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liz mcalister
How Do You Tell the Kids that Grandma is in Jail for Resisting Nuclear Weapons?
"Our grandma is in jail," Madeline tells a woman wrestling a shopping cart at Target.
"She went over a war fence and tried to make peace," Seamus adds helpfully. "They arrested her, and she is in jail now."
"Where?" the woman asks, looking from them to me in disbelief and maybe pity.
"We don't remember," the kids say, suddenly done with their story and ready to make passionate pleas for the colorful items in the dollar section over the woman's shoulder.
Apr 07, 2018
"Our grandma is in jail," Madeline tells a woman wrestling a shopping cart at Target.
"She went over a war fence and tried to make peace," Seamus adds helpfully. "They arrested her, and she is in jail now."
"Where?" the woman asks, looking from them to me in disbelief and maybe pity.
"We don't remember," the kids say, suddenly done with their story and ready to make passionate pleas for the colorful items in the dollar section over the woman's shoulder.
"Georgia," I say, but I don't have a lot of energy to add detail to my kids' story. They hit all the high points.
"There's a lot going on these days," she says. I agree, and we move on into the store and our separate errands.
I was happy not to say more at that moment, happy to avoid a sobbing breakdown at Target, happy to wrestle one little bit of normal out of a very abnormal day.
My mom, Liz McAlister, who turned 78 in November, had been arrested deep inside the King's Bay Naval Base in St. Mary's, Georgia in the early hours of Wednesday morning. Along with six friends, she carried banners, statements, hammers and blood onto the base. They started their action on April 4: the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King's assassination.
Their statement made connections between nuclear weapons, white supremacy and deeply embedded racism. It is a long statement, but given that they were carrying it into a free-fire zone -- where military personnel are authorized to use deadly force -- there was no particular need for brevity: "We come to Kings Bay to answer the call of the prophet Isaiah (2:4) to 'beat swords into plowshares' by disarming the world's deadliest nuclear weapon, the Trident submarine. We repent of the sin of white supremacy that oppresses and takes the lives of people of color here in the United States and throughout the world. We resist militarism that has employed deadly violence to enforce global domination. We believe reparations are required for stolen land, labor and lives."
They walked onto King's Bay Naval Station just hours after Saheed Vassell was shot and killed in a barrage of bullets by New York City police officers, just hours after hundreds of demonstrators filled the streets of Sacramento for another day, shouting "Stephon Clark, Stephon Clark, Stephon Clark" and demanding accountability after the young father of two was killed by police officers on March 18. These seven white activists know that when you are black in this country, your own corner, your grandmother's own backyard, is a free-fire zone more dangerous than any military base.
There is indeed a lot going on these days.
The statement continues: "Dr. King said, 'The greatest purveyor of violence in the world (today) is my own government.' This remains true in the midst of our endless war on terror. The United States has embraced a permanent war economy. 'Peace through strength' is a dangerous lie in a world that includes weapons of mass destruction on hair-trigger alert. The weapons from one Trident have the capacity to end life as we know it on planet Earth."
Carmen Trotta and Liz McAlister holding a protest sign on the Kings Bay Naval Station. (WNV/Kings Bay Plowshares)
Kings Bay is the largest nuclear submarine base in the world at about 16,000 acres. It is the home port of the U.S. Navy Atlantic Fleet's Trident nuclear-powered submarines. There are eight in total, two guided missile submarines and six ballistic missile submarines. These submarines were all built in Groton, Connecticut -- right across the river from our home in New London. Each submarine, my mom and her friends assert, carries the capacity to cause devastation equivalent to 600 of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima, Japan.
"Nuclear weapons kill every day through our mining, production, testing, storage and dumping, primarily on indigenous native land. This weapons system is a cocked gun being held to the head of the planet. As white Catholics, we take responsibility to atone for the horrific crimes stemming from our complicity with 'the triplets' [of evil]. Only then can we begin to restore right relationships. We seek to bring about a world free of nuclear weapons, racism and economic exploitation."
That is not the end, you can read the whole statement and their indictment of the United States on their Facebook group.
These sorts of actions -- called Plowshares -- have a nearly 40-year history, since my father and uncle and six others broke into the King of Prussia plant in Pennsylvania in 198o to "beat swords into plowshares." They struck at nosecones with hammers and marked the weapons with blood to reveal the human costs and mess and suffering the weapons are built to wreak in the world.
My father participated in five of these Plowshares actions in his lifetime and helped organize countless others. Committed conspirers, steeped in active nonviolence, have carried out more than 100 of these actions since 1980. This is my mom's second action. She and her current co-defendant Clare Grady, were part of the 1983 Griffiss Plowshares in upstate New York.
My parents estimated that they spent 11 years of their 27-year marriage separated by prison, and it was mostly these actions that kept them apart and away from us. Countless life events in our family -- birthdays, graduations, celebrations of all kinds -- were stuttered by the absence of one of our parents. I say this with pain and loss, but no self-pity. Dad was able to attend my high school graduation, but not my brother's. We went straight from my college graduation to visit my dad in jail in Maine. I missed all the raging keggers, sweaty dance parties and tearful goodbyes that marked the end of college for my friends to sit knee-to-knee with my father in a cramped and soulless room. On chairs designed for maximum discomfort, I tried to share my momentous day and all my 22-year-old big feelings while ignoring the guards and the room crowded with a dozen others doing the same thing. We wrote thousands of letters. They often crisscrossed each other so that there was a constant weaving of story and sharing across the miles.
So, when I explained that grandma was in jail to my kids -- 11-year-old Rosena, 5-year-old Seamus and 4-year-old Madeline -- I felt the weight of a lifetime of missing and provisional family experiences, frequently lived in prison visiting rooms and through urgently scrawled letters.
I tried to figure out a way to talk to them that would make sense and, in thinking it through, I realized that none of this should make sense to anyone! Nuclear weapons? Absurd! Police brutality and white supremacy? Senseless! Plowshares actions with their symbolic transformation and ritual mess-making? A foolhardy act of David versus Goliath proportions!
So, I didn't try to make it make sense. I just forged ahead, grateful that they had some context: We had participated in the Good Friday Stations of the Cross organized by Catholic Worker friends at our local submarine base a few days earlier, and -- the night before -- we had gone to hear a dramatic reading of Dr. King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail."
"Hey guys, know how we went to the sub base on Friday? Grandma was arrested in a place like that late last night. She is in jail now. She and her friends broke onto the base to say that nuclear weapons are wrong. Remember how Dr. King talked about just and unjust laws?" They nodded and remembered that King said "one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws." I told them that Grandma thinks that nuclear weapons -- things that can destroy so much life on our planet -- shouldn't be built and protected and paid for when so many people are hungry, so many kids don't have good schools to go to, so many people don't have good homes. I went on and on.
"Wait, these nuclear weapons ... They are war things?" Seamus asked.
"Yep, they are war things, bud."
"Good for grandma," he said, and that was the end of our serious conversation.
Mom and her friends are charged with misdemeanor criminal trespass and two felonies: possession of tools for the commission of a crime and interference with government property.
The kids and I didn't talk about the kind of jail time that could mean for their grandma. It is all I am thinking about right now, but they moved on, imagining out loud and with a lot of enthusiasm how grandma got by the attack dogs and police officers they had seen at the Groton Submarine Base. They were sure there was a similar set up in Georgia. "Grandma needed a ladder and a cheetah," said Madeline. "A cheetah is the only animal that can outrun dogs and police officer's bullets."
I am pretty sure no cheetahs were involved in the Kings Bay Plowshares, but I am happy my daughter sees her grandmother as a fierce and powerful anti-war activist astride a wild cat.
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Seven Peace Activists Arrested After Entering Nuclear Submarine Base in Georgia
Citing anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s death, activists say they "went to make real the prophet Isaiah's command: 'beat swords into plowshares.'"
Apr 05, 2018
Citing the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination this week, seven peace activists were arrested on Thursday morning after they made their way overnight onto the U.S. Naval Base in Kings Bay, Georgia where some of the nation's nuclear-armed submarines are stationed.
According to a post by the group on Facebook, the seven people involved in the action and subsequently detained by authorities were: Elizabeth McAlister, 78, of Jonah House, Baltimore; Steve Kelly, S. J., 69, of California; Carmen Trotta, 55, a NY Catholic Worker; Clare Grady, 59, of Ithaca, NY Catholic Worker; Martha Hennessy, 62, of NY Catholic Worker; Mark Coleville, 55, of Amistad Catholic Worker in New Haven, CT; and Patrick O'Neil, 61, of Fr. Charlie Mulholland Catholic Worker in Garner, NC.
Local news outlet First Coast News, citing military officials at the base, report that the seven are facing trespassing and defacing government property charges.
The statement from the group further explained:
The seven chose to act on the 50th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Who devoted his life to addressing the triplets of militarism, racism and materialism. In their statement, which they carried with them, the group quoted King, who said: "The greatest purveyor of violence in the world (today) is my own government."
Carrying hammers and baby bottles of their own blood, the seven attempted to convert weapons of mass destruction.
Kings Bay Naval base opened in 1979 as the Navy's Atlantic Ocean Trident port. It is the largest nuclear submarine base in the world. There are six ballistic missile subs and two guided missile subs based at Kings Bay.
