478 THEOLOGY TODAY

What Would You Do If?

By JOAN BAEZ

Joan Baez is the well-known folk musician. She has taken part in numerous protest
movements, especially in connection with civil rights and the war in Viet Nam. She is a
pacifist, and the excerpt below is taken from her recent autobiography. This passage also
appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, August, 1968, pp. 32-34. Reprinted from Daybreak, by
Joan Baez, Copyright © 1966, 1968, by Joan Baez and used by permission of the publisher,
The Dial Press, Inc.

you're a pacifist. What would you do if some-

"
OK ,
one were, say, attacking your grandmother?"
"Attacking my poor old grandmother?"
"Yeah. You're in a room with your grandmother, and there's this
guy about to attack her, and you're standing there. What would
you do?"
''I'd yell, 'Three cheers for Grandma!' and leave the room."
"No, seriously. Say he had a gun, and he was about to shoot her.
Would you shoot him first?"
"Do I have a gun?"
"Yes."
"No. I'm a pacifist, I don't have a gun."
"Well, say you do."
"All right. Am I a good shot?"
"Yes."
''I'd shoot the gun out of his hand."
"No, then you're not a good shot."
''I'd be afraid to shoot. Might kill Grandma."
"Come on. OK, look. We'll take another example. Say you're
driving a truck. You're on a narrow road with a sheer cliff on your
side. There's a little girl standing in the middle of the road. You're
going too fast to stop. What would you do?"
"I don't know. What would you do?"
''I'm asking you. You're the pacifist."
"Yes, I know. All right, am I in control of the truck?"
"Yes."
"How about if I honk my horn so she can get out of the way?"
"She's too young to walk. And the horn doesn't work."
"I swerve around to the left of her, since she's not going any-
where."
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 CRITIC'S CORNER 479

"No, there's been a landslide."

"Oh. Well, then, I would try to drive the truck over the cliff and
save the little girl."
Silence.
"Well, say there's someone else in the truck with you. Then
what?"
"What's my decision have to do with my being a pacifist?"
"There's two of you in the truck and only one little girl."
"Someone once said, 'If you have a choice between a real evil and
a hypothetical evil, always take the hypothetical one.' "
"Huh?"
"I said why are you so anxious to kill off all the pacifists?"
''I'm not. I just want to know what you'd do."
"If I was with a friend in a truck driving very fast on a one-lane
road approaching a dangerous impasse where a ten-month-old girl is
sitting in the middle of the road with a landslide one side of her and
a sheer drop-off on the other."
"That's right."
"I would probably slam on the brakes, thus sending my friend
through the front windshield, skid into the landslide, run over the
little girl, sail off the cliff, and plunge to my own death. No doubt
Grandma's house would be at the bottom of the ravine, and the
truck would crash through her roof and blow up in her living room,
where she was finally being attacked for the first, and last, time."
"You haven't answered my question. You're just trying to get
out of it."
''I'm really trying to say a couple of things. One is that no one
knows what he'll do in a moment of crisis. And that hypothetical
questions get hypothetical answers. I'm also hinting that you have
made it impossible for me to come out of the situation without having
killed one or more people. Then you can say, 'Pacifism is a nice
idea, but it won't work.' But that's not what bothers me."
"What bothers you?"
"Well, you may not like it because it's not hypothetical. It's real.
And it makes the assault on Grandma look like a garden party."
"What's that?"
''I'm thinking about how we put people through a training process
so they'll find out the really good, efficient ways of killing. Nothing
incidental like trucks and landslides-just the opposite, really. You
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480 THEOLOGY TODAY

know, how to growl and yell, kill and crawl and jump out of air-
planes-real organized stuff. Hell, you have to be able to run a
bayonet through Grandma's middle."
"That's something entirely different."
"Sure. And don't you see that it's so much harder to look at, be-
cause it's real, and it's going on right now? Look. A general sticks
a pin into a map. A week later a bunch of young boys are sweating
it out in a jungle somewhere, shooting each other's arms and legs
off, crying and praying and losing control of their bowels. Doesn't
it seem stupid to you?"
"Well, you're talking about war."
"Yes, I know. Doesn't it seem stupid?"
"What do you do instead, then? Turn the other cheek, I sup-
pose."
"No. Love thine enemy but confront his evil. Love thine enemy.
Thou shalt not kill."
"Yeah, and look what happened to him."
"He grew up."
"They hung him on a damn cross is what happened to him. I
don't want to get hung on a damn cross."
"You won't."
"Huh?"
"I said you don't get to choose how you're going to die. Or when.
You can only decide how you're going to live. Now."
"Well I'm not going to go letting everybody step all over me, that's
for sure."
"Jesus said, 'Resist not evil.' The pacifist says just the opposite.
He says to resist evil with all your heart and with all your mind and
body until it has been overcome."
"I don't get it."
"Organized nonviolent resistance. Gandhi. He organized the
Indians for nonviolent resistance and waged nonviolent war against
the British until he'd freed India from the British Empire. Not
bad for a first try, don't you think?"
"Yeah, fine, but he was dealing with the British, a civilized people.
We're not."
"Not a civilized people?"
"Not dealing with a civilized people. You just try some of that
stuff on the Russians."
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 CRITIC'S CORNER 481

