people who I'm sure changed their minds over the course because it's been such a long war. It's going to soak in eventually. - So yes, I know there are young people who have been more willing to stand up and ask questions, ask questions of their leaders. And I think across the entire country, some of that was displayed in our last presidential election. You know, the vote for Obama, I just saw the statistics again, the only age group that was significantly increased was the one under 30. And I think back to the Vietnam era, which was really powerful in my young life because being born in 1958, I was a sophomore in high school when the hostilities for Americans ended. But I watched that war almost every night through my grade school years and into my high school years and watched it and can remember how the attitude changed over time. I was reminding the students that there were only three channels and we watched, you know, now the part of Walter Cronkite. And so at six o'clock, we're watching the news. And from, you know, me being about six years old in 1964, until I was a sophomore in high school in 1973, we watched something about Vietnam every night. And at some point, the attitude just changed. We're a long ways into this conflict. And I know the attitude is changing, but I haven't seen anything on a national scale from our congressional delegation to really make me have confidence that we are going to stop this anytime soon. So it just goes on. And, you know, I like to remind people to count on their fingers. You have to count on your fingers to really demonstrate yourself how long this has been going on. We've had troops in arms way in Afghanistan since 2001. And we've had troops in Iraq since March of 2003. So here now I have students who, when you do that math, you know, there's mainly sophomores that I see, well, when this war started, they were in grade school. And it's quite somewhat profound when you think about that because that generation coming up, they're getting pretty tired of it. This is typical, it happens. You know, it's always exciting. One of the things I try to point out to people I talk to is how typically it's so exciting to go to war and they show pictures of Germans marching off to World War I and Americans over there. And everybody's so fired up and so excited to go to war. And then after a few years, it starts to soak in. And throughout history, it's usually only taken a couple of years for it to soak in. Our modern war is now being these wars of an insurgency are taking so much longer. And they're so remote that the impact just isn't there on a day-to-day basis and with our media simply not showing any real pictures of the horrors of war. People just don't know. They just don't think about it and so it doesn't exist. - How would you describe yourself, Myron? Are you pacifist? Are you anti-military? Are you just a rationalist who looks at it and say most of the time it's a bad idea? How would you describe yourself? What crystallization do you have? At least at this point in time because I'm not saying it won't change the next month. - Well, I've never been anti-military. That's one of the true wonders to me of what the hardcore militarists in this country have done with the simple sign of the peace symbol. That holding a peace sign for many people when they go by, they interpret a peace sign as a symbol that you A, hate your country and B, hate your military. A complete perversion of what the symbol actually means. I always chuckle at the fact that one of the nicknames of Jesus of Nazareth is the Prince of Peace. You know, I don't think you can go into many Christian churches and not have a common greeting of peace be with you. When I stand in a corner and hold a peace sign, I become evil in the eyes of many people. And it's really a turnaround from the Vietnam protests and the rewriting of history that the protesters actually caused our defeat in Vietnam and somehow that the peace activists were anti-American and anti-soldier. I feel very confident in saying that. That somebody sees the peace sign. They interpret it completely opposite of what it is. So defense? No, I'm not opposed to defense. One of the funniest things I've ever heard is criticism of the peace protesters saying, well, gee, then you'd like your house to be burglarized because you're so peaceful. How ridiculous, how childish. Some of the arguments that you hear are just so bizarre and some of those arguments come from mainstream talking heads on with their megaphone of the national media. No, I don't want my house burglarized. No, I don't want my country attacked. But quite frankly, we need to stop calling it the Department of Defense because it hasn't been defense for a long time. It's been offense. If you look at our department, it should be called the Department of Defense because this is the new attitude that now we need to preemptively find our enemies and kill them. Well, you've got a vicious circle there. One that's not held up well over history. So no, anti-military, no, I supported my daughter going into the military. That'd be a good challenge for her. I had my fingers crossed that we wouldn't get into any stupid wars during your time in the military. And of course, that didn't happen. In hindsight, what would I have done? Well, if she would have graduated from high school a year later, after 9/11, I would have definitely counseled against it. But entering the military in a time of peace, I did say to her that when you do sign your name on the bottom line, if Uncle Sam invites you to a war, it'd be very difficult to refuse. And she knew that going in. We had talked about the reality of joining a military. This was not an overnight decision. This