Dr. Charlie Clements, right, and human rights investigative team from the Brooklyn-based Center for Economic and Social Rights (CESR) examine the family food ration of a young boy in Mosul, Iraq, in January 2003. Other members of the team included Elisabeth Benjamin, left, and Ron Waldman. (Photo courtesy of Robert Huber/Lookat Photos)

In 1992 the United States Air War College invited me to speak to the class of several hundred colonels who were soon-to-become generals. I was nervous. So was the commanding general. He was perplexed about how to introduce a Distinguished Graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy, one who had degenerated into a…a human rights activist.

 Of course, it was due to the thorough training in honor and ethics that I received at the Air Force Academy that led my refusal to fly missions in support of the invasion of Cambodia. I would spend six months in a psychiatric ward and be discharged from the Air Force as 10 percent mentally incompetent. The good news is that I eventually figured out that same piece of paper implied I was 90 percent competent!

 I left that piece of paper behind many years ago, but the consequences of war have never left me. That is why I traveled to Iraq in January of this year on a human rights mission. There I wrote a letter from an Internet café in Baghdad outlining some of the probable humanitarian consequences, if we went to war. I asked my friends to share this e-mail with others. In no time it had jumped from continent to continent.  I heard from a woman in Argentina. She wanted me to know that she and others would be demonstrating on the 15th of February in their small town in Patagonia. I also heard from a professor in Kenya. She had been injured in the bombing of our embassy there. She said that on February 15^th she would be praying so Iraqis would not experience what she and others had in Nairobi. A health worker wrote to say that as bad as things were on the West Bank, they paled by comparison to my descriptions of Iraqi hospitals. She too wanted me to know that she would be marching on February 15^th. The Internet became the connective tissue for millions of us…who understood we were not alone in our struggle against the rush to war.

 Thanks to the rapidity and reach of the Internet, we did not have to depend upon the corporate owned media. As a result, more than a third of Americans did not believe or accept the deception and lies that were used to justify the war.  Compare that to the Gulf of Tonkin incident.  It took almost 20 years for Americans to discover that it was a lie.

 As Robert Muller, former assistant secretary general of the United Nations, pointed out just before the war in Iraq began…never in the history of the United Nations had the Security Council so forcefully debated the legitimacy of a war…much less done it for six months. 

 Never before in our country has such a massive anti-war movement been mobilized…much less before the war even started.  Never in the history of the planet have 30 million people demonstrated for or against anything. February 15th was an extraordinary day. Many students from the 92 countries who attend the United World College where I teach part time told me what their families and friends did that day. One student from England, Imogen, said her parents had never been to a demonstration. They traveled by bus from their small village to London where they were inspired by the presence of hundreds of thousands of others.  Once people like Imogen’s parents have found their voices, it is unlikely that they will remain silent in the future. On that day Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, Quakers, atheists, Muslims, agnostics and UUs marched on seven continents, and we had a strong sense of our interdependence.

 Unlike the 1960s, this peace movement was not motivated by the fear that we ourselves might have to serve in the military or that our children might be drafted. It was based upon a clear awareness that the United States was not threatened by Saddam Hussein.  Our movement believed in the importance of international law and the community of nations to address global conflict.  It grew from our concern and solidarity for the people of Iraq…people who had already suffered so much under Saddam Hussein as well as under the sanctions the United States helped impose and enforce.

 I say all of this because there are many activists who are still confused…angry…even despairing because we were not able to stop the war.  However, early Unitarians and Universalists like Theodore Parker who would tell us not to be discouraged.  He would convince us that our actions have changed the landscape of the world in ways we don't yet understand or see.

 While others argued that catching slaves was sanctioned by the Scriptures, Theodore Parker openly called for defiance of the Fugitive Slave Act and led the Boston opposition to it.  Providing shelter for a run-a-way slave in his home led to his indictment by a federal grand jury.  He died in 1860 before he saw progress in abolishing slavery.  Though made famous by Martin Luther King, Jr., it was Parker, who first told us, “The arc of the universe is long… but it bends towards justice.”

 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