The activists went to three sites on the base: The administration building, the D5 Missile monument installation and the nuclear weapons storage bunkers. The activists used crime scene tape, hammers and banners reading: "'The ultimate logic of racism is genocide,' Dr. Martin Luther King"; "The ultimate logic of Trident is omnicide"; "Nuclear weapons: illegal - immoral." They also brought an indictment charging the U.S. government for crimes against peace.
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'Do Kids Die, Mom?: Parenting in a World on Fire
Facing the future with trepidation during the Age of Trump
Jan 08, 2018
As a mother and an activist, here's what I've concluded as 2018 begins: it's getting harder and harder to think about the future -- at least in that soaring Whitney Houston fashion. You know the song: "I believe the children are our future, teach them well and let them lead the way..." These days, doesn't it sound quaint and of another age?
The truth is I get breathless and sweaty thinking about what life will be like for my kids -- three-year-old Madeline, five-year-old Seamus, and 11-year-old Rosena. I can't stop thinking about it either. I can't stop thinking that they won't be guaranteed clean air or clean water, that they won't have a real healthcare system to support them in bad times, even if they pay through the nose in super high taxes. They may not have functional infrastructure, even if President Trump succeeds in building a yuge gilded wall on our southern border (and who knows where else). The social safety net -- Medicare, Medicaid, and state assistance of various sorts -- could be long gone and the sorts of nonprofit groups that try to fill all breaches a thing of the past. If they lose their jobs or get sick or are injured, what in the world will they have to fall back on, or will they even have jobs to begin with?
The country -- if it even exists as the United States of America decades from now when they're adults -- will undoubtedly still be waging war across the planet. Our Connecticut town, on a peninsula between Long Island Sound and the Thames River, will be flooding more regularly as sea levels rise. And who knows if civil discourse or affordable colleges will still be part of American life?
What, I wonder all too often, will be left after Donald Trump's America (and the possible versions of it that might follow him)? Will there, by then, be an insurgent movement of some sort in this country? Could Indivisible go rogue (please)? Maybe they'd have a nonviolent political wing the way the Sandinistas did in Nicaragua in the 1980s? With the help of volunteers from all over the hemisphere, they eradicated illiteracy, brought in the coffee harvest, and vaccinated against diseases (while their armed wing fought against the U.S.-backed Contras). Maybe in our city, my grown-up kids can harvest potatoes -- no coffee grows here, not yet, anyway -- teach reading, and write revolutionary propaganda.
And when it comes to dystopian futures, I've got plenty more where that came from, all playing in a loop on the big screen in the multiplex of my mind as I try to imagine my kids as adults, parents, grandparents. Please tell me I'm not the only one in America right now plagued in this fashion. I'm not fixated on passing our modest family house down to my three kids or making sure that our ragtag "heirlooms" survive their childhood. What preoccupies me is the bleak, violent, unstable future I fear as their only inheritance.
It's enough to send me fumbling for a parental "take back" button that doesn't exist. I just don't know how to protect them from the future I regularly see in my private version of the movies. And honestly, short of becoming one of those paranoid, well-resourced doomsday preppers, I have no idea how to prepare them.
Recently, I had a chance to school them in the harshness of life and death -- and I choked. I just couldn't do it.
Death and Breakfast
"When will I die, mama?" Madeline asked at breakfast one day recently. She'll be four next month. Her tone is curious, as if she were asking when it will be Saturday or her birthday.
"Not for a long time, I hope," I responded, trying to stay calm. "I hope you'll die old and quiet like dear Uncle Dan."
"I want to die LOUD, mama!"
I'm not sure what she means, but already I don't like it.
"I want to die like a rock star!" her brother Seamus interjects. He is in kindergarten and thinks he's both wise and worldly.
Great, I think, just great. What does that mean? "Yes," I say, my voice -- I hope -- neutral, "rock stars do tend to die, buddy."
"Do kids die, mom?" he asks suddenly.
"Yes," I reply, "kids die sometimes."
My head, of course, is suddenly filled with images of dead kids, little Syrian bodies washing up on Turkish beaches, little Afghan bodies blown to bits, little Yemeni bodies brittle with starvation or cholera. There's no shortage of images of dead children in my head as I talk with a kind of painful calmness to my two small ones on a school-day morning in southeastern Connecticut.
"Do teenagers die?" Seamus asks. They love teenagers.
"Yes," I say, my voice heavy and sad by now, "teenagers die sometimes, too." New images swirl through my head of teenagers drunk, in cars, on drugs, in stages of undress, in mental anguish, dying because they don't believe they can. I keep all of this to myself.
"People die," I say, trying to regain control of the conversation. "We all die eventually. But you don't have to worry. You have a lot of people working hard to make sure you have what you need to live long, happy lives."
Long, Happy Lives and Other Lies
And that was the end of that. Their existential, morbid curiosity satisfied for the moment, they moved on to an argument about the fantasy character on the back of their cereal box.
I, on the other hand, haven't moved on. I'm still right there, sitting at that breakfast table discussing life and death -- the when, the where, and the grim how of it all -- with my three-year-old and five-year-old. And wondering if I've already failed them.
When I was a kid, my own parents, Phil Berrigan and Liz McAlister, Catholic peace activists who spent long stretches of time in jail as nuclear weapons disarmament activists, never missed a chance like this to knock some hard lessons about the power structure's monopoly on violence into my head. Innocent queries about life and death were regularly met with long discourses on nuclear weapons and how such Armageddon weaponry threatened to ultimately cheapen all life, including mine and those of my brother and sister.
To this day, I can still replay those homemade history lessons that regularly began with tales of rapacious white colonizers landing on these shores, wiping out Native Americans from sea to shining sea, and launching the succession of seizures, invasions, and wars that built the United States into an imperial power and guaranteed its future global dominance. (At a certain age, we could even follow along in our own copies of A People's History of the United States by their friend Howard Zinn). Those lessons were an education in violence and its bloody, brutal efficacy, at least in the short term. They were also an introduction to its fundamental failures, to the way such violence, deeply embedded in a society, requires an accompanying culture of pathological distraction, fearfulness, and deep insecurity.
That was my childhood. Some version of that once-upon-a-time-in-America, no-sleep-for-you nuclear nightmare of a bedtime story was always playing in my house. And thanks to their clear-eyed, full-disclosure approach to parenting, I grew up feeling prepared for a brutal, unequal, unfair world, but in no way protected from it. At least as I now remember it, I felt exposed, terrified, and heart-broken too much of the time.
If Madeline and Seamus were 10 years older and asking such questions, what would I have told them? If their big sister and my step-daughter Rosena (who lives with us half the time) were there, would I have been less circumspect? Could I have shared my fears of the future and the myriad ways I dread the passing of each year? Like my parents, would I have held forth on the long-term consequences of our settler-colonial origins, the ways the use of force and violence at the highest levels have come to permeate society, corroding every interaction and threatening us all? Could I have lectured them on guns, drugs, and sex -- on the cheapening of life in the era of the decline of this country's global version of a Pax Americana? Would I have pulled back the curtain to show them that everyone is not working hard to make sure that they -- or any other kids -- have what they need to lead long, happy lives? I don't think so.
All these years later, I'm not convinced of what such rants -- however well reasoned and well footnoted -- truly accomplish. I'm not convinced of what such demoralizing verbal versions of a Facebook scroll of bad news and hypocrisy do for any of us, which is, of course, why I'm sparing my kids, but dumping all my fears on you.
A World on Fire and on the Move
As for my kids, I tried my best to keep that breakfast of ours in the upbeat realm of death-is-part-of-life. That's where I want to live with them. That's how my father died -- as he lived, surrounded by the people who loved him. His two closest brothers died that way, too. When I imagine the deaths of those I love, I hear a last gasp of breath, feel a last grip of fingers, witness a peaceful slumber that doesn't end.
But the peace that I treasured in my father's death, the joyful stability I want for my children, these things that I can tell myself are the bedrock of a meaningful life, are already denied to so many people on this planet. In fact, in a world engulfed in flames (both the literal and figurative fires of war), increasing numbers of them are running as fast as they can in hopes of somehow getting away.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, for instance, 1.7 million people are reportedly displaced, mostly fleeing from one part of that vast African nation to other regions to escape spreading violence. In total, four million people are displaced within that fractured land alone. Similarly, in Myanmar, the Rohingya, a Muslim minority group subjected to terrible violence, have been on the move in staggering numbers. In the wake of a deadly crackdown by that country's security forces, 647,000 Rohingya fled into neighboring Bangladesh where many are now living in fetid, desperately overcrowded refugee camps. And that's just to mention two countries on an increasingly desperate planet.
Last year, an estimated 65.6 million people were displaced, a record for the post-World War II period, and tens of millions of them crossed a border, becoming refugees as they fled war, poverty, persecution, and the destructionof urban areas (from major cities to small towns). They regularly left their homes with what they could carry, kids on their hips, in search of imagined safety somewhere over the horizon, just as people have done for millennia, but increasingly -- with a twenty-first-century twist -- consulting Google maps and WhatsApp, while constantly sharing intel on social media.
