The
contrast between these two Indianapolis groups couldn’t be starker: on the one
hand the KI EcoCenter, a vibrant community meeting place and advocacy/dialogue center
in Indianapolis’ Near North Side neighborhood that is multi-racial, regularly
schedules interesting events that are open to the public (and attract that
public), and actively promotes programs that benefit the Near North Side community
and actually empower youth, who make up much of its activist backbone; and on
the other hand, the Indianapolis Peace and Justice Center (IPJC), a hoary,
moribund, top-down group of mostly septuagenarian and even octogenarian
religious pacifists concentrated in a Board of Directors which makes all
decisions without allowing anything but the most token participation or input
from its “grassroots” members, hosts public events so rarely that they only
occur once in a decade (the IPJC sponsored a forum on mental health in February
2001; its next event, aside from
regular meetings, was co-sponsored with the local Veterans for Peace and a few
others was in August 2012), holds
dry-as-dust monthly meetings that are almost farcical, and whose only public
face is the eight-page quarterly “newspaper,” the Indianapolis Peace and Justice Journal, which is a disgrace to
journalism. I know—I’ve attended
meetings of, participated in, both organizations, and even wrote for the Journal, which never could ever muster
what it took to actually be a real newspaper.
Another
contrast: the KI EcoCenter actually tries to do what its program says it is
about, and succeeds; the IPJC only tries half-heartedly at best to implement
its program, and almost never succeeds—and when it does technically succeed,
such as in publishing the Journal approximately
on time every quarter (when once it published monthly except for the summer
issue, which was bimonthly), the ensuing product is so bad it is not to be
taken seriously.
In
fact, publishing the Indianapolis Peace and Justice Journal is now the IPJC’s
only raison d’être; it long ago gave
up serious outreach to the broader Indianapolis community on peace and justice
issues, chiefly because it only talked to those who were already committed
religious pacifists—no secularists, atheist or agnostics allowed, please; and
certainly no one who only opposed certain wars of the U.S. that lacked
justification, such as Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan either, please. If you thought World War II might have been
necessary to stop Hitler, or that the Civil War was perhaps the only way to end
the plague of slavery, get out now!
And
also, be sure to uncritically embrace Martin Luther King and Gandhi; but stop
sharply right there, don’t go on to see merit in Malcolm X, Ho Chi Minh, Mao
Zedong, or Fidel Castro, and don’t even consider that Marxism might have more
relevance to today’s problems than pacifist theology!
Ah,
but such is the official stance of the IPJC—never stated as bluntly as this, of
course, because the IPJC like vagueness in words and action, and would rather
engage in a soporific symbolic action that shows just how pure it is, and would
never even consider doing something that might upset a good churchman or
churchwoman. With the IPJC in action
well represented directly in all its “activity” every Friday afternoon in
Indianapolis across from the new federal building—by three or maybe four
lonesome pacifists standing on the corner holding Peace signs, and never going
beyond that. And it’s been that way now
for well over two decades, as what was once fresh grew moribund and
moss-covered due to lack of imagination and fear of “contamination” by those
non-religious and non-pacifist, no matter how committed they might be to
actually achieving peace with social justice.
But if they wished to do so through action that that was direct and
forceful, and not confined merely to symbolic “witnessing,” the dominant
religious pacifist claque of mutual admirers made sure they were not welcomed
or accepted.
It
wasn’t always this way in the IPJC, as there was diversity and ferment in
Indianapolis in the 1980s, a willingness to experiment, stretch boundaries and
destroy Indianapolis’ image as the place where nothing happened outside of the
big Indy 500 race. But that changed when
Jane Haldeman, so devoted a Quaker pacifist she was blind to anything and everything
else, gained paramount influence in the organization and quickly turned the
IPJC into a rest home for her fellow Quakers and Quaker co-thinkers, with no
dissent or difference allowed lest it disturb the Quaker notion of “consensus.”
