I was talking to my neighbor
He said, “When I get to heaven, if it’s not like this,
I’ll just hop a cloud and I’m coming right back down here
Back to this heavenly bliss.”

“This Place” by Joni Mitchell
Watch on YouTube

In 2004, I first met Bob Potter when my volunteering began with the Veterans For Peace project envisioned by Steve Sherrill and called “Arlington West,” whereby crosses were set up each Sunday for U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq so as to bring home to the public the terrible cost of war. Back then when I helped with take-down of the crosses each Sunday, I initially knew Bob mostly as Chair of the monthly VFP Chapter 54 meetings which he was excellent at presiding over; always respectful and seamless flow that made the business pleasant, orderly, and productive. In 2007, after hospitalization precluded my heavy lifting at AW, I instead began greeting the public there. Since then, I had the pleasure of working Sundays with Bob Potter at Arlington West. Along with respective chores, always lively dialogue on movies to musicals, books to politics, travels to cuisine, and issues far and near and about everything between. Away from AW, I loved Bob’s marvelous plays, so timelessly creative, whose content always moved and freshness always amazed. It never ceased to amaze me how someone so gifted and extraordinarily accomplished could be so wonderfully ordinary and funny and caring. That someone so remarkable and marvelously talented and vital as Bob Potter should now be gone from us is heartbreaking. My deepest condolences to his family and friends and profound gratitude for having enjoyed the pleasure of his company. With Bob Potter, may we have the courage and the grace and the genius to make this a better place.

Elizabeth Colon
15 July 2010

Exactly three thousand white crosses
Symmetrically fixed in rows of forty-eight
Aligned at attention across a sandy beach
Vastly understate the reality.

Fleeting symbols of a Sunday afternoon,
Garnished with California seagulls, and a soft breeze
Coaxing tiny sailboats from the yacht harbor,
They shine in the sunlight, astonishing the tourists.

Bypasers from LA and the Valley, gawking New Yorkers,
Aussies and Londoners, Dutchmen and Turks,
Gabblers in Farsi, Japanese, Hindi
And all varieties of Spanish pause to contemplate
The irresistible photo opportunity of Death.

As the digital cameras whiz, zip and flash,
Catching the poignant sight, disposing of its brief shock,
Children wonder if there are bodies in the sand,
Then, reassured and disappointed, are led off for an ice cream.

If there were three thousand deaths here
Instead of these chaste memorial place markers,
Three thousand rotted blood-soaked dismembered corpses
Of former American boys and girls from the small towns and barrios,
The squandered assets of bemedaled Generals
Riddled with bullets, blown to pieces, mouths agape,
Strewn chaotically, catastrophically across an invasion beach
Of reality, crashed in our midst in a terrible tsunami
Flooding the beaches and the streets, dashed
Across our suburban lawns, stinking up the schoolyards,
Polluting the supermarkets, poisoning the churches,
Assaulting our ears, offending our nostrils, raping our eyes
With an obscene actuality not seen on TV -
This atrocity dutifully unleashed on our orders – well then,
Something would have to be done about it.

But as it is, the crosses and the grizzled veterans
Who tend them like a flowered garden of regret
Are the matter of a brief moment
For onlookers with other destinations,
And the ignorant carnage grinds on,
Eleven time zones away, receding
Into the forgetful future of a careless empire.

Bob Potter
Arlington West, Santa Barbara
October, 2007

Thomas J. Scheff, Professor Emeritus
Dept of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara

Web: http://www.soc.ucsb.edu/faculty/scheff

REVIVAL OF FEELINGS: MEMORIALIZING FOR CHANGE

When I was a child growing up in the South, I found religious services boring. But I once sneaked into a tent revival meeting. People were laughing, crying, shaking, dancing, and rolling around on the floor. I was delighted because I had never seen anything like it, especially not in my own family. Like many families, we seemed to have a no-emotion rule. My father’s anger was the only exception. As suggested below, acting out anger usually turns out to be a way of hiding other emotions, such as grief, fear, and embarrassment.  This note concerns the revival of those hidden feelings, even with respect to war and peace.