And scientists are predicting that this world in motion, this world already aflame, is just the prologue. As the effects of global climate change become more pronounced, the number of displaced people will double, then triple, and possibly only continue to grow.
Charles Geisler, an emeritus development sociologist at Cornell University, predicts that two billion people may be displaced by rising sea levels by the turn of the next century. Coastal peoples will press inland, while farmland off the coasts is likely to be increasingly compromised by drought and desertification. He concludes: "Bottom line: Far more people are going to be living on far less land, and land that is not as fertile and habitable and sustainable as the low-elevation coastal zone... And it's coming at us faster than we thought."
Madeline and Seamus will be in their eighties (god willing) when Geisler's predictions come to pass. They can't, of course, know about any of these possible catastrophes, but I already sense that they're picking up on something subtly fragile and vulnerable about our relatively settled lives together. How do I respond to them? What do I as a parent do in the face of such a potentially bleak future? How and when do I break news like that? Am I supposed to help my children cultivate a taste for crickets instead of hamburger or start building a solar powered hydroponic farm in our basement? Worse yet, whatever I could imagine suggesting wouldn't be enough. It wouldn't protect them. It wouldn't even prepare them for such a future.
I'm No Fireman
In 1968, my uncle, Dan Berrigan, called Vietnam the "land of burning children" in a beautiful polemic he wrote to accompany a protest by a group that came to be known as the Catonsville Nine. He and eight other Catholics -- including my father (long before he was a parent) -- publicly burned hundreds of draft files at a selective service office in Catonsville, Maryland, a symbolic attempt to obstruct the sending of yet more young men to the killing fields of Vietnam. My father served years in prison due to actions like that one. Throughout my life, my family drew hope from such creative acts of resistance, elaborate and effective performances of street theater that extended right into the courtroom and sometimes the jailhouse. My uncle, a poet and Jesuit priest, turned that Catonsville trial into an award-winning play that's still performed.
And yet, despite their sacrifices, almost half a century later, children are still on fire and I'm no fireman. I'm not breaking into whatever the equivalent of draft boards might be in the era of the all-volunteer/all-drone military. I'm not sitting in at my congressman's office either. I'm nowhere near a "movement heavy" (a Sixties-era term I often heard applied to my dad). I'm just a gardener who tries to be a good neighbor, a mother who tries to look after a whole community of kids. I'm just one more set of hands. And even though these hands of mine are working hard, my efforts feel ever more paltry, inadequate, token.
Still, I'll get up tomorrow morning and do it again, because if my efforts don't matter, what does? I'll hug my kids tight, answer their endless questions, and try to equip them for a future that scares the hell out of me. Even if I can't see that future clearly, I do know one thing: it will be desperate for love, humor, some kind of balance, and the constant if distracted probing of inquisitive children.
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Loving America and Resisting Trump: The New Patriotism
So reality has inexorably, inescapably penetrated my life. It didn't take long. Yes, Donald Trump is actually the president of the United States. In that guise, in just his first weeks in office, he's already declared war on language, on loving, on people who are different from him -- on the kind of world, in short, that I want to live in. He's promised to erect high walls, keep some people in and others out and lock up those he despises, while threatening to torture and abuse with impunity.
Feb 16, 2017
So reality has inexorably, inescapably penetrated my life. It didn't take long. Yes, Donald Trump is actually the president of the United States. In that guise, in just his first weeks in office, he's already declared war on language, on loving, on people who are different from him -- on the kind of world, in short, that I want to live in. He's promised to erect high walls, keep some people in and others out and lock up those he despises, while threatening to torture and abuse with impunity.
Still, a small personal miracle emerges from this nightmare. It turns out that, despite growing up an anarchist protest kid who automatically read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States alongside the official textbooks, I love this country more each day. So I find myself eternally upset about our new political reality-show, about a man so thin-skinned he lashes out at everything and so insulated in his own alt-reality that no response to him seems to matter.
"I've been thinking about September 2001 again because, only weeks into his presidency, Donald Trump already seems like a one-man 9/11."
Above all, I am so mad. Yeah, I'm mad at all those people who voted for Trump and even madder at the ones who didn't vote at all. I'm mad at everyone who thinks the sum total of their contribution to the political well-being of this country is voting every two or four years. I'm mad at our corporate-political system and how easily distracted people are. I'm steaming mad, but mostly at myself.
Yep, I'm mad at myself and at the Obamas. They made empire look so good! Their grace and intelligence, their obvious love for one another and the way they telegraphed a certain approachability and reasonableness. So attractive! They were fun -- or at least they looked like that on social media. Michelle in the karaoke car with Missy Elliot singing Beyonce and talking about global girls' education! Barack and a tiny Superman at a White House Halloween party. Michelle, unapologetically fierce after Trump's demeaning Access Hollywood comments came to light. I loved those Obamas, despite my politics and my analysis. I was supposed to resist all his efforts at world domination through drones and sweeping trade deals and instead I fell a little bit in love, even as I marched and fasted and tried to resist.
Falling in Love With My Country
Now, we have a new president. And my love is gone, along with my admiration, my pride, and my secret wish to attend a state dinner and chat with the Obamas over local wine and grass-fed beef sliders.
What's not gone, though, what's strangely stronger than ever, is my love for this country.
I didn't love the United States under Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan or Bush the First. I was a kid and they were names on protest banners and headlines in the news. My parents were the Catholic peace activists Liz McAlister and Phil Berrigan, and I grew up in an anarchist collective of Christian resisters. My parents and their friends went to jail repeatedly and resolutely. We demonstrated, rallied, and railed at every institution of power in Washington. Those presidents made the adults around me angry and agitated, so they scared me.
I didn't love the United States under Bill Clinton either -- I was young and in college and opposed to everything -- nor under George W. Bush. I was young and in New York City and still opposed to almost everything.
I started calling myself a "New Yorker" three years after moving there when, on a sunny Tuesday morning, airplanes became weapons, tall towers fell, and 3,000 people died. I emerged from my routine subway ride at 14th Street, unaware and unscathed, to stand still with the rest of the city and watch the sky turn black. I spent the rest of that day in Manhattan with friends trying to reach my parents and following the news, as we all tried (and failed) to come to grips with the new reality. Once the bridges reopened, we walked home to Brooklyn that evening, terrified and shell-shocked.
9/11 provided the rationale for sweeping changes in Washington. War by fiat, paid for in emergency supplementals that circumvented Congressional processes; a new Department of Homeland Security (where did that word "homeland" even come from?); a proliferation of increasingly muscular intelligence agencies; and a new brand of "legal" scholarship that justified both torture and indefinite detention, while tucking secret black sites away in foreign countries. All this as the United States went to war against "terrorism" -- against, that is, an idea, a fringe sentiment that, no matter how heavily weaponized, had been marginalized until the United States put it on the map by declaring "war" on it.
The U.S. then invaded and occupied big time, including a country that had nothing to do with the terrorists who had attacked us, and we've been at war ever since at a heavy cost -- now inching toward $5 trillion. Conservative estimates of how many people have been killed in the many war zones of what used to be called the Global War on Terror is 1.3 to 2 million. The number of U.S. military personnel who have lost their lives is easier to put a number to: more than 7,000, but that doesn't count private contractors (aka mercenaries), or those (far more difficult to quantify) who later committed suicide. Now, President Trump has begun adding to this bloody death toll, having ordered his first (disastrous) strike, a Special Operations raid on Yemen, which killed as many as 30 civilians, including children, and resulted in the death of an American Navy SEAL as well.
September 11th was a long time ago. But I finally fell in love with my country in the days following that awful attack. I saw for the first time a certain strain of patriotism that swept me away, a strain that says we are stronger together than alone, stronger than any blow that strikes us, stronger in our differences, stronger in our unities. I'm talking about the kind of patriotism that said: don't you dare tell us to go to Disney World, Mr. President! (That was, of course, after George W. Bush had assured us that, while he made war, our response as citizens to 9/11 should be to "get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.")
Instead of heeding that lame advice, some of us went out and began to try to solve problems and build community. I had read about it in books -- the labor movement of the 1920s and 1930s and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s -- but I hadn't seen it myself, hadn't been a part of it before, and I fell in love.
Of course, the drumbeat for war started instantly in Washington and was echoed throughout the nation, but many of us -- the intended victims of that attack -- said "our grief is not a cry for war." We circled around the victims' families; we reminded America that it wasn't only lawyers and hedge-fund managers who died that day, but cooks and couriers and homeless people and undocumented immigrants, too.
We pulled people from the rubble. We made the "pile" a place of sacred memory long before a huge monument and gift shop were erected there. We honored the first responders who died, we stood up for Muslims and Arabs and all those whom ignorance scapegoated. We marched against war in Afghanistan and then in far vaster numbers against war in Iraq. We called for an international police response to those acts of terrorism -- that weapon of the weak, not the powerful -- instead of the unilateral, militarized approach adopted by the Bush administration. We celebrated, and saw as a strength, New York's incredible diversity. We made art and music and poetry. We prayed in all languages to all the names of God.
