It is right that the murder of many people
be mourned and lamented.
It is right that a victor in war
be received with funeral ceremonies.
Tzu & Le Guin, Tao Te Ching, page 38
How are we to prevent war? asks Virginia Woolf in the winter of 1937, as photos of the Spanish Civil War pile up on her desk, with their broken bodies and broken buildings, and Hitler and Mussolini gather forces to the east, and her own government’s war budget reaches new extremes. War, she asserts—and you will agree—is a horror, a terror that must be stopped. As well we know, confronted as we are with real-time video of genocide in Palestine, the massacre of school children in Iran, a fascist leader not abroad but in our own demolished house, asserting his right to make war wherever he likes, whenever he wants, including in our own cities, as armies under other names murder and disappear our neighbors with impunity. But, Woolf asks, what is she to do, what are the daughters of educated men to do in the face of that horror? And what are we, generations later, working women and their allies, how are we to stop it? It’s a good question, and we must spend some time trying to answer it.
Woolf begins by considering how women might influence the decision to go to war and we may well begin with the same. To influence, we must have some knowledge to impart, some skill in speaking of it, and a listener who would hear us. We have some knowledge—the knowledge that war is a horror, the knowledge that when a missile falls from the sky and rends bodies into pieces that a terrible evil has been done. We can speak of this too, can point to the photos and videos that flit across our screens, children with missing limbs begging for food amid the ruins. These are images and reports of atrocity, undeniably and unequivocally. Yet who would listen, and how? Where can these words be spoken? Here we find we are in some trouble, for the supreme form of speech in our time is not words but money, both in legal doctrine and in fact of order, with our media controlled and manipulated by an obscenely wealthy few who have gobbled up platforms and papers and perverted them to their own aims, aims that seem very much in favor of war, for war has ever been the commander of wealth. When we speak against war we find our words drowned out, lost in the deepfakes and the advertising, the psyops and the slop, the stock market reports, the casual declarations of war crimes, the oil futures, the gilded festivities, the chattering and nattering among a purportedly progressive political class concerned with the appearance of civility but indifferent to its obligations. No knowledge moves through such mediums, only information, a ravening, unending stream of data in which knowing anything is nigh impossible.
And such is that information that it is frequently as odious as the war it both directly and indirectly leads to: racism, misogyny, eugenics, transphobia. (That last a word that implies fear or aversion when the reality is much more violent, both speech and act that seek to eliminate a people whose courage in seeking their own liberty is among our brightest beacons.) But are these notions not the collaborators and soldiers of capital, and so of war? Are not racism and misogyny the masked recruits who go door to door, kitchen to bedroom to workplace, demanding labor and loyalty and love from an underclass who are threatened with suffering and death if they do not deliver it? Toni Morrison, whose words we may yet remember, said: “And they never, ever thought we were inhuman. You don’t give your children over to the care of people whom you believe to be inhuman….They were only, and simply, and now interested in the acquisition of wealth, and the status quo of the poor.” Racism and eugenics were invented to justify the colonization of Black bodies just as sexism justified the enclosure of women’s. The racists and misogynists of today work the same power: they create a world in which a few wealthy men dictate the material conditions of the lives of millions of others who must serve them, who toil for scraps, whose every step, however small, towards more freedom is violently and immediately resisted, and with overwhelming force—an impulse that you will agree is very much like the impulse to war.
Look no further than the disproportionate attack on DEI, an effort that saw not to upend capitalism but merely to lightly expand the number of people who might not be entirely crushed by it, but which has been met with an extraordinary campaign to cancel huge swaths of scientific research, retract life-giving knowledge of medical care, hollow out our universities, purge career civil servants and leaders of the armed forces, and to eviscerate the federal workforce—upending millions of lives and leaving our federal government, already poor from decades of neoliberal retreat, unable to deliver on the basic requirements for the life and liberty of its now abandoned public. That the federal workforce has long been one of the best chances for a comfortable life for Black and brown women excluded from comparable employment in the private sector is of course no coincidence. Meanwhile, the barons of the private sector have likewise backed down from even superficial concern for equality, and now demand such extreme fealty to their enterprises that only someone with no caretaking responsibilities whatsoever—with no care at all, not even for themselves—could possibly meet them.