For the last six years I have been helping at an Iraq War Memorial that my group, Veterans for Peace, sets up on the beach every Sunday. We install what looks like a cemetery, now 3000 crosses, in the morning and remove it in the evening, as per city ordinance. The pier is heavily traveled on Sundays, mostly by tourists. What happens between us vets and the visitors who stop is sometimes like a little revival meeting.

In my early days at the pier, I was puzzled that most of the strollers would go past the memorial with a sidelong glance, at most. How could they ignore a vast mock graveyard, especially since most didn’t even know that it was there? After a few weeks, however, I realized that I had done the same thing. One of my friends who had worked at the memorial from its beginning, ignoring my excuses, had to invite me many times. What could I learn? As it turned out, I had a lot to learn.

Finally, to stop the pestering, I went to the pier on a Sunday morning. To my surprise, I was overcome with feeling when I saw the memorial. I cried for at least 15 minutes. Now I understood why I had avoided the visit for so long: I didn’t want to feel. The number of dead, or any other fact, for that matter, has little meaning until we discover the feeling that underlies it.

I have seen resistance to feeling repeated hundreds of times among the visitors to the pier. The ones who stop to talk are overcome with surprise and grief when they realize the emotional meaning of what before was “just a number” to them.  The difference between me and the thousands who go right past the memorial is that they don’t have a friend to cajole them into stopping.

Ancient wisdom has told us KNOW THYSELF. But we don’t, especially our feelings. It is possible that most of us are asleep to our deepest feelings. Perhaps knowing feelings has meaning not only in our personal lives, but in the realm of politics as well. We are a nation asleep if we just think and act. We wake up when we find the feelings that we have been hiding.

Perhaps the main reason that there was support for the unnecessary Iraq war and the unwinnable Afghanistan war is that the public prefers to cover up their fear, grief and shame with self-righteous anger. We will probably need many years of mourning and atonement for the death and destruction that our silence allowed. Public rituals of forgiveness would allow us to feel our hidden emotions. Private rituals would also play a part. We need to acknowledge that we are afraid, angry, sad and ashamed in a way that revives feelings that are hidden from us. Sharing these feelings openly with those that are dear to us is way to become deeply connected with them.

In the ancient Hebrew tradition, there was encouragement to mourn the loss of parents for the rest of one’s life. Now, as Iris Dement’s song puts it, there is No Time to Cry.

Prayer For Peace rather than War: Let me know my own emotions.

I want to cry bitter tears for the loved ones I have lost, and for the immense loss and destruction that has been going on in the world.

So that I will be less reckless, let me feel fear for the danger and death that we all face.

I often feel weak, helpless, inadequate, or humiliated. Let me feel shame or embarrassment instead of ignoring them or hiding them behind anger and resentment.

Help me to express my anger verbally, rather than suppressing it or acting it out, and encourage others to do the same.

Help me to tolerate authentic expressions of emotion in my family and workplace, rather than encouraging the suppression of feeling.

Even if following this prayer leads to fits of crying, shivering, sweating, or laughing in myself or others, I am ready.

Public monuments like the Vietnam and Arlington West memorials are just a beginning.

Perhaps we could create everyday rituals in our families, offices, schools and churches so that we sleepers can awake.

Here’s wishing us all a more peaceful world in 2010.We will be commemorating one positive development, in a time with too many negatives — December 2009 was the first month with no American military fatalities in Iraq, since the outbreak of the Iraq War.

Set-up will begin at 7:30 am on the beach at Stearns Wharf, Santa Barbara, with take-down scheduled for 4 pm.  We look forward to a good turnout of volunteers.

Arlington West
Courtesy SB Independent

NAME OF EVENT: Special Afghanistan Arlington West
LOCATION OF EVENT: On the beach immediately west of Stearns Wharf, Santa Barbara, CA
DESCRIPTION OF EVENT: Crosses memorializing those who died in the war in Afghanistan
TIME: All day
DATE: October 4, 2009
CONTACT INFORMATION: Mary Johnston-de Leon, maryjohns10@yahoo.com
SPONSORED BY VFP CHAPTER 54 – Santa Barbara, CA

October 7 marks the 8th year of the war on Afghanistan. Join Veterans For Peace, Iraq Veterans Against the War, and Military Families Speak Out as we continue to resist this ongoing war and occupation. For more national activities in this effort, please consult www.veteransforpeace.org.