Full-figured and impatient, a woman with a large suitcase bristled Thursday as she squeezed past two men in a crowded westbound el car on the O’Hare-Douglas line.
One man-me-had the normal reaction, namely suggesting she shove it and then considering strangling her. The other man took a different tack.
“I apologize if I was in your way,” said Colman McCarthy, sporting a Woody Allen-ish golf hat and professorial tweed jacket and at once both needlessly deferential and effective in deflating a minor case of urban rage.
It was typical for McCarthy, 54, a voice in the wilderness in an age of unremitting mayhem.
A Washington Post columnist, syndicated in 50 papers, he also runs the Center for Teaching Peace. It’s a non-profit group he founded 10 years ago and whose mission may seem wonderfully high-minded yet naive: achieving peace by teaching non-violence.
“Journalists are world class at describing the mess the world is in,” he said. “But we often excuse ourselves from either describing solutions or getting personally involved in the solutions.”
McCarthy covered the peace movement of the 1960s and has made peace a theme of subsequent labors. Long before covering the homeless was fashionable, he posed as a homeless man during a cold, early 1980s’ Chicago winter and spent one nervous night at Cook County Jail (“Not only didn’t I sleep that night, I was scared to blink!”)
In 1983, he devised and taught a course in peacemaking for a Washington high school. It relied on works by Mohandas Gandhi, Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King Jr., among others, and focused on domestic, military and environmental violence.
Then, as now, he asked students to identify these 10 names: Robert E. Lee, Dorothy Day, U.S. Grant, A.J. Muste, Napoleon, Jane Addams, Caesar, Lanzo Del Vasto, Stonewall Jackson and John Woolman. He’d find that most know the military men, not the proponents of non-violence.
That course evolved into a somewhat catch-as-catch-can $150,000-a year group, run by McCarthy and wife Mavourneen, relying mostly on foundation grants and advised by a board that includes such card-carrying liberals as Harvard psychologst Robert Coles, Joan Baez and Rep. Ron Dellums (D, Calif.).
Largely using volunteer teachers, it has constructed courses on non-violence and conflict resolution for 30 high schools, colleges and universities, as well as a state prison in Virginia. There’s an eight-lesson home study correspondence course ($95) that culminates in writing an essay that’s not graded.
“I don’t believe in grades. I think they’re a form of academic violence,” McCarthy declared later at St. Viator High School, a Catholic private school in Arlington Heights, and one of two Illinois schools that teaches his course (the other is in East St. Louis).
St. Viator was the only school among a dozen in the area interested in McCarthy’s course when called by volunteer Robyn Opals. Opals, 29, had seen McCarthy bashed on “Donahue” during the Persian Gulf War and contacted him. The course costs the school zilch because McCarthy pays Opals a modest $500 and the school photocopies relevant materials.
“The course challenges the majority opinion, it’s counter-cultural,” said Brother John Dolwick, who runs the class with Opals.
In the often self-obsessed world of journalism, McCarthy, a triple threat pacifist-vegetarian-marathon runner, is a rarity: someone who believes in something.
“He’s a lovely, principled, stubborn guy whose work is admirable,” says George Lardner Jr., a stellar Post investigative reporter.
McCarthy finds violence everywhere, on battlefields, meatpacking plants and Saturday morning cartoons. His three sons do likewise, including one who’s a knuckleball-throwing minor league pitcher for the Baltimore Orioles and is profiled in the March issue of Oak Park-based Vegetarian Times.
As the dad talked to three classes of polite, if marginally enthused, students in a mostly empty St. Viator auditorium, he could not rest easy knowing that 50 wars and ethnic conflicts continued worldwide. They include Serbs and Croats killing one another, Arab Muslims feuding with black Christians in Sudan, Khymer Rouge soldiers attacking Vietamese living in Cambodia, and the Shining Path guerrillas wreaking havoc in Peru.
“This isn’t some anti-war-cut-the-Pentagon-budget-in-half course,” said the true believer.
“It’s exposure to basic skills in getting along with people. We graduate peace illiterates and then wonder why we have the world’s highest crime rate.”
The Center for Teaching Peace is at 4501 Van Ness St., N.W., Washington, D.C., 20016. Its phone number is 202-537-1372.
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McCarthy should be hired as a peacemaker at the Gary Post-Tribune in Indiana-or at least give counsel on non-violent use of Xerox machines.
Part of the Knight-Ridder chain, it’s suffered from difficult labor-management relations, including going 4 1/2 years without a contract with the Newspaper Guild, which represents editorial workers.
Last week, those relations claimed a victim, or better put, a victim went down in an act of unintended bureaucratic self-immolation.
She’s Betty Wells, the top editor, who resigned as vice president and executive editor and announced plans to attend law school. “I’ve been thinking about this for quite some time,” said Wells, 42. “I first took the LSAT (Law School Aptitude Test) when I was 24.”
Visions of Supreme Court arguments may have resurfaced after she left part of a three-page memo to publisher Fred Mott in the newsroom photocopier.
The missive, on “managing the guild,” urged that the paper “isolate five of the hard-core guild members.” It named the five and then boasted that “much of the reason the guild has been diffused in the past year is due” to sticking two loyal unionists in Crown Point, far from the main newsroom. “That was a conscious part of our decision-making process,” she wrote Mott.
The union confronted Mott and has threatened filing an unfair labor practice charge. Two top Knight-Ridder executives were dispatched from Miami headquarters and Wells was gone. She was replaced by William Sutton Jr., the No. 2 editor, who hadn’t fared much better than the union in the memo, chided for not being sufficiently “accessible and responsive.”
On Thursday, Mott said the memo was “a piece, a minor piece” of Wells’ exit. He then added, “Anytime something like that happens it affects a manager’s credibility, which in turn can affect effectiveness.”
I think everybody should step back, read some Gandhi, and make sure not to put all their thoughts on paper.
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For the sake of the language, how about a moratorium on, “Stay tuned”?
A Pavlovian fixture of gossip meisters, it now creeps into news pages and was used five times last week in Chicago papers. In six months, it’s showed up 69 times in the Sun-Times, 65 in the Tribune.
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I was part of a Friday teleconference with Ross Perot, drumming up publicity for his Sunday night “town meeting” on NBC. When I wondered about the accuracy of instant polling he’ll try to do on government reform, he responded:
“We probably should elect our president with a poll. The way we do it now is not scientific.”
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Yes, it was demented to be watching C-Span shortly after 1 a.m. Thursday, staring at live proceedings on the House floor as a handful of congressmen blabbed about the budget. Then, in less than one minute, came this:
U.S. Representatives Jim Kolbe (R, Ariz.) and Robert Walker (R, Penn.) not only attacked President Clinton’s deficit-cutting proposals but cited as their prime authority the same legendary economic analyst, Rush Limbaugh.
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Larry Mendte Watch: Kudos to the unidentified bystander who walked right up to the whirling-dervish WBBM-Ch. 2 reporter during a dramatic rendition of a no-news residential fire at “1300 W. Racine” Thursday afternoon.
As ever-animated Larry was reporting LIVE, the fellow barked at him, “Don’t you be agitatin’!”
He might also have given Larry a Chicago street map. Racine is a north-south street.
