-from Ft. Dix

by Stephen Kelly, SJ

Being in this segregated housing unit (SHU - or in Anglo-Saxon jargon - the hole) with its contraband ban on newspapers and magazines, I'm reminded of the isolation, starvation for verifiable local news that we experienced at our little Jesuit school in southern Sudan. Fourteen years ago, as is still the case to be seen now, civil war and famine raged. News was simply cut off, analogously, like it is outlawed, here. Yet occasionally, making its way through several electronically controlled gates and locked doors, I received an envelope with the Nuclear Resister. And just as occasionally, back in Sudan of 1988, we could get a clear enough broadcast of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) nightly news.

One telling item, in the spring of 1988, BBC reported, "...Thousands arrested in protests at the Nevada Test Site..." Wow, for this guy another hemisphere away from a place, an issue, an event close to his heart, my world became a tad smaller as this important event broke the media blockade to at least get reported. BBC went on to quote then Attorney General Ed Meese, Ronald Reagan's top cop who followed the Rayguns from California to prez of the U.S., hitching on to the Gipper's mind-numbing rationale for greed and war-spending passing itself off as economic leadership. Meese was quoted as saying, "...They (arrestees) will be treated as what they are, terrorists..."

Fourteen years later, it may need pointing out, the Federalist Society, a conservative think tank in D.C. which hands to now Attorney General Ashcroft his script and cues, has as one of its founding board members at the helm, Ed Meese, among other Raygun and Bush constellations. One need not be defensive about asserting conspiracy theories here. This is the new McCarthyism trading the pinko-commie label for the scapegoat of terrorism. Same witch-hunting methods with new naming. But the same label-maker and user in 1988 gains political currency in 2001, 2002 from the terrorist tag.

Now we learned as kids, "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me." Yeah, but the analysis should continue, because the freight purported of such a moniker carries an agenda. Phil Berrigan reminds us that at the heart of demonizing one's opponents is a pattern of lies, prior to leading to murder.

Speaking further of name-calling, bumpersticker lobotomy-esque labeling, the reviling scapegoating: it was Jesus who made a beatitude of adherence to the prophetic tradition and earning such consequences that could affirm it:

Blessed are you when they shall revile you and say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake... for they persecuted the prophets... before you.

In such an assessment, going against the grain and parameters of prevailing powers, we are not only helped to anticipate hurdles of such demonizing, but we're found, deemed blessed.

Should you earn such a label, take heart, you must be doing something right. You must have caught the attention of think-tank powers, by raising opposition to their anti-human agenda.

So I await, in hope, from this cinderblock tabernacle of SHU, like I did on the Savannah Plains of Sudan in 1988, the word of your consoling, media blockade breakthroughs, blessed as you are.

[Stephen M. Kelly, SJ wrote with stubby pencil, as he serves a 14 month sentence for a probation violation: participating in the Plowshares vs. Depleted Uranium action (12/98) while on probation from the Prince of Peace Plowshares action (2/97).]