“Influence must be combined with wealth in order to be effective as a political weapon,” Woolf concludes, and we grieve that the only change we can see in the century since is that the gap of wealth has widened, the effectiveness or lack thereof become only more extreme. Woolf was a member of the propertied class, but it was in her lifetime that women earned the right to their own property and were granted access to professional work, such that they might not be entirely in debt to their fathers and husbands. And yet in her time women secretaries were said to be routinely “fagged out” in the afternoons because they couldn’t afford a proper lunch. Today, our food pantries work overtime to feed the working poor, people who work full time and more but don’t make enough to buy bread. Those who do make enough to live on do so in awareness of their intense precarity, the knowledge that they are one illness or storm away from ruin. And even the wealthiest worker has little compared to the investor class pushing for war, those who see war not as an abomination but as yet another opportunity to increase their bloated purse. What is our wealth compared to the billions spent on fighter jets, the $2.5 million spent on a single Tomahawk as it tears through a school full of little girls? What is our wealth compared to the mind-boggling quantities spent on the drones and satellites that make death as easy as clicking a button from the safety of a desk on the other side of the world? The same flick of a thumb can reduce a hospital to rubble or post a racist meme, often one right after the other. What is our wealth compared to the record-breaking $1.5 trillion requested for the military, a military that is already the richest on the planet? Trump: “We have a virtually unlimited supply of these weapons. Wars can be fought ‘forever.’”
So if money is influence, our relative influence has waned with the rise of the billionaire class. Woolf, recognizing the same, turns her attention instead to education. For if perhaps enough money cannot be mustered to prevent war, then learning—with its values of intellect and reason and enlightenment—may work in our favor, inasmuch as learning grows those faculties of reason, and reason is quite the antidote to the unreason of war. But again we find a problem. In Woolf’s time, while women have ostensibly been permitted into the colleges, they remain excluded from universities, and the women’s colleges are beggarly compared to those gleaming towers. Nor have women been permitted to adorn their names with the same letters and credentials that the men claim, a factor that keeps them from competing for the jobs that require them. It seems that the colleges are less places of learning than they are places of acquiring prestige, a prestige that is fiercely defended and protected, for prestige is a strangely fragile creature who can live only in scarcity and when exposed to too many of its own kind withers and dies like a tree choked by vines.
And today? Well, women have torn down the gates to the universities, that much is clear. Women make up a majority of all college students in the US, and would be an even greater portion were it not for policies that directly work to balance the gender of student bodies. But that tearing down has been met by what can nearly be termed a war itself: a livid and indignant assault on places of learning from the men who want war, aiming at what has become the heart of the university, its beating and bloodied endowment. And the universities have, nearly to the letter, capitulated and retreated in the face of that assault, trading away centuries of purported intellectual freedom in order to protect the money needed to continue to operate, as if operating without that freedom was worth any money at all. Woolf writes:
Is that not enough? Need we collect more facts from history and biography to prove our statement that all attempt to influence the young against war through education they receive at universities must be abandoned? For do they not prove that education, the finest education in the world, does not teach people to hate force, but to use it? Do they not prove that education, far from teaching the educated generosity and magnanimity, makes them on the contrary so anxious to keep their possessions, that “grandeur and power” of which the poet speaks, in their own hands, that they will use not force but much subtler methods than force when they are asked to share them? And are not force and possessiveness very closely connected with war?
Woolf, Three Guineas, page 193
We see that same force and possessiveness in our own time: billions extorted from the universities, while the universities call in cops in riot gear—gear so named because when worn it inspires one to riot—to descend on students protesting genocide in Palestine. A great irony this would be, if irony were not the first casualty of war. For these brave students were met with war while exercising their right to protest the same, a right which past wars have been fought to defend but in which we seem to have retroactively declared defeat.
Places of learning are always the first target of the fascist, because they are places that might counter the propaganda and pseudo-culture that leave us either pacified and accepting of their scraps or else fighting each other instead of fighting those who would start a war. Learning and thinking—a skill the billionaires are trying to supplant with machines that purport to think for us—are a challenge to the illogic and madness of war. To see an image of the broken bodies and broken buildings, to hear the testimony of those who lived, to have the skill and fortitude to ask how this could have happened, who benefits from such a horror, and how they might be stopped—for they must be stopped—is to exercise a lively mind and spirit, one capable of making the imaginative leap between the way things are and the way things ought to be. That interrogative and thinking mind is a threat to the fascist, who needs you to see things only as he does, who needs you unthinking and unquestioning, because only an unthinking and unquestioning mind could possibly accept the horrors of war. Only a mind so subdued by slop and propaganda and advertising, a mind unpracticed in observation and inquiry and imagination—only such a mind could be complacent as its pockets are picked to fund that most terrible of horrors.