is a long, long decision, and she has done well. And I hope for a safe return here in a few months. As do I? Are you part of military families speak out? What's your association with veterans for peace? These bigger associations of people who are standing against the war. What kind of affiliation do you have with any of them? I'm not a member of military family speak out. And I don't know why. I have thought about it. We've talked about it numerous times. And I am an associate member of that's for peace, which is kind of ridiculous because I'm not a vet. But that's for peace to allow associate memberships because some of my closest friends in this peace movement are vets. And early in the war, I came to understand that if there was anybody that had any real clout in speaking up against this war, it was vets. And so supporting that organization with a few dollars worth of dues, it seemed to be the right thing to do. And so I can proudly say, I'm an associate member of that's for peace because of my association with so many veterans who have seen enough of war. They've seen enough and they don't want to see it anymore. And knowing there are other ways to get things done. I'm gonna toss in a bit of my personal philosophy. I believe that one of the reasons that peace witness against these wars from the 80s, 90s to the current decade, the reason that that has been as tepid as it has is because the peace witness, which grew strongly under Vietnam, was not embodied in organizations that were self-sustaining. I think we have to teach peace in terms of community, not just in a book and not just as individuals. So when I asked you what organizations are you part of, I'm partly asking where do you get the sustenance, where do you pass the sustenance on for that? So I'll ask you again, are there ways that you see that our society could benefit and that you personally would benefit from being part of organization, which maybe it's more rational, maybe it's more heartful. I don't know what it is. Organizations which will help carry our community into the future. - We have to hope that's all we have. There's a book, I haven't read it. The title is so cool. We made love and got war. And I know it's a retrospective look at the peace movement out of Vietnam, that is saying exactly what you said, that there was a movement but it had no legs. As soon as the war went away, I was like, oh, okay, it's over, this will never happen again. Well, then we've watched it happen over and over and over again. One, we just have to stop glorifying war to start with. I see that over and over again in our history books and our movies, young males just love to watch war movies. And even with all the graphic detail that you have in war movies now, it doesn't do it. And I think in large part because it does nothing to portray the long-term cost of war. That the heroism and the bravery of the day-to-day combat is all that's ever portrayed. And rarely do you ever have anything that shows the long-term cost. How damaging it is to society. I fear so badly that we had 500,000 soldiers in Desert Storm and that bred one Timothy McVay. We've had over a million soldiers deployed in this war. Violence that is bred by war doesn't necessarily stop when the war ends for individuals. And so, you know, what do we do? You know, that's a good one. I think that one of the things that we're shocking to many people who see a standard peace corner was that we were still there after the Obama election. Because I know many people interpret us just as, you know, anti-Bush and just true we were. But we are also anti-war. And so, with the cheerleading for Obama and all this wonderful talk, you know, those of us who took a, well, let's see, you know, wait and see attitude. No, Obama has more people in harm's way than Bush ever did. Guantanamo is not closed. Rendition, there's some suspicion that's still going on. The indefinite detention, which just about makes me want to cry, indefinite detention, that's what we fought against in the American Revolution. And now we're doing it. This is a terrible thought historically. So what do you do? Well, we're still out in the street. It didn't matter that it was a different president. What matters is the war goes on. You know, we've got to have some legs and we've got to stay with this because I sometimes counsel students that in 20 years, if history is our guide, we're almost guaranteed to do this again. You need to be willing to stand up and not want your children to do this because the age group I'm talking to in 20 years, they would have kids. And those children would be the ones going off to war. But you look back at the pattern and we're just destined to do this again and again and again. Unless somebody stands up and says this has got to stop. So I hope these groups are out there can do it. I know what the history books say about the people that have stood up and taken completely unpopular positions about war. And those people are hailed as heroes. And the people that have led wars, caused wars are the villains. And so we need to keep that in mind when we start rolling towards our next war. But then, of course, we have a lot of the heroes of war, like Grant or Eisenhower, who then go on to become our presidents. And it's pretty rare that you see a Quaker president, a Quaker anti-war president, Richard Nixon being the sad exception to Quakers who usually oppose war. And there he was symbolizing a lot of what Quakers think is the worst behavior you could have. So what groups have been effective long-term? What movements have been effective? Education or otherwise? Where have we seen the best success? And I'm going to guess that the best success that we've had