An open letter from Charlie Clements
Julia Ward Howe understood this too. She fought tirelessly for women's suffrage as founder of the New England Women's Association. Though she never was able to cast a vote, she stayed in the fight. Ten years after her death, women's suffrage became law.
One thing that Julia Ward Howe and Theodore Parker can teach us … is that the time it will take us to address issues of injustice is exactly equal to our lifespan.
Their activism and that of many other early Unitarians and Universalists was fueled by a belief that we have the potential to recognize right… to correct wrongs… to find solutions…and to make this a better world. I believed this in the 1980s when I was director of human rights education at the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. I believe it now.
At that time, my task within the organization was quite focused. It was to bring about a change in U.S. foreign policy. We worked to bring about negotiated settlements to end the Central American conflicts, which were fueled by our weapons and our tax dollars. Our goal was to help create more just and democratic societies. We accomplished that.
As a special guest at the signing of the peace accords in Mexico City that finally ended the bloody civil war in El Salvador, I may have been one of the few present who could recall the arc of the Service Committee's role. It had begun almost 20 years earlier when UUSC helped the Archdiocese in San Salvador publish Justice and Peace, a newsletter offering self-help and literacy skills to the poor. That was many years before Archbishop Romero was murdered. The signing of the peace accords was a transcendent moment for me personally. Before I came to the Service Committee, I had worked as a doctor in an area of El Salvador known as a “free fire zone.” The villages there were bombed, rocketed or strafed – daily – by U.S. supplied aircraft…all the while President Reagan was certifying to Congress that the Salvadoran armed forces were respecting the human rights of civilians.
For 20 years the Service Committee stood with Salvadorans who wanted a society in which their children could fulfill their human potential…a universal hope regardless of one's religion or beliefs. Professor Elizabeth Wood of NYU recently interviewed more than 200 campesinos, who risked their lives to participate in the civil war. They confirmed what we at the Service Committee had believed. She concluded that “through rebelling, insurgent campesinos asserted...their dignity in the face of condescension, repression and indifference.”
Their struggle for “dignity and worth” resonated with the Service Committee long before most Americans could locate El Salvador on a map. Later when Salvadorans fled the violence and made the treacherous journey to the United States, it resonated again with many Unitarian Universalist congregations. In defiance of U.S. law, they declared themselves “sanctuaries” much like Theodore Parker's home had been for runaway slaves. It resonated again with members of Congress, many of whom I escorted to El Salvador with the Service Committee's Human Rights Education delegations. We enabled them to hear the voices of the campesinos and contrast them to the lies they were told at the U.S. embassy. In the end, as persuasive as President Reagan was, he could not convince those members of Congress to support his war.
“Dignity and worth” are the very words that are enshrined in the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Was there a Unitarian or Universalist on Eleanor Roosevelt's staff, who could have penned those words as she midwifed the birth of this important document? I don't know. I do know the Service Committee can make certain that the ideals in this declaration assume an even greater prominence as one of the most important documents in human history.
Standing up for human rights, sometimes means saying no to fear. In the name of this so-called war-on-terror, which seems to cause terror at home and enact it abroad, we have been encouraged to fear our neighbors, each other, strangers (particularly Arabs and Moslems) and to spy on them, to lock ourselves up, to isolate ourselves. By living out our hope and resistance in public, embracing our diversity, we overcame this catechism of fear. We forged community that bridged our differences as we demonstrated our commitment to the people of Iraq.
And in this community of hope and resistance, we said no to the propaganda of war and no to the corporations that benefit from killing. Instead, we said yes to our culture that honors women, because they, more than men, nurture life. Yes, to our culture that honors the sun, because it, more than oil, produces life. Yes, to our culture that honors water, because it, more than the stock market, sustains life. And yes to our culture that honors the seasons and decency and human dignity, because they all illuminate life.
While property is important, it is not more important to us than life itself. The seeds of this culture have been planted by ministers and lay-persons in Unitarian and Universalist congregations, which for more than 150 years have been in the forefront of the effort to keep our ship of state on a self-correcting course.
The Service Committee is at its best when there is synergy between its policy work in Washington, its relationship with people whose voices it can amplify from the midst of their struggles against injustice, and its activist membership. Most human rights organizations function by “name, blame and shame”…then they move on to the next atrocity. They don't stay the course like the Service Committee did in El Salvador. They don't have social justice committees that can potentially be mobilized in hundreds of churches across the country.
But the Service Committee can only be as effective as its program, which must simultaneously embrace advocacy, witness, direct experience, education and mobilization. I understand each of these elements. I have lived them for the last 25 years. I have been an effective voice for human rights – the Thomas Paine Award, the Catherine Dunfey Award and the Letelier Moffitt Award are evidence. Now I want to help make the Service Committee, an even more powerful voice for human rights.
As the flower slowly turns toward the sun, in the long term, history bends toward justice and the arc of the universe toward life. The Service Committee has been part of a revolution of hope and resistance since its creation. And for 25 years before that the Unitarian and the Universalist Service Committees were part of that same revolution. It is how Unitarian Universalists live their faith. I was formally part of that effort for a few years … I would like to again be a part of it as the Service Committee writes some of the next chapters in this vibrant tradition.
Biography of Dr. Charlie Clements
UUSC trustees name Clements as new president
