How do you tell a group of teenagers that this won't be the last time a President stands behind a lectern and tries to sell them a war

Or that this wasn't the first time that you've heard this same sales pitch

“Quaker Peace Action” Quaker Tapestry Museum

I had a different lesson planned for Sunday, for the middle school class I teach at our Quaker Meeting. But early Saturday morning, there were explosions in Caracas and a foreign leader hustled onto a plane and a couple hours later Trump took a victory lap on Fox and Friends. “I watched it like… a television show… the speed, the violence— it was an amazing thing” my country’s President gushed, describing a war crime.

Usually, when the world breaks my heart, I process that heartbreak in writing. But I couldn’t write on Saturday, at least more than a few sentences, because I watched the press conference and yes, I can list all the ways that the whole affair was uniquely Trumpian, but what broke me was the deja vu. I’ve spent my entire life watching press conferences like this. The President of the United States behind a lectern, telling me that there was no other choice. This is why we have to invade another country. This is why we have to arm another country, so that they can do the invading. This is why troops are on their way to a place where human lives, I am asked to believe, don’t matter as much as they do here.

“No blood for oil!” I’ve chanted, across multiple decades. And still, another press conferences. “Here’s an idea!” they all proclaim, with varying degrees of sophistication and obfuscation, “what about blood for oil?”

I couldn’t write on Sunday either, because there were thirteen year olds waiting for me in the blue room in the basement of our Meetinghouse, the one with the mismatched couches and flags of the world hanging from the ceiling. We gathered around a bucket of snacks and I apologized for the ad hoc lesson. “I’m probably doing this more for me than for you,” I confessed. The teens were patient with me. They’re always like that. What a pleasure to get to hang out with them every week.

I opened up my laptop and showed them the press conference. The President bragged about how these attacks were some of the best in history. “Wait, what?” the teens exclaimed. Then, a few minutes, later, a matter of fact declaration. “This is so depressing.” I paused the video.

I only needed them to see a little bit. I wanted us to experience it together, this depraved ritual of faux seriousness, because I was once a teenage pacifist and a teenage socialist and just generally a weirdo kid who believed that the work of our lives is to care for each other. I’m still that kid, and now I get to teach kids like that.

We talked about how the President in Venezuela was an autocrat, and that’s the gotcha that’ll often get parried your way, if you’re a bleeding heart pacifist. “What do you do with a dictator if you’re not allowed to bomb them?” It’s a fair question, actually, one that seems pretty urgent given the current situation in our own country.

Rather than offering my answer, we did a simulation together. One of the kids got to play the despot and everybody else were the activists. “So what do you do if the government has stripped you of your rights?” “What next, if they make protest illegal?” “What options do you have?”

They devised a protest strategy, a pretty good one actually, but also asked, “is it guaranteed to work?” I had to admit that some nonviolent social movements succeed, but others fail. I didn’t have to offer the counterpoint; they got there themselves.

“There’s no guarantee a war will work either, but with a war, but you know for sure that a war will make more victims.”

My goal wasn’t to convince them to remain pacifists for the rest of their lives. Nor, it’s worth repeating, is it my goal to prescribe that path for anybody reading this reflection. I love so many people who share my dreams of a better world, but not my conviction as to how we get there. That’s fine. Good even, because I very well might be wrong.

What I wanted the teens to know, simply, is that they aren’t alone. They’ll be made to feel lonely for their beliefs, but that’s different. As they grow old, they will encounter far more swords than plowshares. They will be called naive and unrealistic and worse, a thousand times over. They will head to the streets to protest, and most days it will be the same cast of characters. They will get annoyed, as I do, by the long-winded speeches and the marching in circles and the competing Trotskyist newspapers. I wasn’t really teaching them a lesson, you see. I was just making them a quiet, imperfect promise, the same one that was once made to me.

I didn’t tell them this story, but as the teens sorted through what all this meant for them, I remembered the first time I ever preached at a Quaker Meeting. Now many Quaker Meetings, ours included, don’t have preachers, but the one I attended in college was semi-programmed, so every week a different Senior got to give a short message before silent worship.

My week came not long after the second invasion of Iraq. When that news broke, I had been home, in Montana, for spring break. I was trying to finish my Senior Thesis, but was impossibly distracted by the news from Baghdad. One afternoon, I heard a radio report, not about the attacks themselves but about how the stock market hit a record high as soon as the bombs fell. I bawled at my parent’s bulky desktop computer, then walked out the front door and headed, instinctually, towards downtown. I had a hunch that there’d be a protest down by the river.

The crowd gathered on the hill in Caras Park was far bigger than I expected. It’s easy to forget those jingoistic early days. That was the era of “Courtesy of the Red White and Blue.” Put a boot in their ass; it’s the American way, etc. etc. These days, everybody pretends they opposed the war from the start. But back then, you were overjoyed to find fellow travelers. I found plenty of strangers in that crowd, but also plenty of familiar mentors. Middle-aged and elderly activists whom I trusted and admired. People who had given me advice on how to raise your voice, how not to give up, how you win some and lose some. I didn’t understand all the lessons yet, but I knew that, by their side, I was home. I cried again, on the banks of the Clark Fork, but not the same type of tears as before.

That’s what I taked about, the first and only time I preached at Quaker Meeting. I talked about that afternoon of tears and how I was there and we were there and the river was there and how rivers can’t wash away the worst of what we do to each other, but they will connect us to each other. Just as there have always been warmongers, so too are we never the first to cry out for peace.

On Sunday, the teens got mad at the state of the world, but not just. We laughed quite a bit, far more than I was expecting. The material I’d been able to find as a stand-in for weapons in our simulation were mini marshmallows, so I shouldn’t have been that surprised. When class was over, the teens hurried, as they always do, to the thrifted CD player we keep in our room. Months ago, I brought a few old CDs from home, but they only ever listen to the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, and mostly just the first track.

“Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older, and we didn’t have to wait so long.”

Brian Wilson famously called that song a teenage symphony to God. And because those particular teenagers have listened to it on repeat, together, it belongs to them now. They all belted out the chorus in unison, a heap of temporarily un-self-conscious giggles and smiles.

I didn’t tell the teens that there’s a reason why they don’t call them middle aged symphonies to God, how I no longer believe that, in just a few years time, everything will be magically different. Saturday was Venezuela. And perhaps there won’t be troops there for long, but perhaps there will be. Tomorrow may be Cuba. Or Greenland, apparently. Over the next few years, I will help some of those kids with their conscientious objection paperwork.

I never stopped hoping, though. That previous hope, the wouldn’t it be nice one, was replaced with something different. The drums of war will not disappear tomorrow, but neither will our counterpoint, sometimes whispered, often shouted.

There is always another way. They will tell us that there isn’t, but they’re lying. There will always be a river and a room full of friends, and we will be there, together.

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