Doing Time for Peace

Description

In this compelling collection of oral histories, more than seventy-five peacemakers describe how they say no to war-making in the strongest way possible--by engaging in civil disobedience and paying the consequences in jail or prison. These courageous resisters leave family and community and life on the outside in their efforts to direct U.S. policy away from its militarism. Many are Catholic Workers, devoting their lives to the works of mercy instead of the works of war. They are homemakers and carpenters and social workers and teachers who are often called "faith-based activists." They speak from the left of the political perspective, providing a counterpoint to the faith-based activism of the fundamentalist Right.


In their own words, the narrators describe their motivations and their preparations for acts of resistance, the actions themselves, and their trials and subsequent jail time. We hear from those who do their time by caring for their families and managing communities while their partners are imprisoned. Spouses and children talk frankly of the strains on family ties that a life of working for peace in the world can cause.


The voices range from a World War II conscientious objector to those protesting the recent war in Iraq. The book includes sections on resister families, the Berrigans and Jonah House, the Plowshares Communities, the Syracuse Peace Council, and Catholic Worker houses and communities.


The introduction by Dan McKanan situates these activists in the long tradition of resistance to war and witness to peace.

Sujets

• Human Rights
• Philosophie et théologie
• State
• Politics
• Religion
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Vanderbilt University Press
• Date de parution: 07 janvier 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780826518736
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