The Donald, a One-Man 9/11
I guess I've been thinking about September 2001 again because, only weeks into his presidency, Donald Trump already seems like a one-man 9/11. He's ridden roughshod over business as usual without even a geopolitical crisis or calamity as an excuse -- and that's not so surprising since Trump himself is that calamity.
With a razor-thin mandate, considerable bluster, and a voracious appetite for alt-facts (lies), he's not so much tipping over the apple cart as declaring war on apples, carts, and anything else beginning with the letter A or C.
It seems almost that random and chaotic. In these weeks, he's shown a particular appetite for upending convention, saying screw you to just about everyone and everything, while scrapping the rules of decorum and diplomacy. With a sweep of his pen and a toss of his hair, he takes away visas, nullifies months of work by advocates for refugees, and sends U.S. Special Forces off to kill and be killed. With a few twitches of his thumbs he baits Mexico, disses China, and throws shade at federal judges. With a few ill-chosen words about Black History month (comments that would have been better written by my 10 year old), he resurrects Frederick Douglass, disparages inner cities, and slams the "dishonest" media again (and again and again). His almost-month as president can be described as busy and brash, but it barely hides the banality of greed.
Flying Our Flag
Sure, Donald Trump's a new breed, but perhaps in the end our resistance will make him the aberration he should be, rather than the new normal. So many of his acts are aimed at demeaning, degrading, demonizing, and denigrating, but he's already failing -- by driving so many of us to a new radical patriotism. I'm not the only one falling in love with this country again and this love looks like resistance -- a resistance that, from the first moments of the Trump era, has seemed to be almost everywhere you looked.
"Sure, Donald Trump's a new breed, but perhaps in the end our resistance will make him the aberration he should be, rather than the new normal."
Even at his inauguration, a group of young people stood on chairs wearing matching sweatshirts spelling out R-E-S-I-S-T in big letters. They had positioned themselves in the inner ring of the Capitol and were loud and visible as Chief Justice John Roberts swore the new president into office. The environmental group Greenpeace greeted Trump's White House with a daring banner drop from a crane across the street -- a huge, bright banner also emblazoned with RESIST. Pink woolen "pussy hats" were popularized by the Women's March, a global event and possibly the largest demonstration in American history,one that rekindled our hope and strengthened our resolve on inauguration weekend. Now, those hats help us recognize and salute one another.
We're working hard. We're tying up the phone lines all over Capitol Hill, turning town halls into rowdy rallies for health care and human rights, shelling out money to support Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, the immigration lawyers fighting for people barred from the U.S. and the closest Black Lives Matter chapter. We're getting organized, getting trained, getting prepared, and getting connected. And we're doing it all with a sense of humor: the Bowling Green Massacre Victims Fund? Priceless!
We are, in short, resisting in old ways and new.
Given my background, it's no surprise that I'm not a flag waver. While growing up, I learned a lot more about what was wrong with my country than about what was right with it. But I'm seeing so much that's right about it in this new Trump era of engagement or, if you prefer, call it radical patriotism. I'm mad... I'm scared... I'm hopeful... I'm still in love -- more so than ever -- with this country Trump is trying to hijack.
I don't live in a big city any more. I'm not a scrappy kid in my early thirties either. I'm a mother of three kids and a homeowner. I've sunk my roots in a small, struggling, stalwart community along Connecticut's eastern shoreline and I'm planning to live here for the rest of my life.
New London is a community of 27,000 or so, poor and diverse. It's almost a majority-minority community, in fact. We're home to three refugee families settled from Syria and Sudan. We have a good school system, getting better all the time. Every Wednesday, the chefs at the middle school up the street from my house cook a meal, open the cafeteria, and invite the whole community to eat dinner for five dollars per person. I went with my girls a couple of weeks ago for Cajun shrimp stew and white rice. The room was full and the mood was high. Young professionals and hipsters with kids ate alongside folks who had just stood in line for an hour and a half for a free box of food from the United Way across the street and gotten a free meal coupon as well for their troubles.
New London's mayor held a press conference soon after in the lobby of City Hall where the heads of all the city departments asserted their support for immigrants and refugees in our community. The last city council meeting was standing room only as people pushed an ordinance to keep fracking waste out of our area.
The weekend after the inauguration, my husband and I raised a flagpole on the second story porch of our house and hung a rainbow peace flag from it. I look up at it every morning waving in the breeze and I'm glad I live here, in this country, in this moment of radical upsurge and a new spirit of patriotism.
I'm talking to my neighbors. I'm going to city council meetings. I'm writing letters to the editor of our local paper. I'm taking my Sudanese neighbors grocery shopping and to the post office. I'm loaded for bear (nonviolently, of course) if anyone tries to mess with them.
My kids are the anti-Trumps. "We went to the women's march in Hartford, Mommy," two-year-old Madeline shouts every time she hears the word woman. She knows enough to be proud of that. "Look, Mommy! They have a flag like ours!" says four-year-old Seamus with delight whenever he sees another rainbow, even if it's just a sticker. He's learning to recognize our tribe of patriots.
We're engaged, we're awake, we're in love, and no one is taking our country from us.
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What the Obituaries Missed About My Uncle, Dan Berrigan
Father Dan Berrigan's life, legacy and gifts were celebrated at Saint Francis Xavier Church in New York City on Friday, May 6. The church is supposed to fit only 700 people, but more than a thousand crammed in, packing the aisles and sides, sitting and standing through the more-than-two-hour-long service.
May 13, 2016
Father Dan Berrigan's life, legacy and gifts were celebrated at Saint Francis Xavier Church in New York City on Friday, May 6. The church is supposed to fit only 700 people, but more than a thousand crammed in, packing the aisles and sides, sitting and standing through the more-than-two-hour-long service.
Communion took half an hour, and they ran out of wine about two-thirds of the way through. Liz McAlister, my mother and Dan's sister-in-law, offered a powerful eulogy, bringing his familiar words from Catonsville ("Our apologies good friends, for the fracture of good order") into the sanctuary, as well as the assembled to their feet for an extended ovation. My siblings, Kate and Jerry Berrigan, and our cousin Carla Berrigan Pittarelli, joked that this is what Dan must have felt like all these years preaching and teaching. Standing ovations for days!
The four of us "young" Berrigans (in our 30s, 40s and 50s) conspired on a single eulogy to share different facets of our "Unka" that didn't make it into the obituaries in the New York Times, Washington Post and other media outlets. Now that the planning, organizing and interacting with so many people is over, I offer you my portion of that eulogy. At the same time -- as I sift through precious memories, a lot of great lessons, sadness and longing -- I try to remind myself of my own wisdom: It is enough.
--
I moved to New York City in 1998, with an internship, a notion of being a writer, and a way station of sanity and welcome at 98th Street (where Dan and a dozen other Jesuit priests lived). I didn't need a New York City dream -- I had Uncle Dan.
For more than 10 years, we had such great times -- long lunches, long leisurely walks through Riverside Park and long prayer walks across 42nd street for Pax Christi's Stations of the Cross on Good Friday. Actions, Bible studies, dinners at 98th street, road trips to Syracuse or Kirkridge [a retreat center in Pennsylvania]. I was always welcome. He always had time. He answered my phone calls at odd hours, asked me questions and listened for the real answers. He loved cappuccinos, cold white wine in the afternoon, and for the toll operators on the George Washington Bridge to be really energetic and colorful. He hated the radio, but always had music running through his head. He loved to share his food and would always offer me half of whatever he had, not eating until I ate. My Uncle Dan -- Unka -- told me my history. He shared his favorite books. He lifted his eyebrows in a particular way when he was ready to be rescued from a conversation.
And then -- all of sudden -- this spry and stalwart man, this slight man of swagger and soul and scripture (alliteration is my only poetry) beings to falter, grow slow, grow quiet. And now, the one I leaned on for advice, clung to for courage and counted on for the word that made it all make sense -- now, he needs. Not much, not all the time, but more and more. And what does he need? An arm, a hand, easy company, love without condition. He needs me. Imagine... Me. And I find -- improbably and providentially -- that I have something and someone to offer. Myself, but more, a love that changes with time and a son -- Seamus Philip -- who is (or was, he is four now) pure love.
And so my wordless son and my quiet uncle find one another, and they congregate on a new plane and conspire in a new language at once so simple and infinitely more complicated than what is available to me -- to us. Eyes lock, hearts lift and souls connect. And what do I do? Be present, mark it down, appreciate it.
My Madeline Vida comes later and understands the heart of the matter. When words emerge for her, "Uncle Dan" becomes a declaration, an assertion, a key to open up reality. "Uncle Dan!" she announces at the threshold of a new place. The words and the person connected to them are -- for a time -- a kind of talisman for her. We go to the White House for a demonstration in January and she chants "Uncle Dan, Uncle Dan, Uncle Dan" sometimes under her breath, sometimes loud and clear. My dear uncle, her magic spell. I don't understand it, but I like it.
The children -- Seamus, Madeline and their big sister Rosena -- love him, and we -- Patrick and I, and all of us up here -- love him. And it is enough. It is all. No more words. Just being together.
And then that too is gone. He has left us. Of course, we believe Dan is in heaven, cheering us on and loving us deeply. But he is gone.
We have one another. It is enough. It has to be.
