Wendell Berry’s timely essay “A Citizen’s Response to the National Security Strategy of the United States of America,” is featured in the March/April issue of Orion Magazine. The Orion editors chose to introduce the issue with a beautiful tribute to Bob Swann:
For the past year or more, there has been an ongoing peace vigil in Great Barrington, where the Orion office is located. Every Saturday, at a busy intersection, a group of people, ranging from just a handful to a noisy hoard, has stood with various signs and banners: “Don’t Attack Iraq,” “Peaceful Solutions,” “Support Our Troops; Bring Them Home.” One rather large sign appeared recently: “Never Forget 9/11.” And next to that sign was another: “Bomb Saddam.” Which side was the bearer of the never-forget sign on? Oddly enough, it was hard to tell.
As cars roll through the intersection, many people honk and wave the two-fingered peace sign out the window. Others give the thumbs up to the Bomb Saddamers, deliberately turning the thumb downward (or worse) when they approach the peace crowd. And of course plenty just look away.
By the time this issue of Orion is in readers’ hands, the war may be underway; it may even be over. Then again, it may have been narrowly averted. And if that’s the case, will we simply retire the signs and go home? As Wendell Berry points out in his essay in this issue, “we have not learned to think of peace apart from war.” But we could do this. We could learn from those among us who make peace a matter of daily practice, people who spend whole lifetimes working to address the root causes of conflict.
Orion staff and friends were reminded of this recently with the death of neighbor and colleague Robert Swann. Bob was not unfamiliar with protest, having served a lengthy prison term as a conscientious objector in World War II. Much of that time was spent in solitary confinement, because he refused to cooperate with the prison’s policy of racial segregation. During the long hours alone, he read about and pondered the conditions that led to war, thinking mostly about how to change them. He came to believe that people need access to land where they can live and work, a system of currency that enables economic self-sufficiency, and community institutions that work to sustain both land and people. When he left prison, he set to work on the reforms he felt were essential for building a peaceful world.
Much of this work involved picking up a hammer and building things. Bob organized crews of black and white Americans in the South to rebuild churches that had been burned in the struggle for civil rights in the sixties. He created the country’s first community land trust to provide farmland for African-American farmers in Georgia. Years later, he designed and built affordable housing for the community land trust in Great Barrington. He pioneered the movement for local currencies. In 1980, he founded the E. F. Schumacher Society [now the Schumacher Center for a New Economics] to put the decentralist ideas of Small Is Beautiful author E. F. Schumacher into action. Bob believed that building what Schumacher called “an economics as if people mattered” could steer us away from the conflicts that lead to war. He died in January at age eighty-four.
As a friend and advisor to the Schumacher Society [now the Schumacher Center], Wendell Berry was well acquainted with Bob’s interest in community credit, land trusts, and local currencies, all of which grew out of his peace activism. In fact, Berry could have been paying tribute to his friend’s life and work when he wrote the final sentence of his cover story for this issue: “If we are serious about peace, then we must work for it as ardently, seriously, continuously, carefully, and bravely as we have ever prepared for war.” Peace, in other words, is not something you can hope for or fight for. It is a way of living.
At the wake held for Bob Swann was a simple, beautiful wooden casket, upon which rested a hammer and a measuring tape, among other tokens and symbols. The message, or so it seemed, was let us all now get to work building the kind of world we want to live in.
– “From the Editors,” Orion, March/April 2003
A Memorial Service for Robert Swann will be held Saturday, February 22, 2003, at 2:00 PM in the Sanctuary of the First Congregational Church, 251 Main Street, Great Barrington, Massachusetts. The Robert Swann Memorial Fund has been established through the Schumacher Center to continue his legacy of positive action on behalf of small communities and local economies. Writings by and about Bob may be found at the Center’s website.