was in Japan. I think we built a more pacifist society there by the end of that war than any other country I know of, except maybe India. Well, the Japanese example is incredible because one of the things that has stood the test of time for Japan is the prohibition on the Japanese having a military. If you have one, you use it. Well, the Japanese have a Coast Guard. They apparently are not that worried about being attacked. They certainly must not have been worried too much about being attacked by the Vietnamese and Koreans and so on. If they wanted to change it, of course they could. India is an interesting study when nuclear war is brought up for much of my teaching career. He said I was never really worried about the Soviets and the Americans nuking each other for a number of different reasons, cultural similarities and so on. But the Pakistanis and the Indians, both having nuclear capability and having some animosities that go back to partition in 1947, seemed to me that there were some military leaders there that would be much more willing to press the button. But yet the people are generally pacifist and anti-war. So this isn't a sound anti-military. But what Eisenhower warned against has come to fruition. The military industrial complex is in control. Our own local newspaper has an article about our presto industries having a very profitable year. We have to read into the middle of the article to find out that their most profitable sales was in 40 millimeter shelves for the military. We have Oshkosh, which is just overjoyed because they got a contract to build a new bomb-proof vehicle. Wherever you look, and sometimes I want to just be obnoxious at Peace Corner, I always remind people standing next to me that we're just jealous that we didn't invest in the war industries when the war started. Because for all the talk of the economic downturn, there is no economic downturn for the companies that are producing military hardware. They're doing really well. That's scary. What business can you hope that comes to town that's going to employ? And if you open a war plant, I know a couple of years ago I read that we couldn't even keep up with bullet production. We were buying bullets from Israel. And that doesn't surprise me. It's just so profitable. The military industrial complex is really scary to me because standing up to that, I'm not that smart. But we're counting on you, Myron. We're counting on you to come up with the answers. I wanted to ask you about your perspective. And this, again, is as a history teacher, as a person who's getting the big picture in focus. God bless America is the big rallying call following 9/11. To some degree, I think we needed as a nation healing, pulling together, evaluating one another, saying we're not beat and downtrodden. But, of course, right away that phrase gets used as God bless us. And the rest of them, we don't care about their welfare. So my question is, your perspective from history, we, they, your last name, your surname, bookholtz, is a German name. So you're one of the enemy. You're one of those Nazis, right? I mean, you're maybe the reason you're opposing is because you want Germany to take over the nation. And, you know, people can think that way when they get into a we-they point of view. Your ideas? One of the things that bothers me the most about our modern society is the ridiculousness of the meaningless soundbite. You know, God bless America. I, I, I chuckle every time I see that there's some spare tire covers in town that's American flag and a spare tire cover. And then it says, there's only one. And I chuckle myself in other, isn't there? There's a million of them, and these flags all over Eau Claire. But there's only one. It, it, it becomes when you see the soundbite sounds good. When it's thought about rationally, it becomes pretty ridiculous. You know, God bless America. Well, okay, well, God bless the Iranians too. I mean, you know, Al Akbar means God is great. And yet that is the reason for us to bomb other people. And in reality, the Judeo-Christian Islamic tradition and all comes from the same core religious experience and the same God. So I am really, really opposed to simplistic soundbites. And unfortunately, that's what we are bombarded with in the short term. It can seem like it makes sense until you stand up and say, no, one of my neighbors here said to me during this war that, well, 9/11 proves that our oceans don't protect us anymore. They thought, wow, I mean, how did our oceans, how did our oceans protect the Native Americans? How did our oceans protect us at Pearl Harbor? And how did our oceans protect us from the Soviets were routinely having submarine patrols and international waters with 20 nuclear warheads armed and only literally minutes away from the destruction of any American city? You know, our oceans don't protect us anymore. But that became just a common theme. Oh, now we have to go on the attack because our oceans don't protect us. One of my favorite teachers that I've ever seen has a picture of Geronimo and his band of warriors on it in the caption of the T-shirt says, practicing homeland security since 1492. The soundbite is a hurtful item intellectually. It makes you believe things that are not true. But bumper stickers are good, right? So what's your favorite bumper sticker? I mean, we do live in the society of tweets and of soundbites. And so if you're going to compete in the marketplace of ideas, you have to put something brief out there, like bring troops home or whatever. So what are your favorite ones that, of course, obviously have some thought behind them. It's not enough to have a few words out there, but that should symbolize something deep. What do