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Price for Witnessing Against War
The funeral for anti-war priest Daniel Berrigan was a reminder of humanity’s need to challenge immoral government actions and the price that one pays for doing so
May 08, 2016
Fr. Daniel Berrigan's funeral was being live-streamed Friday, as I started to write this, which seems only fitting. Dan's witness and writing have been a constantly re-chargeable battery for my moral compass.
Live-streaming (arranged by America magazine) was the next-best thing to being at the funeral in person. And it brought back memories of getting shoe-horned into West Baltimore's St. Peter Claver church in early December 2002 for an equally moving celebration of the life of Dan's younger brother, Fr. Phil Berrigan.
Homilist Fr. Steve Kelly, S.J., who has spent more than a decade in this or that prison for non-violent resistance to war began with some Berrigan-style Irish humor: "Let members of the FBI assigned here today validate that it is Daniel Berrigan's funeral Mass of the Resurrection, so they can complete and perhaps close their files. 'Death has no dominion!' to quote Daniel's friend William Stringfellow."
Kelly then minced no words in calling out "appointed pastors who collude with structures of domination, blessing the bombs."
Tears welled as I watched Catholic Worker friends drop a large banner with the words from Isaiah, "They shall beat their swords into plowshares. Nations shall make war no more," a charge lived into by all three brothers Berrigan - Jerry, Dan, and Phil.
And I thought back on what I learned decades ago at retreats led by Dan on the prophets Isaiah and Amos.
During the eulogy, Liz McAlister, Phil's widow, quoted from the "apology" Dan wrote for burning draft cards with home-made napalm in Catonsville, Maryland, in May 1968 at the height of the Vietnam War:
"Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house."
Liz continued to read from the Statement of the Catonsville 9: "The suppression of truth stops here; this war stops here!" (emphasis added by Liz's own prophetic voice.) Not stopping was the loud, un-church-like cheering that rattled the rafters.
So Liz added a vintage Berrigan admonition for those who "seek ways to exempt themselves from responsibility." I had the feeling that the affirming crowd would still be making a din, had not Phil's daughter Frida gently gestured: Please, let my mom finish.
Thanks to the live-streaming, I could discern many of my friends at the still functioning Dorothy Day Catholic Worker houses for men and women in the Bowery. The only folks missing were those doing the daily Martha-work of preparing food for the lunch line. Ringing in my ears was another charge, heard hundreds of times from my Irish grandmother: "Show me your company, and I'll tell you who you are!"
As the daughter of the late Jerry Berrigan, eldest of the three brothers, added her words to the eulogy, I felt proud to be out on bail, awaiting trial with 11 others of the "Jerry Berrigan Memorial Anti-Drone Brigade" for shutting down the main entrance and exit to Hancock Air Force Base Brigade near Syracuse, New York, on the morning of Jan. 28, 2016. Jerry, who lived in Syracuse, was frequently arrested there for similar protests against drone killings.
'Whatever His Views, He's Harmless'
Following people like Dan, Phil, and Jerry can get you beaten up and thrown in jail, but the benefits are out of this world, so to speak. Watching Dan's funeral, I found myself musing over the words chosen by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's confidant Sidney Blumenthal, reassuring Clinton that she had nothing to fear from the likes of me.
On Feb. 15, 2011, at George Washington University, Clinton had, with callous aplomb, completely ignored my getting assaulted by two security personnel as I silently stood directly in front of her with my back turned.
In a Feb. 18, 2011 email, Blumenthal explained: "Ray McGovern, a former CIA officer who gave the daily brief for President George H.W. Bush, is pretty well known in the intelligence community. He's become a Christian antiwar leftist who goes around bearing witness. Whatever his views, he's harmless."
Harmless or not, I can see my grandmother smiling down at the company I now keep, and whispering in her thick Irish brogue, "If you were really harmless, Raymond, they would not be writing them email things about you."
It was not so long ago that I moved in circles where the label "activist" was dismissed as misguided but, well, harmless. How fortunate, then, to learn of the definition given to activism by my co-passenger on the U.S. Boat to Gaza, poet Alice Walker: "Activism is the rent I pay for living on this planet."
I could not be more grateful at having fallen in, better late than never, with such companions. Dan's funeral served as a reminder of how much my journey has changed - having witnessed power from the inside, and the consequences of challenging it from the outside.
On the Inside
During the first Ronald Reagan administration, it was my job to conduct early morning one-on-one briefings of the Secretary of Defense (Caspar Weinberger), Secretary of State (George Shultz), and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (Gen. Jack Vessey) and also, depending on their schedules, Vice President George H. W. Bush, as well as a movable feast of Assistants to the President for National Security Affairs.
Another senior CIA officer and I took turns, each of us briefing every other day six days a week. As professional intelligence analysts, we conducted ourselves in a completely non-partisan way, and our services were appreciated. We relied largely on The President's Daily Brief that we had helped prepare the day before, and we updated and supplemented the material in it, as needed.
Ronald Reagan was given these one-on-one briefings as soon as he became president-elect and put considerable value on them. Once in the White House, however, he ordered that, as a general rule, the early morning briefings be given to his most senior national security advisers whom he would normally ask to brief him directly several hours later.
When I took early retirement at age 50, I was fully aware that few others on "the outside" had the privilege of acquiring a first-hand feel for how intelligence could be used, and power abused.
At the time, however, I had no inkling that the creeping politicization and careerism fostered by senior CIA official Robert Gates on behalf of Reagan's CIA Director William Casey would corrupt managers and analysts alike to the point they would let themselves be suborned into conjuring up the kind of faux intelligence that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney ordered up to "justify" war on Iraq.
'Quid Est Veritas?'
What brought this to mind earlier this week was the tenth anniversary of an impromptu, four-minute debate that I had with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in Atlanta on May 4, 2006.
It was not hard to prove him an inveterate liar about important matters like the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) he said were in Iraq - but weren't; and the ties that existed between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein - but didn't. But my Rumsfeld anniversary brought a painful reminder that things have hardly improved - and that no one has challenged former Secretary Clinton openly about her lies - about Syria and Libya, for example. [See Consortiumnews.com's "A Need to Clear Up Clinton Questions."]
The opportunities for such challenge have become fewer; the penalties harsher; the Fawning Corporate Media dumber and dumber.
The mini-debate with Rumsfeld in Atlanta depended largely on luck. Not only had I truth as my breastplate, so to speak, but the stars were nicely aligned. People like Rumsfeld, an accomplished Princeton debater (and, for that matter, Wellesley valedictorian Hillary Clinton), are required to keep careful track of their lies. Those not normally burdened with that extra chore - professional intelligence analysts, for example - enjoy a distinct advantage, even in times like these, when all too many Caesars keep asking "Quid est Veritas?" - "what is truth?" - a phrase attributed to Pontius Pilate during the trial of Jesus.
As it turned out, I had some success - momentarily, at least - exposing Rumsfeld, who had played fast and loose with the truth, while enjoying the "matinee-idol" label pinned on him by President George W. Bush during the initial weeks of "shock and awe."
The abundance of evidence notwithstanding, my attempts to expose the lies of Hillary Clinton proved much more difficult (as I was wrestled away by security guards for turning my back on the Secretary of State), and I had zero success exposing Teflon-coated General (and former CIA Director) David Petraeus for the fraud he is (as I was arrested by New York City police at the entrance of a Petraeus speech). Worse still, the violence I encountered escalated with each nonviolent attempt.
With Rumsfeld, none of the media stenographers at Pentagon briefings ever looked up from their pads long enough to ask the Defense Secretary a direct question about his prevarications, so the Pentagon prima donna seemed a bit shocked by a factual question he could not spin.
So, Rumsfeld was not used to fielding "impertinent," un-self-censored questions. Indeed, it may have seemed to some as though I were unfairly blindsiding the poor Secretary of Defense.
An Exchange with Power
The setting for Rumsfeld's talk was a little-known, defense-secretary-friendly-Southern-white-male-upper-crust "think tank." There was no advance notice of Rumsfeld's talk on its website, but some women friends from the World Can't Wait figured out a way to get me a ticket (for $70!).
The impromptu debate went as follows:
RAY McGOVERN: And so, I would like to ask you to be up front with the American people. Why did you lie to get us into a war that was not necessary and that has caused these kinds of casualties? Why?
DONALD RUMSFELD: Well, first of all, I haven't lied. I did not lie then. Colin Powell didn't lie. He spent weeks and weeks with the Central Intelligence Agency people and prepared a presentation that I know he believed was accurate, and he presented that to the United Nations. The President spent weeks and weeks with the Central Intelligence people, and he went to the American people and made a presentation. I'm not in the intelligence business. They gave the world their honest opinion. It appears that there were not weapons of mass destruction there.
RAY McGOVERN: You said you knew where they were?
DONALD RUMSFELD: I did not. I said I knew where suspect sites were, and we were --
RAY McGOVERN: You said you knew where they were, "near Tikrit, near Baghdad, and northeast, south and west of there." Those were your words.
DONALD RUMSFELD: My words -- my words were -- no, no, no, wait a minute! Let him stay one second. Just a second.
RAY McGOVERN: This is America, huh? Go ahead.