And so at last we turn to the workplace, as Woolf does, not in the hope that we might make enough money to counter the warmongers—for we have done the math, and no matter how hard we try, there is no chance of that—but because work is where we may, if we’re lucky, earn enough to keep a roof over our head and food in our belly, both of which are necessary to be able to think and act in the world. And we must be able to think, to remember that war is a horror, to resist being anesthetized by the memes and the vapid statements to violence. But here we find a curious contradiction: on the one hand, we are threatened with a lack of work, with our jobs taken over by machines who will never know that war is a horror, because they cannot know anything at all. On the other, high-pitched edicts that we must work so hard that there can be no time to think of anything else, no time to consider how these pictures of broken bodies and broken buildings came to be. (Musk: workers “need to be ‘extremely hardcore,’ logging ‘long hours at high intensity.’”) How can both of these claims be true? How can the investor class simultaneously threaten us with no work, and, at the same time, threaten us with too much? It seems they fear equality more than hypocrisy.
Perhaps we should also fear the disposition that the professions—which women fought so hard to enter, and now must fight so hard in which to stay—train us for. Here again is Woolf:
And those opinions cause us to doubt and criticize and question the value of professional life—not its cash value; that is great; but its spiritual, its moral, its intellectual value. They make us of the opinion that if people are highly successful in their professions they lose their senses. Sight goes. They have no time to look at the pictures. Sound goes. They have no time to listen to music. Speech goes. They have no time for conversation. They lose their sense of proportion—the relations between one thing and another. Humanity goes. Money becomes so important they must work by night as well as by day. Health goes. And so competitive do they become that they will not share their work with others though they have more than they can do themselves. What then remains of a human being who has lost sight, and sound, and sense of proportion? Only a cripple in a cave.
Woolf, Three Guineas, page 258
It’s interesting to think with Woolf about our current march towards war, as the differences between her time and ours are revealing as much for what hasn’t changed. She wrote at a time when women were still largely excluded from professional work, from universities, from the armed forces. We read her today as women with one or more degrees, with careers, many of us carrying medals won in war zones and the scars to prove them, many of us with pips on our collar, credentials as long as those held by the men who guarded the libraries from the presence of women in Woolf’s time. But in both eras our presence in these places seems to have inspired an extraordinary, and extraordinarily violent, response. The assault against diversity programs is so out of proportion to those programs’ actual impact that we must admit something more elemental is going on: women’s presence in previously precluded spaces (and it is important to note that it is white women who have been the greatest benefactors of diversity initiatives, and Black and brown women who now suffer the greatest costs of their retreat) has inspired a level of violence among a small group of rich, insecure men that they will lay waste to the whole world before they will consider sharing their table with women as equals. Their own self-worth is so mean and spare that it withers when it comes into contact with those who do not bow and bend in their presence. The armed thugs marching through our streets, the speeches about force, force in our own cities, force elsewhere in the world, soldiers rechristened as “warfighters,” all of this is an assertion of manhood, a manhood reduced to nothing more than domination in all things, a masculinity that can see itself only in the violent oppression of others, whether that is other countries, other cultures, other races, other genders, or the more-than-human world. As Jamelle Bouie notes, “the vision of the world here is the vision of a rapist.”
We are forced to conclude that to be in possession of a great deal of money, to be in a position of great authority, whether over an institution of learning or of government or of business, is to be in favor of war. The prestige and power that accompany both rank and great wealth—wealth which in our own day has grown so large as to be incomprehensible—also engender an instinct to possession and to the violent and disproportionate defense of that wealth. While we, who have neither great rank nor great wealth, know war to be an abomination, a horror through and through. Yet we can never hope to compete with the warmongers in either arms or cash, in prestige or status. So what are we to do?
We must refuse to compete at all.
We, with our empty hands, know it is right to mourn and lament the murder of many people. And so we mourn, and we lament, and we demand that our would-be leaders stop this incessant and evil warmaking.
Are those demands enough? It would seem not. It would seem that despite great opposition to war, despite great risk to our economy, to our own safety as we shred our oldest and strongest alliances, that our demands for an end to war land on ears not deaf but blocked, stoppered with ego and greed and lust for domination in all its forms. And perhaps this should be no surprise. For why would a class of people so threatened by the mere presence of women in their schools and governments and workplaces ever open their ears to those women’s demands? Our speech must be a very great threat if they are so unwilling to hear it.