That “consensus,” enforced by the iron
hand of ostracism toward all who thought differently, became the norm among
Indianapolis “progressives,” as it naturally fit their already-existing
timidity. And so, from the early 1990s
on, interrupted only by a flurry of activity at the new millennium that soon
petered out, hidebound religious-oriented “consensus” laid its stifling hand on
everything else that might have otherwise emerged. When a group of feisty young anarchists
founded an independent left bookstore, Solidarity Books, the “respectable
progressives” moved to stanch it by hook or crook. A longstanding rumor has it that the
anonymous phone call that brought a police raid on the Solidarity Books
collective house in search of a nonexistent cache of weapons had been placed by
a certain leading member of the IPJC.
This person gets indignant over the accusation, but has never denied it,
even privately. As it was, the
Solidarity Books was forced to totally disband by 2005, with its members
dispersing in chagrin and disgust, and a youth movement of radical activists
never again emerging in Indianapolis until the Occupy movements swept the
nation. From which the old “progressives”
were all conspicuous by their absence across the board—socialists, pacifists,
labor people, all noticeably absent except for a few token people who never
stayed around too long. Such is the
legacy of the IPJC.
By
contrast, the KI EcoCenter has only been around since 2005, in
contradistinction to the IPJC’s being around since 1986. In 2009 it founded the 317 Media Café and
public space in a former grocery store that abandoned the neighborhood, and
continued to build from this ever on.
The Media Café now houses an alternative school that serves more than
just “special needs” children, has a regular program menu of community forums,
films and even a monthly open mic talent night; in all of which youth play a
prominent and self-directing role, not being mere “fronts” for the adults
controlling things from behind. I’ve
been to four of the KI EcoCenter’s events to date, and can attest to the
enthusiasm and vitality that permeates the Center, and to the high quality of
its programs. Though little-known, the
KI EcoCenter represents that positive direction which this veteran activist of
peace and social justice movements would like to see permeate Indianapolis. I discovered it through serendipity, a chance
invitation by a friend on Facebook to a forum on community job creation, and
once present, was immediately and enthusiastically hooked. This was the vibrancy I had once briefly seen
in Indianapolis in the 1980s, and again, also briefly, in the Solidarity Books
collective of the early new millennium.
But the KI EcoCenter has had a staying power now for seven years, and
seems to be not only well established, but also having lost none of its vigor
over time. It is just an exciting place
to visit, and the earnestness of the Near North Side neighborhood participants,
overwhelmingly young and great-majority black, rubs off on me every time I
attend a function there. It is as
addicting as heroin, as sweet as chocolate, and far healthier than either: for
who would ever have thought that, this far removed from the synergistic 1960s,
such movement and energy was still going on!
Each
time I’ve visited the EcoCenter I’ve noticed the active participation of two
older adults—Paulette, the Director, and M., both appearing to be in their late
fifties. But the vast majority of the
other participants are young people from late childhood into their twenties,
overwhelmingly black residents of the neighborhood, and they do the key work
and run the show. Paulette and M. guide
and encourage, offer lead at times but never dominate, but draw out from the
young participants instead. So when the
KI EcoCenter says it is about youth empowerment, it’s not jivin’! It is a powerful living example of the best
in Black Nationalism, a real adherence to and practicing of its motto, “Self-empowerment
through self-mastery,” and is the kind of community-focused self-help that
Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, or the young Black Power activists of SNCC in the
1960s would see as living embodiments of their social philosophy. Not that persons of other races don’t
participate, or are not encouraged to—quite the opposite. The KI EcoCenter, situated in a mixed-race
neighborhood that is predominantly black, is foremost about the empowerment of
the whole community, not just of some within it. The first time I attended a KI EcoCenter
event, a community jobs forum, the four panelists were comprised of two white
persons and two black persons, all residents and activists in the Near North Side
neighborhood. And following the showing
the presentation of the PBS documentary, “So Goes Janesville,” on the economic
devastation and search for development alternatives following the closing of
the GM plant in Janesville, Wisconsin, was one of the most impressive panels
I’ve ever seen—one comprised entirely of black youth aged 16, 13, and even as
young as 10, all of whom spoke intelligently on the film and ably fielded
probing questions from the adults in the audience. Even the ten-year-old girl displayed
knowledge and self-confidence! The KI
Eco Center is truly an exciting find for me, and I am hoping it can serve as a
model that will spread to other Indianapolis neighborhoods. I hope I am indeed seeing the future of
positive social justice empowerment there, just as I hope that in the IPJC I
see the dying gasps of an all-too-moribund past that lived far, far beyond its
usefulness and appropriateness. (The KI EcoCenter
also has a website, www.kiecocenter.org.)