DONALD RUMSFELD: You're getting plenty of play, sir.
RAY McGOVERN: I'd just like an honest answer.
DONALD RUMSFELD: I'm giving it to you.
RAY McGOVERN: We're talking about lies and your allegation that there was bulletproof evidence of ties between al-Qaeda and Iraq. Was that a lie or were you misled?
DONALD RUMSFELD: Zarqawi was in Baghdad during the prewar period. That is a fact.
RAY McGOVERN: Zarqawi, he was in the north of Iraq, in a place where Saddam Hussein had no rule. That's where he was.
DONALD RUMSFELD: He was also in Baghdad.
RAY McGOVERN: Yeah, when he needed to go to the hospital. Come on, these people aren't idiots. They know the story.
DONALD RUMSFELD: You are -- let me give you an example. It's easy for you to make a charge, but why do you think that the men and women in uniform every day, when they came out of Kuwait and went into Iraq, put on chemical weapon protective suits? Because they liked the style? They honestly believed that there were chemical weapons. Saddam Hussein had used chemical weapons on his own people previously. He had used them on his neighbor, the Iranians. And they believed he had those weapons. We believed he had those weapons.
RAY McGOVERN: That's what we call a non-sequitur. It doesn't matter what the troops believe. It matters what you believe.
MODERATOR: I think, Mr. Secretary, the debate is over. We have other questions, courtesy to the audience.
'Let Him Stay'
Early in the exchange, the black-hatted point man from Rumsfeld's SWAT Team (clearly seen in the video) put his elbow in my solar plexus as I was speaking and started to pry me from the microphone to which I was adhering like permanent glue.
However, after a glance in the direction of the TV cameras, Rumsfeld waved him off, with a "no, no, no, wait a minute! Let him stay one second. Just a second." It was a snap decision to continue the debate, with Rumsfeld convinced he could put me in my place. After all, I had identified myself as a former CIA analyst, and Rumsfeld had had an easy time intimidating CIA directors George Tenet and Porter Goss, as well as those of my former colleagues badgered into dancing the Cheney/Rumsfeld fraudulent tango on Iraq.
The event also took place early enough that afternoon to make the evening news. Better still, the event was aired live on C-Span and CNN. All this together made it very difficult for TV producers, anchors and pundits to brush off my challenges to Rumsfeld as inconsequential. Besides, there was very little happening that was newsworthy on May 4, 2006, which put icing on the cake.
In any case, the tense scene of a citizen challenging the great and powerful Rumsfeld with real questions was so unusual that even the corporate media recognized it as "news" and gave it at least fleeting attention on the evening news shows.
But my unmasking of Rumsfeld's Iraq War lies also created a highly unwelcome precedent that I would be made to pay for by soon being pigeonholed as a disgruntled stalker.
CNN anchor Paula Zahn's first questions that evening were (1) "How long have you harbored this animus against Donald Rumsfeld?" and (2) why was I "following the Secretary of Defense all the way down to Atlanta?"
I explained that, in fact, I had gotten to Atlanta first - to receive, that same evening, the ACLU's National Civil Liberties Award (won the previous year by Coretta Scott King).
I could not remember how long I had had "this animus" toward Rumsfeld. Were I quicker on my feet, I would have said something like -- since his lies got thousands of human beings killed in an unnecessary war. But you don't get a do-over.
After the Zahn interview, CNN's Anderson Cooper's first question, asked of me haltingly as I was exiting the auditorium, was much less hostile but, in its own way, far more revealing: "Weren't you afraid?" he asked. Think about that for a while.
No Such Luck With Hillary
Five years later, with some slight hope for an encore during a possible Q & A - this time with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton - I wangled a ticket to hear her speak at George Washington University on Feb. 15, 2011. After several minutes of fulsome praise from the university president and prolonged, standing, adulatory applause from the carefully chosen audience, before Clinton even uttered a word, I decided to remain standing in silence with my back to her.
Unlike Rumsfeld in 2006, Secretary of State Clinton was taking no chances. True, her speech focused on the need to respect dissent, but she was talking about the authorities in Iran, not in Washington. She missed not a syllable as she watched me brutalized directly in front of her and then dragged down the main aisle (with Clinton seeing-no-evil and nary a peep from the Hillary-friendly audience of by-standers/by-sitters).
Once outside the auditorium, a Clinton security-woman interrogated me at some length, after two sets of steel handcuffs were put on my wrists. I was then arrested and dumped into jail.
Perhaps Clinton thought her tacit condoning of this pre-emptive strike by her security folks would provide a useful deterrent to others who might choose nonviolent but highly visible ways to express dissent - or, God forbid, ask an impertinent question of the kind asked of Rumsfeld in Atlanta.
Unlike my encounter with Rumsfeld and even though multiple TV cameras caught the brutal way I was seized and thrown out directly in front of Hillary Clinton ("escorted out" is the gentle way Fox News put it), there was almost no further mention in mainstream media.
The Clinton incident happened at the same time of day as my mini-debate with Rumsfeld, so its absence from the evening news had nothing to do with the news cycle. Still, one would have thought the Kafkaesque nature of my brutalization at the very moment Clinton waxed eloquent about respecting dissent - in Iran - might have provided irresistible grist for a news story or commentary.
But in the five years that had passed since the Rumsfeld event in Atlanta, the media had grown five years-worth tamer. And, in contrast to Rumsfeld's quick calculation as he looked at the cameras in the back, Clinton apparently believed she could count on the TV outlets and pundits NOT to give much coverage to the assault. In any case, she calculated correctly.
A number of Washington media stenographers were there, of course, as well as the cameras, but the evening TV producers and anchors chose the safer path. After all, no "sensible" commentator or outlet will gratuitously put out of joint the nose of a probable heiress to the presidency.
Less Tolerance of Dissent
If my understandable chagrin at the way Hillary Clinton ignored the assault right in front of her leaves me open to charges of having an "animus" toward Hillary Clinton, so be it. That is very small potatoes in the grand scheme of things.
My "animus" was substantive - her share of responsibility for all manner of death and destruction because of her vote for the Iraq War and the benighted escalation/surge in Afghanistan, for example. It would be only another couple of months after her GWU speech before she helped create equal tragedies in Libya and Syria.
I suppose I should thank my blessings in having avoided the far more brutal, fatal treatment accorded Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.
Although I had a ticket to hear David Petraeus speak at the 92nd Y in New York City on Oct. 30, 2014, I was barred from even entering, roughly treated, whisked away by NYPD cops already on the scene and jailed overnight in the infamous "The Tombs" beneath the Criminal Court in lower Manhattan.
Although my arrest occurred in the so-called "media capital of the world," the incident was almost completely ignored at least in the mainstream media. [See Consortiumnnews.com's, "When Silencing Dissent Isn't News."]
The trend seems to be more violence from the "organs of state security," as they were known in Soviet parlance, and more silence in the mainstream media.
All the more need to follow the example of the Berrigans.
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Baltimore is Burning--Not Just in Flames, But With a Righteous Anger
Baltimore is my home town -- the birth place of Jonah House, a Christian nonviolent resistance community founded by my parents, Phil Berrigan and Elizabeth McAlister. Those places that the whole world is seeing "going crazy" on the news? They are my geography, my history, who I am. Baltimore is many things to many people and I feel like I am right there even though I am far away right now.
May 02, 2015
Baltimore is my home town -- the birth place of Jonah House, a Christian nonviolent resistance community founded by my parents, Phil Berrigan and Elizabeth McAlister. Those places that the whole world is seeing "going crazy" on the news? They are my geography, my history, who I am. Baltimore is many things to many people and I feel like I am right there even though I am far away right now.
North and Pennsylvania, where police cars burned, is the site of one of my many bike accidents. Going too fast on wet pavement, my bicycle skidded out from under me and I fell in front of a crowd of people waiting for the bus. Someone laughed dramatically; I waved, bowed and got back on my bike, skinned knees stinging.
The shopping center on McMechen Street -- where people broke windows and thieved as neighbors photographed license plates and called for peace -- was on my way home from school. My brother and I went there all the time to buy eggs and milk for our mom, or Pall Mall cigarette's for a neighbor. If we had money left over, we'd order wings at the fried chicken shop and the owner would throw in a fourth so that we could each have two for our one dollar.
Mondawmin Mall -- where police shot tear gas at kids to protect Target, Shoppers and Marshalls -- was part of my route home in high school. My friend Sonni and I would go into the mall, pool our coins for an order of Western Fries and wait for each other's buses.
New Shiloh Baptist Church -- where Freddie Gray was eulogized and mourned, where police violence and murder was condemned, and where justice was demanded in voices wracked with tears -- is just a few blocks from Saint Peter's Cemetery. This odd and beautiful expanse of green grass, white marble headstones and furrowed garden rows is where my mom and the Jonah House community call home. These are the streets my mom travels every day, often pushing her one-and-a-half-year-old friend Eli in a stroller, and saying "hello" to everyone she meets. She has never seen another white person walking in her community.