So to speak against war is necessary—necessary for us to speak so with one another, so that we do not forget that war is a horror—yet insufficient. It is not enough to speak against war, for the warmongers, with their infinite money and infinite weapons, cannot hear us against the drums they so loudly bang for war. We must look elsewhere for the path that leads away from here.
When Woolf was writing, women were precluded from the armed forces, and so could not refuse war by refusing to fight. We today are not subject to the same prohibition. We find ourselves among the ranks of soldiers both on our own soil and on many others. We have not earned the same respect, for many of our brothers seem to believe we have been put there solely for their use and abuse, and others—the same people who drive us to war, who claim no reason for war save war itself—work to exclude us once again. Yet women make up roughly a sixth of the armed forces, and perhaps as much of the forces in our streets. Here is perhaps our greatest opportunity to halt the march to war. For we have it within our power to refuse to fight. We who know that war is a horror must refuse to raise a gun or fly a jet or steer a drone heavy with death into homes and hospitals and schools. We must refuse to go door to door in our own cities dragging people without warrant or reason into filthy, inhumane, and hastily built camps—for as sure as killing is a part of war, so too is gathering people up and locking them away. We must drop guns and kevlar and gas masks and walk away from the field of war, whether that field is distant from our homes or just down the street. We may look here to the courage of those like Ella Keidar Greenberg, an Israeli who, at 16 years of age, signed a pledge refusing to enlist in the military and was then, at 19, jailed for that refusal. “Refusal is the imperative,” she speaks, and we who have not plugged up our ears to reason and wisdom can yet hear her, and agree. For to make the horror of war with your own hands is to become a horror yourself.
This is easy to say for the great many of us who do not fight in war, who have not raised guns or donned armor or placed hands on keyboards and rained death on schools and hospitals from afar. But the imperative to refusal remains: we must refuse to lend our hands or minds to war, in whatever way we can. And so we must also refuse to work for war, to use our labor to make the technology of war, whether of weapons or of surveillance or of detention, whether that technology is used in our own streets or somewhere afar—for any technology used afar will come home soon enough, as we see with the militaries in our streets, outfit with cast offs from so many wars abroad. We must not lend our hand to the making of guns or missiles or drones, of targeting systems or intelligence databases, of satellites that scour the planet for schools and hospitals, of algorithms that prescribe processes for murder, processes that promise to scrub their operators clean of the blood that follows but which will haunt them, nonetheless.
Is this enough? It is not. For war is such an enormous undertaking—witness the trillions of dollars, an amount of money too big to think with—that it seeps into nearly every part of the economy. The same servers that summon servants to your door are used to surveil the people of Gaza; the same newspaper that brings details of the war to our eyes and ears also perpetuates a story that the greatest hardship of war is the price of gas at the pump. The same so-called AI that makes it easier to prototype a website is simultaneously being used to generate enormous quantities of racist and misogynist slop that treats war like a spectator sport. The same university that teaches the history of war also pays millions in bribes to the warmongers, while making a concerted effort to erase trans people from the very same history books. If we are truly committed to not working for war, we must not work for any of it. Not for the weapons manufacturers or the drone makers or the algorithm authors; not for the papers or the products or the schools.
Perhaps you will think I am being too harsh. Perhaps you will say, but this is my only way of making a living, of keeping a roof over my head and my children’s heads, of feeding and clothing my loved ones. After all, we have also noted how our publics have been decimated by the very same men who push for war, men who have likewise colluded to raise prices on milk and eggs, who have transformed homes into commodities, such that we who had so little money compared to them seem every day to have less and less. Already our food pantries work overtime feeding the working poor, and we rightly fear every cough and tooth ache, every flutter of our overworked hearts or tiny lump beneath our skin, for medicine is increasingly a privilege reserved only for the rich. How could we refuse work under such conditions, when work is increasingly scarce?
Here we must pause and again wonder at that scarcity. For it is a curious thing that work is becoming harder and harder to come by, that what work there is is often so poorly remunerated we must visit the pantries for bread at the end of the workday. Or, if it pays well, it does so under the constant threat that it could end at any moment, that it will end soon enough. Is it not the case that the men who loudly bang the drums for war, who build the technologies of surveillance that are used both to round people up and to aim missiles on their backs, who pollute our skies with satellites and insert themselves into the field of war as if they were heads of state themselves, states of ego and greed and impunity—are these not the selfsame men who declare we no longer need workers at all, that one machine can do the work of dozens? And do they not declare, out of the very same mouths, with the very same breaths, that those few workers who remain must work themselves to the bone, must work every waking hour they can, must eschew rest and play and leisure for the work is too great to put down for even a moment? And do they not also say—for as we have seen, those with more money have more speech, and seem ever to want us to hear them—that it is immigrants who are taking away all the jobs? (A dog-ate-my-homework excuse, if there ever was one.) And meanwhile there is so much work that needs doing but isn’t being done: our schools overcrowded, our farms short-handed, our streets and bridges crumbling, our parks neglected, our clinics overrun, our laboratories empty.
