Working Smart and Local
Nebraskans for Peace makes global connections in their own backyard
Nebraska may be an agricultural state, but it’s far from fertile ground for peacemaking. Trying to sustain a dissenting voice in this reddest of “red states” is a nonstop political and economic challenge. That Nebraskans for Peace (NFP) has survived 41 years to become what is now the oldest statewide peace and justice organization in the entire country can be credited to equal parts pluck and luck. We’ve learned to “work smart,” prioritizing issues in line with changing conditions and opportunities.
Peace and justice issues are abstract and global. We’re for world peace. We’re for justice. We’re for equality and against racism and sexism. We’re pro-disarmament and anti-war. But it’s not enough to merely stand for abstract principles. To be relevant and effective in peace work, it’s essential to localize abstract and global concerns.
The war comes home
Our work exposing the war making role of the US Strategic Command is a case in point. This command center for waging the international “War on Terror” is headquartered in our state. It is potentially the most dangerous place on earth, charged with everything from offensively waging nuclear and cyber-warfare to coldheartedly killing human “targets” with remote-controlled drones.
Our state’s preeminence in the War on Terror is a point of pride for most Nebraskans, who tend to feel underrated by the rest of the country. Located at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, US Stragetic Command (StratCom) annually pumps $2.5 billion into the local economy. Most Nebraskans wouldn’t dream of badmouthing
it.
Because of this support, the local hook to challenging StratCom’s growing menace was not, it turns out, in mobilizing popular opposition in Nebraska, but in educating the broader national and international community to Nebraska’s role in modern warfare. This community had no idea what the newly retooled and ever more deadly command in America’s heartland was up to in the wake of September 11.
Most Americans are unaware that Strat-Com was integrally involved in planning and coordinating the assassination of Osama bin Laden. The command center has eight “missions” dedicated to high-tech and other forms of warfare: nuclear deterrence, space, cyberspace, full-spectrum global strike, intelligence/surveillance/reconnaissance, missile defense, information operations, and combating weapons of mass destruction.
Nebraskans for Peace began by jointly organizing an international conference in Omaha with the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space in 2008, drawing participants from 12 countries and 28 states. We’re presently at work on an internet documentary about Strat-Com to alert people around the globe of
the unprecedented mandate and enhanced war-fighting prowess this command now possesses.
Sometimes finding a local hook for international peace work requires seizing opportunities at hand. In the early months of the Iraq War, for example, we stood on street corners with signs like anti-war activists everywhere, feeling alienated and inviting abuse from hostile passers-by.
But then—right out of the blue—Republican US Senator Chuck Hagel began publicly voicing reservations about the Bush administration’s war policy, virtually handing us a tangible, local strategy on which to focus our anti-war energies. Senator Hagel’s outspoken comments quickly isolated him from his Republican colleagues in Nebraska’s
congressional delegation and infuriated the party faithful in the state. Naturally, peace activists loved it.
The last thing the embattled Senator needed at that moment was to be publicly linked to a political “fringe” group like Nebraskans for Peace. So NFP surreptitiously coordinated an “Email Hagel” campaign in which our members—without referencing their ties to us—wrote the Senator to thank him for his leadership and encouraged him to keep speaking out. A staffer subsequently told us that these messages and phone calls emboldened the Senator to continue his public criticism of the White House’s
war despite the wrath of the state party establishment.
Senator Hagel’s relentless hounding of the Bush Administration on its war policy succeeded in fracturing the Republicans’ unified stance on the war, but at great personal cost to the Senator, who retired in 2008 rather than face a bruising primary battle with the state leadership’s chosen successor.
Local linkages
Other aspects of our work have a decidedly more “homegrown” quality, with a straightforward connection to local concerns.
For over a decade now, our organization has been a leading supporter of Oglala Lakota Sioux tribal leaders and activists in their ongoing efforts to end alcohol sales in the border town of Whiteclay, Nebraska. Four beer stores in this unincorporated village of 14 people sell over 11,000 cans of beer per day to Indian residents of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, two miles away.
While the sale and possession of alcohol on the reservation itself are banned, an estimated 80 percent of the population suffers from alcoholism. Liquor industry lobbyists have opposed all legislation aimed at targeting regulatory violations in Whiteclay, which include selling alcohol to minors and to intoxicated persons, selling beer on credit\ and in exchange for food stamps and sexual favors and sales to bootleggers.
NFP has given sustained support over the years to the liquor license challenges, legislative initiatives, demonstrations and roadblocks mounted by Indian activists, including the production of a documentary film to raise national awareness of this ongoing struggle. Our advocacy with Nebraska’s Native peoples on the Whiteclay issue ultimately earned us an Organization of the Year award at the Second Annual Chief Standing Bear Commemoration.
Another local social justice issue we’ve tackled is immigrant rights. When the town of Fremont, Nebraska held a special election in 2010 over an anti-immigrant ordinance, we waded into what has become a national showdown over federal immigration policy. The local ordinance sought to prohibit the employment and housing of undocumented workers in the community. The political momentum from the Fremont ordinance in turn spun off a number of explicitly anti-immigrant bills in the succeeding session of the Nebraska Legislature modeled on Arizona’s notorious anti-immigrant SB 1070. NFP played a leading role in defeating this hate-based legislation—for the time being, at least.
Climate change comes home
Our more recent effort to creatively localize global issues is NFP’s work on climate change. For decades, NFP consciously left environmental issues to environmental organizations. But climate change is an altogether different matter—threatening as it does to undermine the very conditions necessary to preserving life on this planet. If we haven’t got a healthy planet to live on, peace and justice issues become moot. As polls repeatedly show, however, making the case for action on climate change is a tough sell. And in a red state chock full of climate skeptics that gets 65 percent of its electricity from coal and boasts the ownership of the two largest coal-hauling railroads in North America, tackling the issue of climate change is a still tougher challenge—even for environmental groups.
NFP has taken on this issue virtually by default. We’ve begun working to alert our public offi cials and publicly owned utilities about the science of climate change and
the urgent need to get off coal, with the help of a 350.org group that we’re incubating—part of an international grassroots campaign to reduce world CO2 emissions to 350 parts per million. It’s slow work. But then, peacemaking generally is.
There are no foolproof formulas for working smart and local. Every situation is diff erent and circumstances change. But what we’ve found over the course of our
41-year history is that we’ve got to be willing to reinvent ourselves as an organization in response to new conditions.
The end of the Vietnam War forced an earlier generation of NFP’s leadership to adjust its goals, as did the end of Cold War 15 years later. September 11 and the War
on Terror brought yet another shift in our priorities. And most recently, the economic recession and the imminent danger of climate change have prompted a further transformation of our focus. More changes are certain to come in the days ahead. But by working as smart as we can, with a little luck, we’ll continue to meet them.