Baltimore is diverse, in all the meanings of that word -- enough to be home to film auteur John Waters and the late rap icon Tupac Shakur, prolific novelist Anne Tyler and jazz great Billie Holiday. All these different strands came together at the intersection of Monroe Street and North Avenue on Monday, when -- in the midst of tense standoffs between grieving community members and riot police armed to the teeth -- a shirtless black man in a studded leather jacket moonwalked in the middle of the street to Michael Jackson's "Beat It."
Baltimore is a funny place. They call it Charm City. They tried "The City That Reads," but it was at the height of our run as the city with the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the nation. So, people guerrilla-edited the signs to read "The City That Breeds," which promptly ended that rebranding campaign (while also highlighting our collective illiteracy because the signs all said "The City That Breads").
Baltimore is also the kind of place where an ex-nun can convince the local Catholic hierarchy to hand over an abandoned cemetery to a resistance community so they can raise guinea fowl and goats, while mentoring a new generation of nonviolent activists and developing deep and mutual relationships with a battered, impoverished neighborhood. It's a place where an educational program -- designed to help young black children learn math -- can become a radical institution of youth teaching youth and transforming their communities.
Of course, it saddens and grieves me to see my city burning and raging. But, what does it mean? It means there is power, energy. Where there is rage, there is hope. Where there is anger, there is the passion to make the future different, better, more equitable, more just. Where things have been torn down, they can be built up again.
The eyes of the world are on Baltimore. They are seeing cars on fire, kids throwing rocks, police behaving badly, and baseball being played to an empty stadium. But they are also seeing classical music concerts in the streets, football players joshing with kids, a thousand brooms and 10,000 good ideas for what needs to change to make Baltimore a livable city for its poorest and most marginalized members.
The question after the brutal death of Freddie Gray in police custody shouldn't be "Why are people rioting?" but rather, "Why doesn't this happen every single day? And why are we (white America) surprised, shocked, and tantalized, by what we see?"
An analysis of Gray's neighborhood by the Justice Policy Institute found that just over half the community is unemployed and just under half is chronically absent from school. A third of the houses are vacant. And Baltimore taxpayers spent nearly $17 million last year incarcerating 458 people from that community -- that is money that could be spent on jobs creation, shoring up failing schools and ensuring that residents live in safe homes.
Robert Wilson, a college student who went to high school in Baltimore told a New York Times reporter near the burned out CVS on North Avenue, that he had seen someone on television say, "This doesn't feel like America." In response to them, he said, "This is America ... They just don't want you to know!"
Baltimore is America -- gross disparity between black and white, rich and poor, ring suburb and inner city. It is filled with decades of economic policy and promises of growth based on playgrounds for the wealthy -- Camden Yards for the Orioles, M&T Bank Stadium for the Ravens, the Inner Harbor complex of upscale shops, restaurants, festivals for tall ships, the Baltimore Aquarium, and now horse racing and gaming. Besides all this entertainment-based economy, any other economic activity in Baltimore is now "Eds, Meds and Feds" -- meaning educational institutions like the University of Maryland, medical facilities like Johns Hopkins Hospital, and federal government outposts meant to extend the District of Columbia's reach deep into Maryland.
It was not always like this. When I was little, we would smell vanilla, cinnamon and black pepper wafting up from McCormick Spices' warehouses and processing facilities downtown. People worked there. Bethlehem Steel sat on the other side of the harbor, employed upwards of 15,000 people at its height. Beth Steel was the draw that brought many black families to Baltimore, where even the dirty, dangerous work was better than living under Jim Crow in the South. Stieff Silver perched above the Jones Falls Expressway and anchored the neighborhood that became Hampden.
Those industries are all gone. Baltimore is a third world city in a first world nation and the kids throwing rocks at police cocooned in riot gear know that intuitively, even if they aren't putting it into words. They see the glistening towers of Johns Hopkins Hospital looming above the moldering blocks of brick rowhouses; the boarded up vacant homes outnumbering those that are inhabited on block after block. They see workers bused in from the suburbs, protected by armed security guards. They see white sports fans getting rowdy and drunk before the big games downtown -- some of whom chanted "we don't care" at the protesters marching by the row of bars near the stadium last weekend.
These young people see their friends and family members getting murdered by police -- and not just Freddie Gray. In a survey of "justifiable homicides" by police, the FBI found that "Baltimore police officers killed 127 people over two decades ending in 2012. In other similar cities that reported to the survey each year, including Oklahoma City, Memphis and Seattle -- where the Justice Department found a "pattern and practice of excessive force" in 2011 -- none reported more than half the number of "justifiable homicides" as Baltimore.
I am heartbroken. It is all so wrong: that Freddie Gray is dead, that another family and community mourns, that angry kids are met by police hidden inside thousands of dollars of Kevlar and Plexiglas gear, and that destruction even seems like a viable form of resistance.
The mainstream media has decided to focus on the rioting, violence and wounding of police officers. This is the kind of spectacle that TV was invented to cover: the breathless brush with danger, the shaky zoom in on the fire down the street, the silent satellite images of people running through deserted streets. I watched all this in horror too, of course.
White America looked because of the violence, but now that Baltimore has our attention, we cannot look away. We must look through the flames, through the broken glass, to see a righteous anger that we have ignored for too long -- even though we have seen it all too often as of late in New York, Cleveland, Ferguson and so many communities.
What are we going to do? Build, rebuild and build again. Connect, reconnect, heal, and repair, and do it again.
Mahatma Gandhi's contribution to thought and action on nonviolence was resistance to empire, noncooperation with the occupying power and constructive programming to supplant and subvert what the imperial power requires the occupied, oppressed population to endure. Constructive programming -- that is the next step in Baltimore. And it is already well under way. There are a host of groups and organizations that have been doing that work for years. Groups like BUILD, which is assembling community power for broad-based social and political change and The No Boundaries Coalition which, among other efforts, is trying to broaden the definition of public safety and ensure that the community has a strong voice in policing. The aptly named Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, is a Baltimore-based people's think tank, writing on race, power and politics and putting forward concrete changes to Maryland law that will make policing more accountable.
The "riots" are not the last word on Baltimore. In fact, they are barely the first, thanks to these and other organizations that have been doing constructive programming for decades. There is so much to celebrate in the streets of Baltimore: the discipline and leadership coming from black churches and the Nation of Islam; the brave and creative people who turned the media spotlight from the outbreaks of violence to the true heart of Baltimore; the many community members who stood up to looters and opportunists. There's also the brave broom brigades who are helping to clean up in the aftermath of destruction, as well as all of the people who are building for a better tomorrow in Baltimore -- one where justice for police murder is swift and transparent, the benefits of economic development are manifest throughout the city, people take care of one another in their communities, and young people of all races can learn, play and thrive in a city that values and respects them.
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Uncle Pentagon: Growing Up in the Shadow of the American War State
Mar 10, 2015
The Pentagon loomed so large in my childhood that it could have been another member of my family. Maybe a menacing uncle who doled out put-downs and whacks to teach us lessons or a rich, dismissive great-aunt intent on propriety and good manners.
Whatever the case, our holidays were built around visits to the Pentagon's massive grounds. That's where we went for Easter, Christmas, even summer vacation (to commemorate the anniversaries of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki). When we were little, my brother and sister and I would cry with terror and dread as we first glimpsed the building from the bridge across the Potomac River. To us, it pulsated with malice as if it came with an ominous, beat-driven soundtrack out of Star Wars.
I grew up in Baltimore at Jonah House, a radical Christian community of people committed to nonviolent resistance to war and nuclear culture. It was founded by my parents, Phil Berrigan and Liz McAlister. They gained international renown as pacifist peace activists not afraid to damage property or face long prison terms. The Baltimore Four, the Catonsville Nine, the Plowshares Eight, the Griffiss Seven: these were anti-Vietnam War or antinuclear actions they helped plan, took part in, and often enough went to jail for. These were also creative conspiracies meant to raise large questions about our personal responsibility for, and the role of conscience in, our world. In addition, they were explorations of how to be effective and nonviolent in opposition to the war state. These actions drew plenty of media attention and crowds of supporters, but in between we always went back to the Pentagon.
As kids, horrific images of war were seared into our brains from old documentaries about Hiroshima and Nagasaki and newer dispatches from Vietnam, and later El Salvador and Guatemala. And all of them seemed traceable to that one place, that imposing five-sided building overlooking the Potomac and surrounded by parking lots and sylvan acres of lawns and paths.
Burning Hair and Baby Bottles Filled With Blood
In many ways, I grew up at the Pentagon. Our family never sat for a formal portrait. We didn't take snapshots at parties or picnics or on vacation. But what we do have is photo albums stuffed with pictures taken at the Pentagon as we protested there year after year after year.
In one of my favorite photos of myself as a toddler, I'm marching down the Pentagon parade ground, holding a bottle of milk in one hand and tightly grasping the hand of my favorite grown-up, Rosemary Maguire, with the other. The pillars of the River Entrance are behind me. Best guess: it's 1976. My brother Jerry relaxes in a stroller in the background. My mom and other friends are standing nearby. We could be anywhere, but of course we're not. We're at the Pentagon and our protest is either just over or about to begin.
When President Gerald Ford requested a post-Vietnam Pentagon budget of $105 billion for 1976, he was asking for an increase of 15% in military spending. American nuclear capabilities, already vast, were to be built up yet more, while conventional non-nuclear forces were to be expanded, too. After debate on the Hill, however, Congress cut his increase in half.
