Ever since the September 11th terrorist attacks, the American people have been bombarded with this message from the President and his advisors: war is the only answer. The Compassionate Rebel offers more than fifty rebuttals to that argument, in the shape of interviews and case studies highlighting nonviolent action and activism. That alone makes it worth the time—but readers are forewarned to read with their eyes open and their minds engaged.
A compassionate rebel is someone who feels deep anger towards the world's injustices but channels that anger into constructive, change-making action, rather than into violence and unchecked aggression. Burt Berlowe, Rebecca Janke, and Julie Penshorn conducted interviews with and wrote essays on some fifty of these compassionate rebels. The stories of people like these are not told nearly often enough in our current 'sex-and-scandal-sells' culture, and The Compassionate Rebel is a welcome peek into a world of nonviolent activism that many never even guess exist. They work for change in almost every conceivable area of activism: the environment, child welfare, senior citizen rights, the pro-peace movement, and Native American treaty rights, just to name a few, reminding readers that whatever cause moves them is worthy of advocating on behalf of. Almost all of the interviewees live in Minnesota, which makes the book especially inspiring for local readers who will see that change can be made right here at home, and not just in seats of power like Washington, D.C. Reading these stories will give readers hope that the entire world may not be heading to hell in a very small hand basket and leave them wondering what more they can do to become compassionate rebels themselves. If this is the authors' (or 'story-carriers,' as Berlowe, Janke, and Penshorn call themselves) only goal, then they achieve it admirably.
However, there are serious flaws with The Compassionate Rebel for which readers need to be on the alert.
First of all, there seems to have been a checking of critique at the story-carriers' doors, almost as if, once Berlowe, Janke, or Penshorn deemed a person worthy of inclusion in the book, that person became inoculated against criticism of their methods. For instance, in "Disarming the Toybox," Berlowe writes of anti-war toy and anti-circumcision activist Teddy Copley, "When bookstores and libraries refused to carry books on circumcision practices, she quietly slipped them onto their shelves. When she went to hospitals to assist with births, she left literature by the phones." Had Copley been an anti-abortion activist, her methods would most likely have drawn scathing criticism and accusations of proselytizing and invasion of privacy. Since she is advocating a cause the story-carriers apparently support, her actions go without comment. Likewise, if a random friend or coworker told you half the stories Julie Penshorn tells about her boyfriend, you'd say, "What a jerk. Dump him!" But since Penshorn is one of the people writing the history books, so to speak, she gets to justify his actions as 'compassionate rebellion in everyday life.'
Even more disturbing is a certain white-washing that reveals a bias on the part of the authors that seems totally out of keeping with a book that claims to be dedicated to the sharing of 'a hidden culture.' As with the mainstream media, readers should approach The Compassionate Rebel asking, "What stories aren't being told?" Although the interviewees come from every conceivable racial and socio-economic standing, they are overwhelmingly Christian, and almost universally straight—at least as far as the story-carriers will tell us. An alarming number of the stories detail how finding the love of Jesus and one good heterosexual life-mate changed the course of a person's life and made them the effective compassionate rebel they are today. A subset of activists dubbed 'spirit changers'—those who do their work specifically through or because of their religious beliefs— are overwhelmingly Catholic. The Earth-based spirituality clearly integral to many of the Native American interviewees and environmental activists is either glossed over, made 'quaint,' or—most alarmingly - shown through the entirely inaccurate context of a Christian understanding of environmental stewardship. If any of the compassionate rebels are motivated by Allah, or Yahweh, or the Báb, readers don't hear about it, and if anyone was saved by one good homosexual life-mate, readers definitely didn't hear about that. The book doesn't even show any compassionate rebels working for GLBT rights. In a book dedicated to unearthing the stories our media does not tell, these omissions are especially glaring.
The issues tackled in The Compassionate Rebel are vitally important ones, indeed. Readers who take the time to delve into the stories of fifty real-life activists will come away feeling richer for the reading—but perhaps also feeling that so worthy a subject deserves even better treatment than it gets here. And if these stories inspire readers to go out into their communities and find the stories that haven't been told, then perhaps that is the book's greatest victory.
- Eli Weintraub