This is not to say that the scarcity isn’t real. It is real enough, as the lines at the food pantries attest. But it is manufactured; it is built bolt by chip by screw by a billionaire class who want workers who complain neither of their warmongering nor of their whip. On the one hand, they threaten us with no work at all, with the misery and penury that comes from a lack of work, and therefore a lack of the means of living. On the other, they demand endless work, a work that wipes out all other avenues for thinking and being, that leaves us programmable and programmed, no space left in our minds for thoughts they haven’t placed there. Are we to merely acquiesce, to accept their scraps and the miserable conditions attached to them? Surely not. For if we accept these conditions, will they not impose even worse upon us? Will they not keep increasing their demands and decreasing our pay until we are working ceaselessly, and for nothing? What would compel them to stop? Already we have seen that their greed for money and for power is so voracious it will tear through buildings and through bodies, it will murder many people, it will poison the air and the soil, it will bring great storms upon us. So there must be an end, and it is only we who can bring that end about.
So I say again we must refuse to work for war. But I do not wish you any hardship. If the only work available to you is the work of war, or work that has been perverted to the aim of war—and I am trusting that you have done your best to find other work, to make your living in a manner that does not end the lives of others—then there remain yet other avenues to take. Here you must gather with your colleagues and comrades, for the work against war is not solitary. You must first speak and be heard by each other, know that you are not alone in recognizing that war is an abomination, a great and terrible horror. For while speaking into the networks and the platforms is like speaking to the wind, your words tossed away from you before they can reach your own ears, we still have the ability to speak to our colleagues and to our neighbors, to speak unmediated and uncensored with each other. To speak with our mouths and with our hearts and with our lively, imaginative minds. To say, war is a horror, and I will not work for it, and are you with me? Can we speak together? Can we move and act against war hand in hand, and right here, where we stand?
Here we see a great many of our kith and kin already stepping up. We can look to workers at Amazon, Google, Salesforce, and others who demand that their work not be used for surveillance, mass deportation, drone warfare, or genocide. We can look to the hundreds of workers at Thomson Reuters who raised alarms after learning that their company was selling data to ICE, prompting shareholders to demand an investigation. We can look to the community in Monterey Park, California, who successfully organized in favor of a ban on the construction of data centers—after noting that in addition to being polluting, noisy, energy guzzlers, such data centers also fuel ICE’s violence against their own neighbors. We can look to the Harvard graduate students currently on strike, whose demands include protections for international students at risk of deportation. We can look to the twenty-four attorneys general who have filed more than seventy lawsuits aimed at stopping the administration from waging war at home.
And we can look to Luanne James, a librarian in Tennessee, who when asked to remove books from her library—books flagged for such transgressions as “female empowerment” and “following one’s dreams”—said, “I will not comply.” For is not censorship likewise a tool of war? Haven’t the book burners and the warmongers always been the same people, with the same aim? Are not slop and chatbots who care nothing for veracity the new tools for censorship—censorship by means of pollution rather than prohibition, but the ends are the same.
James was subsequently fired for her dissent. Refusal always invites consequences. But then so too does compliance, and often very grave consequences at that. Here we may heed the advice of the veteran scientists who resigned from the National Institutes of Health after it was gutted by the Trump administration. They implore, “Please decide where your red line is so you can choose to act before the line is already behind you.”
There is risk here, of course. Organizing is, in theory at least, a protected activity and legally you may not be retaliated for it, but we have seen who the law protects and who it bends and breaks for and have no confidence in it protecting the likes of us. But there is risk no matter what we do or do not do. To be alive, to have a body vulnerable to gun and missile and chemical weapon, to famine and to thirst, to penury and hardship, is to be at risk; only the dead are relieved of the risk of harm. Your employer may punish you for organizing, but what is that risk compared to the risk of being complicit in war? The risk of knowing yourself to be someone who helped rain death on schoolchildren, who helped imprison your fellow workers in filthy detention camps, who helped program people’s minds to be numb to atrocity and horror? For you will know what you have done. Even if your daytime self can wrap you up in comforting excuses and justifications, can be lulled by the distractions and the advertisements and the television that anesthetizes your conscience, you will know it in the dark of the night. Our dreams know where we have gone wrong and they will never let us forget it.