A
couple of weeks ago the Fall 2012 issue of the Indianapolis Peace and Justice Journal came out, the first under
its new editor, old IPJC hand Carl Rising-Moore; and though I am used by now to
seeing dismal issues of this paper, this is the worst issue yet. Under rising-Moore’s aegis, the Journal shifted from being a forum which
provided space for developing local writers to being a compendium of articles
already on the Internet, striking a blow both against relevancy and for
redundancy. With a layout designed by
another IPJC old hand, Jim Wolfe, it’s also the worst-appearing issue of the Journal yet, with an eye-averting
appearance that’s as attractive and enticing as the prospect of sitting in the
hot August sun watching paint dry!
Cronyism dominated the editorial selections by Rising-Moore, who posted
two pieces by Jim Wolfe, in addition to having Wolfe do the layout—for which he
also received credit. Both the Wolfe
pieces were silly: there was a sentimental poem about his wife, and a horrible
article about gender and diversity that begins with a description of Jim Wolfe
actually teaching his university class on Gender Day dressed up drag in
traditional woman’s garb and mincing like a cartoon caricature of that
“traditional” woman. If I had been in
Wolfe’s class as a student when he pulled such a shenanigan, I would’ve walked
out in disgust and headed immediately to his department chairman’s office
insistently demanding he be fired! For
some reason Jim Wolfe is proud of such a gross display of conduct unbecoming a
true university professor (Wolfe regularly teaches at a local university).
Another
bad article by a local author in the Journal
is Ed Towne’s on guns in Indianapolis, which aside from relating a shooting
incident in Indianapolis that demonstrates more stupidity than gun violence—a
man actually attempted an armed robbery at gunpoint of Don’s Guns!—had no other
local content whatsoever, just generalities on guns and gun control of a generic
nature. Except for one glaring
error—Towne’s article has George Zimmerman fatally shooting Trayvon Martin in Indianapolis, not in Sanford, Florida,
where this nationally-notorious shooting actually occurred! Why Rising-Moore or someone else who was
putting together the issue didn’t notice this blatant typo is beyond me; or
perhaps it’s not—the Journal has
always displayed such troubling unprofessionalism that it’s regularly referred
to (and all these are comments I’ve actually received concerning the Journal) as “lame,” a “boring rag” and “looks
like middle school.”
Despite
my active career as a freelance writer who regularly publishes at the national
level, Carl Rising-Moore has seen fit to bar me permanently from contributing
to the Journal because an article I
submitted was an alleged “personal attack” on one of his cronies, local
Veterans for Peace President Ken Barger.
But of course, given his sanctimonious pacifism, Rising-Moore can’t just
turn down a submission, he has to personalize my very submitting of the article
in the first place—a sure-fire demonstration of personal pique triumphing over
any notion of professionalism. So bad it’s even worse than amateurishness—it’s
downright childish! But again, that’s
the IPJC and the way it actually is. As
for my “personal attack,” what I actually wrote was a scathing critique not of
Barger himself, but of his truly naïve and childish notion of the “peaceful
society” that was published in the Summer 2012 issue of the Journal—where somehow Barger’s idea of
the “peaceful society” is akin to that of AT&T or a credit card company;
i.e., one of compulsory arbitration to “benefit all parties concerned…where
protest is not even needed[.]”
Indeed! Well, I’ll let the reader
of “Politically Incorrect Leftist” judge for himself whether I’ve personally
attacked Barger or merely his ideas. The
piece in question, “The ‘Peaceful Society’ and Social Reality” is posted as
another blog entry directly below this one.
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