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excerpt

Name games

by Bradley McKellip

As a student and active member of the Bethel College community, [my last name] puts me in a strange place at times. For example, when the Bethel College Jazz Combo (of which I am a part) played at a coffee shop in Kansas City last spring, a group from Rainbow Mennonite Church in Kansas City came up to first commend our fine playing and second to play “the Mennonite Game.” Which is to say they began asking for last names to see who was related to who, and how.

I don’t have the last name to let me play the Mennonite Game, and I didn’t have the upbringing to instill nonviolence as an integral part of my identity. It took three months of walking through the tired stone streets of war-battered Derry, Northern Ireland, to do that.

Over those three months, I listened to lecture after lecture on Catholics discriminating against Protestants and Protestants discriminating against Catholics. I saw dozens of pictures of IRA paramilitary desperately trying to assert their identity with car bombs and assault rifles. I talked to pacifists in pubs about the nearby murals commemorating the hunger strike of Bobby Sands and the Bloody Sunday massacre.

All of these are great for a history paper or a case-study on collective violence. To inject a healthy commitment to nonviolence into one’s bloodstream, to consider peacemaking in even the most quotidian of acts, takes something less predictable, less romantically “life-changing” and a little more visceral, less Huck Finn-esque bildungsroman and a little more Saturday night.

I’m thinking specifically of the night of my 21st birthday, when a group of students from the university decided the best place to celebrate was a club. The specific club they chose had the cheapest drinks in town that night and they all were trying to navigate that narrow line between Irish hospitality and college student thriftiness. However, other Irish friends [Catholics] informed me they would not be joining us for the evening’s festivities because, much as they loved all nightclubs had to offer, the particular club we were planning to attend was “Protestant.” In other words, kids named O’Donnell do about as well in the Protestant game as kids named McKellip do in the Mennonite game. Only instead of ending in hymn sings, these conflicts end with fists. Or bats. Or hunger strikes. Or guns. Or bombs.

In that moment, I realized just how much I did not want this seed of violence to be cultivated in me – in the words I speak, in the papers I write, in the way I love those closest to me. That seed is cultivated in giving what end up being arbitrary aspects of one’s identity priority over others. If these friends thought of themselves as students at the university together, as joint inheritors of the rich history of Derry City, as the ancestors of those who died for the exact same reasons, I think they would find it much easier to go to a dance club together.

The recognition of this kind of division – of this problematic structure of identity – has been quietly informing my perception of my own [Bethel] community. There is much talk of divisions on the Bethel campus – of course, not even remotely close in terms of magnitude to the horrors that have happened in Ireland. They are, however, of the same nature. And its solution, not unlike my own epiphany, is not grandiose. It cannot come from the Bethel College administration. It will struggle if implemented in the classroom.

Rather, it must come from me and my fellow students, recognizing and searching for the things we share, as well as the strengths we have to offer each other. When the game-winning touchdown and the gorgeous tenor solo and the enlightening interpretation of Emerson offered in a literature class are all performed by the same student, I will applaud him for all three, not simply acknowledge whichever one pigeonholes him in a way that reinforces my own perception of my identity by highlighting the ways in which we differ.

Brad McKellip is a senior from Newton, majoring in English. This is excerpted from his entry in the C. Henry Smith Peace Oratorical Contest for Bethel, for which he finished second.