lines. It is harder, in some sense. It is easy to judge and condemn and decry. It is hard to relate and communicate and respectfully agree to disagree.
My husband grew up here. Many of his friends at school were dependent on the military industrial complex. They moved around a lot. They would be in his class for a year while their dad was deployed to the Navy base and then they would be gone. From an early age, Patrick developed the ability to relate to people from different backgrounds and different political perspectives, finding common ground.
He said: “Even though most of the other kids at school had some direct relationship with the military through their parents’ enlistment or employment, and I was the peace activists’ kid, I never had any conflict with those kids. I never hid who I was or what I thought and believed. I worked really hard to find ways of communicating respectfully and nonjudgmentally. I learned to focus on systems, not personalities. I would tell the other kids: ‘I am not against your dad the soldier; I am against the system that bombs cities and kills kids. I think your dad joined the military for the same reasons I am against war.’ I think that I helped kids think more about the world and their role in it.”
After twelve years of being “Peace Pat” in the Submarine Capital of the World, he anticipated going to Earlham—a Quaker college in Indiana where he would major in Peace and Global Studies—as a kind of long-awaited homecoming. “I thought I would find my people! But I found myself less comfortable than I was in high school. It was kind of like: Everyone is progressive, everyone agrees that war is bad, so what do we talk about now? What do we do? How do we use this critical mass of like-minded people to create change? It made me realize that being a peace minority made me sharp and deliberate about who I was and what I thought and how I communicated with other people. It motivated me. At a place like Earlham I could be sort of lazy about it, which made me glad that I had not always been able to do that.”
Patrick is a good sounding board and a great inspiration. How do I get the conversation started with my new peers?
“Hey, I notice you are a really great father. Why do you work on submarines that could annihilate fathers and daughters?”
“How do you sleep at night?”
“Don’t you see the contradictions between your life and your work?”
Or my favorite when I was a kid protesting at the Pentagon: “You can’t run from a nuclear war.”
Patrick and most other small-town activists would tell me that these conversation “starters” actually kill dialogue. They tell me that empathy, compassion, and mutual aid are more effective. So I am letting go of judgment and conversion and starting with real conversation.
Of course Patrick makes mistakes too. Like the time he left a dirty diaper sitting on the back of the sofa. It was neatly wrapped. I walked by it two or three times before it registered in my tired mind: “Patrick! Gross!” My husband had changed the baby’s diaper and then left it right there.
But then I started to piece together our night. The baby was up at midnight to nurse, then up again at 2, and again at 4, and then again at 5:30—at which point Patrick took the voracious little eater away and I got to sleep deeply until 7:30. Bliss.
Patrick, on the other hand, walked around with a gassy, restless, grumpy baby for the better part of two hours. When Seamus would drift off, nuzzled on his dad’s shoulder, Patrick would try to get comfy on the couch. But then Seamus would wake up again, and there would more walking as the cycle repeated three, four, five times. I picked up the diaper and brought it upstairs to the pail with all the rest of them. I did not give him a hard time about it. Dads get a bad rap these days. They are accused of not doing housework. When they take care of the kids, it’s called babysitting by the Census Bureau. And
My husband grew up here. Many of his friends at school were dependent on the military industrial complex. They moved around a lot. They would be in his class for a year while their dad was deployed to the Navy base and then they would be gone. From an early age, Patrick developed the ability to relate to people from different backgrounds and different political perspectives, finding common ground.
He said: “Even though most of the other kids at school had some direct relationship with the military through their parents’ enlistment or employment, and I was the peace activists’ kid, I never had any conflict with those kids. I never hid who I was or what I thought and believed. I worked really hard to find ways of communicating respectfully and nonjudgmentally. I learned to focus on systems, not personalities. I would tell the other kids: ‘I am not against your dad the soldier; I am against the system that bombs cities and kills kids. I think your dad joined the military for the same reasons I am against war.’ I think that I helped kids think more about the world and their role in it.”
After twelve years of being “Peace Pat” in the Submarine Capital of the World, he anticipated going to Earlham—a Quaker college in Indiana where he would major in Peace and Global Studies—as a kind of long-awaited homecoming. “I thought I would find my people! But I found myself less comfortable than I was in high school. It was kind of like: Everyone is progressive, everyone agrees that war is bad, so what do we talk about now? What do we do? How do we use this critical mass of like-minded people to create change? It made me realize that being a peace minority made me sharp and deliberate about who I was and what I thought and how I communicated with other people. It motivated me. At a place like Earlham I could be sort of lazy about it, which made me glad that I had not always been able to do that.”
Patrick is a good sounding board and a great inspiration. How do I get the conversation started with my new peers?
“Hey, I notice you are a really great father. Why do you work on submarines that could annihilate fathers and daughters?”
“How do you sleep at night?”
“Don’t you see the contradictions between your life and your work?”
Or my favorite when I was a kid protesting at the Pentagon: “You can’t run from a nuclear war.”
Patrick and most other small-town activists would tell me that these conversation “starters” actually kill dialogue. They tell me that empathy, compassion, and mutual aid are more effective. So I am letting go of judgment and conversion and starting with real conversation.
Of course Patrick makes mistakes too. Like the time he left a dirty diaper sitting on the back of the sofa. It was neatly wrapped. I walked by it two or three times before it registered in my tired mind: “Patrick! Gross!” My husband had changed the baby’s diaper and then left it right there.
But then I started to piece together our night. The baby was up at midnight to nurse, then up again at 2, and again at 4, and then again at 5:30—at which point Patrick took the voracious little eater away and I got to sleep deeply until 7:30. Bliss.
Patrick, on the other hand, walked around with a gassy, restless, grumpy baby for the better part of two hours. When Seamus would drift off, nuzzled on his dad’s shoulder, Patrick would try to get comfy on the couch. But then Seamus would wake up again, and there would more walking as the cycle repeated three, four, five times. I picked up the diaper and brought it upstairs to the pail with all the rest of them. I did not give him a hard time about it. Dads get a bad rap these days. They are accused of not doing housework. When they take care of the kids, it’s called babysitting by the Census Bureau. And
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