your favorite bumper stickers are your favorite word bites? Well, there's a one longer one that's something about when the Pentagon starts having bake sales to buy missiles instead of public schools will all be better off. I've seen one. I actually have one that says something about now that you've conquered Iraq. Why don't you move there? And there's a lot of sarcasm on the peace side of the bumper sticker. It's incredibly sarcastic. And in the bumper sticker slogan, it needs a lot of explanation. And yet, on the other side, the pro-war side is that yellow ribbon support our troops. Every time I see one of those stickers, I think, what, one's the last time you sent a package or you sent a letter, support our troops, and we know it. The answer for the great majority would be none of them. So there's a lot of really good ones out there. A lot of good sarcasm. And it makes you smile when you see them. And I know I've seen more of them in the past couple of years than there was in 2003, for sure. So it's another unscientific pull of how attitudes have changed about the war. One area we haven't talked about is religion or spirituality. And I know that you don't particularly identify strongly in that area. But I'm pretty sure you do have an historical overview that includes the role that religion or spirituality has played in peace or war. So what insights can you give me? And how do you connect with that personally? Well, I had a hard time while I actually haven't been back to the church I attended since the 2003, when walking into a church and being surrounded by bumper stickers that were promoting war and then having people that had, because of their politics, you knew they were supporting war, turn around and say, "Peace be with you at a church service." That pretty much completely turned me off to organized religion. I have an aspect of an idea, especially it goes back to our American Revolution, that our founders were really tired of following people wearing crowns and robes. And whether those crowns and robes signified religious leadership or political leadership, it didn't matter. Many of our founders describe themselves as Dias. They had a concept that there could be a greater power out there, but they weren't interested in taking orders from some human who, because of title, is supposed to be held up as god on earth or something like that. So I kind of consider myself a Dias tonight. And in that sense that when I'm teaching geography, geography books describe an ocean as a big body of water. There's a little more to it than that. But generally, that's all you get. And I like to ask, we students who have been to an ocean-- when you stand by an ocean, does the description big body of water describe it very well? And of course, they laugh. And the power of nature is very incredible. In the summertime for my battery recharge, I frequently walk almost daily in the morning out at Loge Creek and the trees. And I have a friend who says that he worships at the Church of the Great Outdoors, and I've become my believer in that as a way to approach. I say, I go to a mass every day of the week in Church on Sunday. That sounds like a good base to me. I want to thank you so much for taking the time, Myron. Especially in your laid-back time. Here I am, making you think hard when you could be just sitting here, charging your batteries, getting ready for the school year. Thanks for standing out there, being a prominent figure, taking the risk, standing up as a teacher in public school, doing that, loving the soldiers. At the same time, you've got daughter over there, loving the soldiers. At the same time, you're saying, let's do the best thing for our country. So thank you for standing in all those ways. It's been my pleasure talking to you. It's been a real enjoyable experience. Thank you very much. That was Myron Buchholtz. Today's spirit and action guest. He teaches history at Eau Claire Memorial High School, and in line with Myron's historical outlook on an opposition to war. I want to send you out with a song by Phil Oakes. His song, "I Ain't A Marching Anymore." All I march to the battle of New Orleans, at the end of the early British war. The young land started growing, the young blood started flowing, but I ain't a marching any more. Or I kill my share of engines and 1,000 different fights. I was there at the little big farm. I heard many men lying. I saw many more dying, than I ain't a marching anymore. It's always the old, you lead us to the war. It's always the young to fall. Now look at all we've won with the saber and the gun. Tell me, is it worth it all? Or I stole California from the Mexican land, caught in the bloody civil war? Yes, I even killed my brothers, so many others, but I ain't a marching any more. Or I marched to the battles of the German trench, in a war that was bound to end all wars. I must have killed a million men. Now they want me back again, but I ain't a marching any more. It's always the old, you lead us to the wars. It's always the young to fall. Now look at all we've won with the saber and the gun. Tell me, is it worth it all? Or I blew the final mission in the Japanese skies. I set off the mighty mushroom road. When I saw the city's burning, a dude that I was learning, that I ain't a marching any more. Now the labor leaders screamin' when they close the missile plans. United Fruit screams at the Cuban shore. Call it peace or call it treason. Call it love or call it reason, but I ain't a marchin' any more. I ain't a marchin' any 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 home ♪ ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world home ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing. ♪ (upbeat music)