"You mean the Chinese, don't you?"

"Yeah, the Chinese. Try it on the Chinese."
"Oh dear. War was going on long before anybody dreamed up
Communism. It's just the latest justification for self-righteousness.
The problem isn't Communism. The problem is consensus.
There's a consensus out that it's OK to kill when your government
decides who to kill. If you kill inside the country you get in trouble.
If you kill outside the country, right time, right season, latest enemy,
you get a medal. There are about one hundred and thirty nation-
states, each of them thinks it's a swell idea to bump off all the rest
because he is more important. The pacifist thinks there is only one
tribe. Three billion members. They come first. We think killing
any member of the family is a dumb idea. We think there are more
decent and intelligent ways of settling differences. And man had
better start investigating these other possibilities because if he doesn't,
then by mistake or by design, he will probably kill off the whole
damn race."
"It's human nature to kill."
"Is it?"
"It's natural. Something you can't change."
"If it's natural to kill why do men have to go into trammg to
learn how? There's violence in human nature, but there's also de-
cency, love, kindness. Man organizes, buys, sells, pushes violence.
The nonviolenter wants to organize the opposite side. That's all
nonviolence is-organized love."
"You're crazy."
"No doubt. Would you care to tell me the rest of the world is
sane? Tell me that violence has been a great success for the past
five thousand years, that the world is in fine shape, that wars have
brought peace, understanding, brotherhood, democracy, and free-
dom to mankind, and that killing each other has created an atmo-
sphere of trust and hope. That it's grand for one billion people to
live off of the other two billion, or that even if it hasn't been smooth
going all along, we are now at last beginning to see our way through
to a better world for all, as soon as we get a few minor wars out of
the way."
''I'm doing OK."
"Consider it a lucky accident."
"I believe I should defend America and all that she stands for.
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482 THEOLOGY TODAY

Don't you believe in self-defense?"

"No, that's how the Mafia got started. A little band of people
who got together to protect peasants. I'll take Gandhi's nonviolent
resistance. "
"I still don't get the point of nonviolence."
"The point of nonviolence is to build a floor, a strong new floor,
beneath which we can no longer sink. A platform which stands a
few feet above napalm, torture, exploitation, poison gas, A and H
bombs, the works. Give man a decent place to stand. He's been
wallowing around in human blood and vomit and burnt flesh scream-
ing how it's going to bring peace to the world. He sticks his head
out of the hole for a minute and sees an odd bunch of people gather-
ing material and attempting to build a structure above ground in
the fresh air. 'Nice idea but not very practical,' he shouts, and slides
back into the hole. It was the same kind of thing when man found
out the world was round. He fought for years to have it remain
flat, with every proof on hand that it was not flat at all. It had no
edge to drop off or sea monsters to swallow up his little ship in
their gaping jaws."
"How are you going to build this practical structure?"
"From the ground up. By studying, learning about, experiment-
ing with every possible alternative to violence on every level. By
learning how to say No to the nation-state, No to war taxes, No to
the draft, No to killing in general, Yes to the brotherhood of man;
by starting new institutions which are based on the assumption that
murder in any form is ruled out; by making and keeping in touch
with nonviolent contacts all over the world; by engaging ourselves
at every possible chance in dialogue with people, groups, to try to
begin to change the consensus that it's OK to kill."
"It sounds real nice, but I just don't think it can work."
"You are probably right. We probably don't have enough time.
So far we've been a glorious flop. The only thing that's been a
worse flop than the organization of nonviolence has been the or-
ganization of violence."
A friend of mine told me it would be risky to write about Jesus.
. . . I wonder if Jesus knows what's happening on earth these days.
Don't bother coming around, Jesus.

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