Daniel Berrigan (pictured from the Jonas House Web site), the Catholic priest and war resister, adds his voice to those seeking to remind us that the current presidential race is only a small blip in the larger scheme of activism required to force social change.
In an interview with Chris Hedges in The Nation, he says that he is not preoccupied by the election, as so many on the left have been, quoting his brother, the late Father Philip Berrigan, “who said that ‘if voting made any difference it would be illegal.'”
Berrigan argues that those who seek a just society, who seek to defy war and violence, who decry the assault of globalization and degradation of the environment, who care about the plight of the poor, should stop worrying about the practical, short-term effects of their resistance.
“The good is to be done because it is good, not because it goes somewhere,” he says. “I believe if it is done in that spirit it will go somewhere, but I don’t know where. I don’t think the Bible grants us to know where goodness goes, what direction, what force. I have never been seriously interested in the outcome. I was interested in trying to do it humanly and carefully and nonviolently and let it go.”
Berrigan’s comment is instructive during an election in which the once-formidable Hillary Clinton continues to make her case using the argument that she has the best chance to win — as if she were playing golf rather than running to lead the nation. The issue is not who can win, but who offers the best program for the future, which of these highly flawed candidates can break the cycle of arrogance, greed and empire that have turned the United States into a hated nation.
Our goals should be to protect our freedoms, to improve the economy, rebuild the safety net and end the folly that has been our great-nation thinking (the assumption that we have the right and the responsibility to control the destiny of the rest of the world).
All empires, Berrigan cautions, rise and fall. It is the religious and moral values of compassion, simplicity and justice that endure and alone demand fealty. The current decline of American power is part of the cycle of human existence, although he says ruefully, “the tragedy across the globe is that we are pulling down so many others. We are not falling gracefully. Many, many people are paying with their lives for this.”
