We are NOT alone: The Pilgrimage to the School of the Americas
by Sheryl Johnson
National Representative (elected co-chair of SCM)
December 4, 2008
It’s strange – all of a sudden I am hit by emotion. It’s weird – I was so unemotional while in Georgia, only connected on an intellectual level, really.
I got home this evening and was about to start typing up more of the entries but decided to take a look at the SOA Watch website first. Somehow doing all of that made it real in a way that being there hadn’t even felt real. I can’t quite explain it, but the photos and narration make the protest “real” and “serious” in a way that being there wasn’t. Being there was just being there, like any day – seeing it projected back in journalism makes it all more serious. Perhaps it is the tone of writing, or maybe it’s something to do with the photos that capture moments and perspectives that I didn’t notice. I don’t know if I can really describe it well. But all of a sudden I feel the whole experience.
What hit me most was the list of the six people who did cross onto the base and get arrested – and will be tried in January. I had no idea that it had happened. The first person on the list was a nun. I am humbled by that commitment. Humbled by the fact that they knew with certainty that they would be arrested. Humbled by that willingness to give one’s life to such an ancient, counter-cultural tradition in a way that is so public and is literally worn every moment. Humbled by the engagement with “modernity” and living one’s faith out in the world, not behind the walls of the convent.
On an unrelated note, I also picked up a CD while I was there – the group is called Emma’s Revolution and the album is called “one”. It is amazing. One of the songs was written specifically about the SOA – it is called “one by one” (all of the songs on the CD are pretty cool and mostly address a specific social justice issue/encounter – another one is about an undocumented worker killed in the world trade towers on 9/11). It is amazing to listen to again as the images of people coming, one by one, each from such different circumstances, each holding a cross commemorating a different life, walking as a mass but one at a time placing it on the fence. That tension between individual life/collective life; individual deaths and the institution and systems of the SOA hit me. I’d highly recommend the song as an interesting format for learning about the SOA.
Anyway, the image of walking in a mass with 20,000 other people united in word and common action has been sticking with me. I have been thinking about that in the context of the United Church creed, which begins “we are not alone.” I have often thought of that line in the pastoral sense – in a society ripe with individualism and loneliness and despair “we are not alone”. But I’ve begun to think of it in a much more “prophetic” and active sense. WE are NOT alone – we have responsibilities to act, to see the connection of our actions to effects – as a challenge.
- Read Sheryl’s full daily journal from the 2008 Pilgrimage