But perhaps even this risk seems too great. You know your circumstances, and you know the ways the investor class has of keeping your head down. You cannot be fairly asked to put your own life, or your kin’s lives, on the line. And yet you are not without the ability to work against war, even in these difficult times. For you can work against war while seeming to work for it. Perform your work diplomatically while leaking information to the press, so that those on the outside who are safe from retaliation may organize in your stead. Look for ways to gum up the works; raise concerns and questions and show where plans are short, where steps have not been thought out, where coordination is insufficient. Do not meet expectations but dash them, show them to be shortsighted or foolhardy, lacking sufficient detail; make those who set them doubt their own understanding of the world (as they try to sow doubt in you). They have made this easy on you, the warmongers and profiteers, by foisting unpredictable and inconstant machines upon you and mandating their use, by setting irrational milestones that could never have been met even by those who tried. Right there is a ready-made excuse for why the work could not be delivered as asked—your hands were tied. Do the work if you must, but do it dragging your feet, do it always on the lookout for ways to slow down the march to war and so give others the time to stop it.
Does this gall you? It galls me. We ought not to have to spend our energy, what little and precious time we have on this earth, denigrating and diminishing our own skills. It is a violence to the self to do our work poorly. But against the alternative—against setting those same skills in the making of war—it seems a small sacrifice, and a necessary one. For it is not only your skill in, say, design or management or engineering that you may exercise. It is also the skill of refusal, the skill of refraining from making war in all its many and terrible forms. And that too is a kind of work, a good work, work that all of us can do.
For there is one weapon that only we possess and which the billionaires and the warmongers can never take from us. One weapon which so frightens them they will twist their words into knots, they will spend the entirety of their vast fortunes trying and failing to convince us that we don’t possess it at all, they will claim over and over and without evidence that it is vanishing before our eyes even as it remains right there in our hands, clear and plain to hearts yet open to the world: the refusal to work.
To refuse is a creative act. What is created in a refusal is a gap, a space, a moment in which something else makes ready to emerge, something that waits upon our invitation and a bit of water or sunlight to pop itself out and set down roots. To refuse is to create that which can only exist in the shade of that refusal, the refusal giving shelter to the choice that appears behind it. To refuse is to choose.
In that choice, we find ourselves in the gap, in the place where no one has programmed our thinking, no one has told us what to do, no one has left any instructions or orders that we must follow. No one stands ready to answer our questions or to assign us tasks or to relieve the anxiety of being alive to uncertainty, for this has always and ever been the only way to be alive. In this gap is not one choice but many, a myriad of choices, for from here on out there can be no prescription, no map or plan or diagram. Only one step, and then the next.
Yet we are not without skill or art. In fact, it is our art which is most at need here, our art that helps us imagine how things could be different, how we could work not for war but for peace, and for liberty, and for care for all our kin in all the kingdoms. How we could live with one another if prestige and missiles and extreme wealth were relegated to the history books, where they belong. It is our art, the art of painting or drawing or sculpting or dancing or making music or writing—and while all the arts are needed here, I will make a special plea for writing as that which so often gives us new worlds to think with—that we can think with the question of what we are to make with one another when we refuse to make war.
For to refuse the work of war is to choose to see things as they really are, and as they yet could be. This is a choice we make most strongly when we make our art, when we bring our keen attention to the world and do not flinch from it, do not numb ourselves to it, but rather look at it squarely and know that however things are, they can—they will—be otherwise.
What could our work become when it isn’t the work of death, of domination, of separation and detention and surveillance? What is our work when we give up seeking wealth and prestige—which no matter how hard we work, we can never have enough of? What is our work when we do not accede to orders from above but make choices with each other? What is our work when we see it not as a way to make a wage but a way to make more life, not only for ourselves, but for everyone? What becomes of our work if we work for the living?
To refuse is an ending; an ending to our work being used to rend buildings and bodies, to massacre schoolchildren, to surveil and capture and detain. To refuse is a beginning. To turn away from the work of war is to turn toward the work of making a living world, work that does not answer to the billionaires, with their slavering, unending greed, but which only answers to each other. The gap that we create with our refusal is not void but potential, not emptiness in the sense of want but empty as a bowl or bag is empty, as an ear cocked to a speaker, a pair of hands cupped and raised to the roiling and darkening sky.
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