DOING TIME FOR PEACE
DOING TIME FOR PEACE
RESISTANCE, FAMILY, AND COMMUNITY
Compiled and Edited by
Rosalie G. Riegle
Vanderbilt University Press NASHVILLE , TENNESSEE
2012 by Vanderbilt University Press
Nashville, Tennessee 37235
All rights reserved
First printing 2012
Manufactured in the United States of America
Segment by Joan Cavanagh, copyright Joan Cavanagh.
Words of Jim Douglass, copyright Jim Douglass.
Lyrics for There s a Train, copyright Jim Strathdee.
Reprinted by permission of Desert Flower Music. Copy license 03262011 P1.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file
LC control number 2012029830
LC classification number JZ5584.U6R54 2013
Dewey class number 303.6 6--dc23
ISBN 978-0-8265-1871-2 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-8265-1872-9 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-8265-1873-6 (e-book)
To Johannah Hughes Turner, for making this book possible
Protest that endures . . . is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one s own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.
-Wendell Berry, A Poem of Difficult Hope
CONTENTS
Preface
Coming to the Project
Collecting and Shaping the Stories
Acknowledgments
Introduction by Dan McKanan
1. Precursors to the Plowshares Movement
Dick Von Korff
Bradford Lyttle
Robert (Bob) Wollheim
Tom Lewis
Willa Bickham
Michael Cullen
Annette (Nettie) Cullen
Tom Lewis, Chuck Quilty, and Marcia Timmel
Mary Anne Grady Flores
Mike Giocondo
2. Let s Do It Again! The Berrigans and Jonah House
Father Dan Berrigan, SJ
Phil Berrigan
Elizabeth (Liz) McAlister
Frida Berrigan
Jerry Berrigan
Kate Berrigan
3. Beating Swords into Plowshares: Plowshares Communities and Their Actions
Sister Anne Montgomery, RSCJ
Kathleen Rumpf
John LaForge
Father Carl Kabat, OMI
Jean and Joe Gump
Darla Bradley
An Interlude: Michele Naar-Obed and Joe Gump on the Use of Blood
Father John Dear, SJ
Katya Komisaruk
An Interlude: Karl Meyer, Joan Cavanagh, and Jim Forest Critique the Plowshares Movement
Mark Colville
Sisters Carol Gilbert, Jackie Hudson, and Ardeth Platte, OP
4. Catholic Worker Communities and Resistance
Robert Ellsberg
Steve Woolford and Lenore Yarger
Claire and Scott Schaeffer-Duffy
Steve Baggarly and Kim Williams
Brian Terrell
Paul Gallagher
Judith Williams
Father Tom Lumpkin
Michele Naar-Obed
Roundtable on Resistance
5. Resister Communities: Syracuse, New York, and Hartford, Connecticut
Ed Kinane
Ann Tiffany
Andy Mager
Rae Kramer
Kathleen Rumpf
Genevieve (Mickey) Allen
Teri Allen
Brian Kavanagh
Jackie Allen-Doucot
Micah Allen-Doucot
Chris Allen-Doucot
6. Resister Families
Kim and Bill Wahl
Jim and Shelley Douglass
Anne S. Hall
Barb Kass
Ollie Miles
Mike Miles
Frances Crowe
Hattie Nestel
Joni McCoy
Tom Karlin
Harry Murray
7. After the Millennium
Ana Grady Flores
Dan Burns
Becky Johnson
Steve Downs
Kathy Kelly, with Father Joe Mulligan, SJ
Camilo Mejia
Epilogue: Winter Begins by Morgan Guyton
Afterword by Bill Quigley
Appendix A: Brief Biographies of the Narrators
Appendix B: For Further Reading
Notes
Index
PREFACE
Coming to the Project
Ever since the Vietnam War, when I walked in candlelight vigils and visited draft boards with Catholic Workers and Quakers and students and friends, I ve been a protester working for peace in the world, like many other people. One day I found myself crossing the line from protest to nonviolent resistance, from saying no to acting no, as Jim Wallis characterizes the direct action that disobeys the law and has consequences in jail or prison time. In 1984 Wallis wrote, To protest is to say that something is wrong; resistance means trying to stop it. To protest is to raise your voice; to resist is to stand up with your body. 1
I decided to stand up with my body and walk through an open gate onto a military base near Omaha, kneel down, say an Our Father, and refuse to leave when asked, in order to send a message, that STRATCOM, the Strategic Air Command, was endangering the world. 2
Then I thought, Whoa! What will my grandchildren think if their granny is in jail? Then, Can their granny take it? Can she give up her creature comforts, her computer, her glass of wine at 5:00?
Well, I didn t have to go to jail. After three court visits and a bench trial, I received only a fine and a scolding from a judge who said I was old enough to know better. But this brush with prison-I could have done time for six months-was the genesis of this, my third oral history project. 3 I wanted to know why people would take that risk, why they would make what many of us see as huge sacrifices, and what it was like for them when they did.
Civil disobedience that results in prison is not new: the most significant victories for justice issues in the last one hundred years have been achieved at least partially because nonviolent resisters have stood up with their bodies and spent time in jail for doing so-Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., and countless others, known and unknown. From India to Poland to Egypt to the United States, citizens have taken pacifist Barbara Deming s advice and moved from words of dissent to acts of disobedience. From these nonviolent actions, the world has been changed. The peace people, as they sometimes call themselves, stand up with their bodies to change our foreign policy to one of peace instead of endless war and preparations for war.
Now, I must have always known that peace resisters were connected to someone-were mothers and fathers and grandparents and aunts and uncles and members of communities. But before I started to interview for this project, I d never thought of the implications of that connection, both for those who did the actions and went to prison and for those in the family and community left behind. Barb Kass of Luck, Wisconsin, explains: The person at home does the time. Absolutely. For instance, in a family, he or she makes up emotionally for the other parent being gone. And also, that person is always answering to the larger community who says, Why don t you just write letters? I volunteered a lot at school and people do look at you and try to figure out what resistance means. So if you have relationships with them, they can t write you off quite as quickly.
The people I interviewed call nonviolent direct action by several names-civil disobedience, divine obedience, and lately civil resistance-because they feel it is their government that disobeys the law, especially international law, not they. Although they see the web of connections between war and oil and caring for the earth and for the poor of the world, they speak here about their peace resistance.
These narrators are mainstream in many ways (white, mostly college educated, and from the political Left) but they are people who have come to see resistance as normative for a moral person. While diverse in lifestyle, motivation, and experience, they are alike in another important aspect: their resistance decisions spring from a Christian or Jewish faith. Often, but not always, they evidence a profound commitment to that faith. In fact, one hears them called faith-based activists. Because their religious and moral choices run counter to the well-funded waving of flags and teabags, they provide a strong counterpart to the current conception of religion as the fundamentalism of the Right.
A few are known throughout the nonviolent peace movement, like Jesuit priest John Dear and Kathy Kelly of Voices for Creative Nonviolence, but many have been unheeded and unsung. They come from metropolitan areas and from family farms, from Seattle and San Francisco, from Baltimore and Boston, and from Duluth in the North to Norfolk in the South. Some strive to be macroscian-that is, to influence the future. Some show a surprising humility, taking their lives and actions for granted. Their jail and prison experiences range from the notorious Los Angeles County Jail to Alderson Federal Prison, the latter with buildings originally modeled after those of Bucknell University. Some have spent years in prison, some just a few days in jail. Some served easy time, some carry lasting scars.
Some speak of broken marriages caused by long separation, troubles in the communities left behind, the loneliness of children while their parents are imprisoned, the fears of rape, the failures of communication between prisoners, and the frequent exasperation at the prisons failure to address injustices. Some narrators now question the value of their resistance, some continue to make it a part of their lives. Many evidence a sardonic or wry introspection, and there s a surprising amount of humor, which I hope readers will see without the stage directions transcribers traditionally insert.
Today one hears little about the resisters arrests and trials in mainstream media. Unlike newspapers and television of the Vietnam era, which reported dramatic stories of draft file burnings and the resultant trials, contemporary media seem bored with nonviolent actions, so the voices have been muted. This book seeks to remove the mute and with it I hope to show readers that resistance is a normal and necessary response in today s perilous world.
After you ve