The Dominos fell the wrong way

September 7, 2006

Dominos fell the wrong way

Seeing, reading, and hearing about all the war hysteria an old saying popped into my head…”that’s all I can stanz and I can’t stanz no more”. While I agree with Popeye’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popeye) food preferences, as a Mennonite committed to non-violence, I take a different approach than he would to Bluto or Brutus

I remember walking out on the playground at Lower Salford Elementary School one day, I don’t know if Ida Keyser, Miss Heckler, or Mrs. Smith was my teacher that year, but I remember seeing the whole play ground filled with bomb shelters. I also remember in our Weekly Reader in the world news section we read about Vietnam. During most of junior high school and Souderton and later while at Christopher Dock Mennonite High School….we were constantly told in the news about the threat of communism and why we needed to stop this threat to American democracy and Southeast Asia is where we were going to do this. One of the US solders who fought in Vietnam and was involved in the My Lai Massacre (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mai_Lai_Massacre) went back 25 years after the incident in 1993 to revisit the site. When he arrived the children now living in the village approached him announcing their names….”me Flower…me Blossom.” His response was…”My God we should have bombed these people with Love”

Instead of going to Vietnam, I volunteered to go into alterative service, working as an orderly caring for persons with disabilities in West Berlin, Germany…living behind the Iron Curtain for two years…in an island of western democracy.

Suddenly in 1989 the Iron Curtain fell under its own weight. The people in Berlin said the Wall fell for the same reason it went up…to keep people from leaving. When it fell, hardly a shot was fired, but it fell backwards and knocked a lot of other communist dominos with it. And so, at the end of one of the most violent centuries in history, we saw a non-violent revolution, using Gandhi and Martin Luther Kings non-violent approach, that democratized over a billion people’s lives...in East Germany, Russian, Romania, Czechoslovakia, China, South Africa, Chile and other countries as well.

This is why I’m a member at Salford Mennonite Church, Harleysville and involved in our “Be not Afraid Weekend” to find ways to live in peace in a fear-filled age. I invite anyone who is interested in this kind of dialogue to our sessions on Saturday and Sunday September 9 and 10 (http://www.salfordmc.org/ ).

Joe G. Landis

Lederach