These were overwhelming sums to the adults protesting back then. And yet, even after adjusting for inflation, they seem almost modest today. Nearly 30 years later, President Barack Obama is requesting $534 billion for the Pentagon and another $50.9 billion for ongoing military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. And this doesn't even include the more than $12 billion for maintaining and bolstering U.S. nuclear forces, most of which is tucked away in the Energy Department's budget at a moment when Washington is committing itself to a trillion-dollar, multi-decade upgrade of those forces.
A snapshot eight or nine years later shows me crouched behind my little sister, then an irresistibly cute toddler of two or three. I'm helping her hand out leaflets to Pentagon employees as they come to work. A woman takes a flyer from her, while grown-up friends hold a banner that reads "Faithfulness to the Covenant Means Disarmament."
Our house was full of such banners, painted in block letters on sheets. The year might have been 1983 and the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists then stood at three minutes to nuclear midnight. Caspar Weinberger was Secretary of Defense; the Pentagon was, of course, his office; and he had already earned the moniker "Cap the Ladle" for his efforts to increase spending on nuclear weapons like the MX missile and President Ronald Reagan's futuristic "Star Wars" anti-missile-defense weapons fantasy.
In the picture, I'm in a jean jacket that I loved to rags and wore regardless of the weather, and a regrettable headband with a floppy bow. The Pentagon workers would undoubtedly have refused flyers from me, but they took them with a smile from my little sister. They probably didn't read them, but getting those tracts into their hands seemed like some measure of success.
When I was eight, 75 people from our community were arrested blockading the entrances to the Pentagon. Meanwhile, a few people towed a broken-down station wagon onto its parade ground, disabled it completely, and left it there with "LAST RESORT" spray-painted on its side in big block letters. "Auto workers are sleeping in their cars in Houston," John Shields, one of the protest leaders, told UPI, "We are making the connection between homelessness and the lack of jobs because of the mad buildup of the arms race."
In another photo, taken in April 1985, I walk down the River Entrance steps. I am 11 and soaking wet and grimacing. I still remember the moment. I'm hoarse from chanting "You can't wash the blood away!" as a maintenance crew works to scrub down one of the Pentagon's imposing pillars. They could and did wash the blood away. Their hoses are visible in the background and the pillars are clean. Drawn from the veins of my parents and their friends, the dark red liquid was a potent symbol meant to mark that building with the end result of war. My parents hoped that it would remind those entering of the reality of their work, of what lay behind or beyond the clean offices they labored in and the spiffy suits or uniforms they wore. At the time, the Pentagon was locked in a fierce fight with the CIA and the White House over the wisdom of trading weapons for hostages with Iran and giving the money to U.S.-backed mercenaries in Nicaragua who were fighting a bloody war against peasants, catechists, and communists who wanted land reform, education, and democracy.
Thrown from baby bottles, splattered high onto porous white marble, the blood was hard to wash off. The maintenance guys worked around us as much as possible. They tried not to get us wet. Occasionally, the police would move us out of the way, only to watch us scamper back through the suds and pools of pinkish water.
Sandblasting, power-washing, scraping: it was all tried to get those stains out. Over the years, the columns wore away perceptibly and by that modest measure we marked our success. We were changing the Pentagon, molecule by molecule. It was hard work, but maybe easier than changing the hearts and minds of the men and women who walked through those pools of blood, tracking it onto that building's highly polished floors.
All those years protesting at the "War Department" -- my parents liked to use the old World War II-era name for it -- so many hours spent pleading, haranguing, imploring, condemning, appealing, and confronting, and not surprisingly, a stilted decorum developed around our acts. Ah yes, you again, it must be Hiroshima Day.
We were the reminder, the tweak of conscience, the minor cost of doing business. They abhorred us but also tolerated us; they welcomed us as a foil or a challenge. Sometimes, it seemed like a little of all three at once. Looking back now, it's kind of incredible that "they" let us be there, year after year. Maybe they appreciated our creativity. One thing was for sure: we knew how to make a spectacle.
In the late 1980s, a group of women cut off all their hair and burned it on the Pentagon steps. Wrapped in burlap sacks, they then keened in mourning for the victims of war -- and let me assure you that burning hair does smell like death, like war, like terror. It may be the most awful smell in the world.
At the time, I was a young teenager in love with my long hair and I held onto it tightly as women I admired cut theirs off. (My mother's hair was already too short to hack away dramatically.) Later, I felt their bare heads in wonder and laughed as one of them tried to lessen or at least neaten the damage with a small pair of scissors and a comb. The stench of their witness lodged in the back of my throat and clung to my jacket for the rest of the winter. This is the smell of the Pentagon, I would tell myself whenever I wanted to toss my coat in the washer. It's good to remember.
In the early hours of one morning during the brief and devastating first Gulf War of 1991 -- who today even remembers "the highway of death"? -- we blocked the roads leading to the Pentagon with huge piles of broken concrete and rebar. A handful of people with banners stood marking the piles as the "rubble of Baghdad." The police arrested them, but could hold no one because they had no witnesses to the dumping of all that material. One officer even told my mom that she should get "an academy award for this one! This is the best you've ever done!"
In another picture, I am in my late teens, standing at the top of the steps of the River Entrance, along with my brother and another friend. We hold a banner that reads in part "We Remember, We Remember." I'm squinting into the early morning light and my hand is on my chest. And I do remember, even all these years later, that feeling of dread. I look at the picture and know that my younger self is barely breathing and my heart is racing beneath my hand -- I am that afraid. I still feel that.
Protesting a Pentagon That Is Everywhere
Ours was not a solitary witness like that of Baltimore Quaker Norman Morrison who, in November 1965, set himself on fire under Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's window to protest the war in Vietnam. With his wife Anne, Morrison was a war-tax resister and peace activist. He was searching for a way to end that grim war. He died of his wounds.
During the Vietnam War there were also huge crowds on the grounds. As many as 50,000 people marched to the Pentagon in a vast and militant October 1967 demonstration, which included an element of the absurd and mystical, a Yippie ritual of exorcism and "transformation" to levitate the Pentagon.
We did not have huge crowds, but we were steady and predictable. Year after year, my family and community made up for our modest numbers by being the most faithful and regular of visitors, willing to risk prison for nonviolent spectacle and witness against war. And we are still there. Every Monday morning at the crack of dawn, a handful of friends brave the cold (or heat) and a long commute to stand with signs of protest inside a fence-enclosed "free speech area."
But it's another, tighter, more repressive age when it comes to the war state. Leaflets are no longer allowed, nor are photographs. Any activity or demonstration outside of that grassy little spot is met with arrest, which happens often enough without a lot of media or other attention.
Since September 11, 2001, the nature of war itself has changed. There is no longer really a battlefield except that semi-metaphorical "global" one, nor any clear delineation between civilian and combatant. There are no front lines. War is now total in a new way: in the air and on the ground, human and robotic, online and cyber.
In the process, the "footprint" of the Pentagon has been transformed. On that September day, of course, Flight 77 took out one side of the building, killing 125 people. As part of the reconstruction of the site, a whole series of security upgrades and physical changes were made so that visitors -- including protesters -- can get nowhere near it without walking a gauntlet of official searches and scrutiny.
At the same time, monstrously huge as it is, the Pentagon is no longer a single place, a single building at all. In its way, in the post-9/11 era, the Pentagon and the complex of military corporations that service and serve it have spread all over Northern Virginia. You can find a mini-Pentagon in the Department of Homeland Security and another in the State Department, not to speak of countless police departments across the country.
So much has changed, but the Doomsday Clock has again tick-tocked back down to three minutes to nuclear midnight and wars are raging at every turn. It's been a few years since I paid old Uncle Pentagon a visit. I am long overdue.
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Liz McAlister's Fearsome Mom-ness
My mom is fearless. No, really, I mean it. When my brother and I were little, we got our bikes stolen a lot. We were easy marks -- pudgy, white and well-meaning, living in a tall crowded row house full of white, well-meaning people.
May 12, 2013
My mom is fearless. No, really, I mean it. When my brother and I were little, we got our bikes stolen a lot. We were easy marks -- pudgy, white and well-meaning, living in a tall crowded row house full of white, well-meaning people.
"Hey shorty, lemme hold that bike." We would "share" and the bike would be gone. We were always afraid to go home without our bikes because it meant getting into the car with mom and searching the neighborhood. We begged her to just buy us new bikes, but it never worked.
No matter how big and intimidating the boys who "held" our bikes were to us, they seemed small and looked like kids as they handed our bikes back to our mom after mutely enduring her tongue scouring. They might have mumbled or glared as she stowed the rusty old third hand bikes in the back of the car, but they did it quietly and behind her back.
It was not just neighborhood toughs-in-training who endured our mom's fearsome mom-ness. Once, demonstrating against war and nuclear weapons at the White House, mom held on to the end of the banner with her teeth as the police put her in handcuffs.
She is tough, but as kids we also watched her joke with the Pentagon workers and the police a lot. Handing out leaflets, she would address anyone in uniform as "General" or "Admiral." Even the toughest patriot had to smile at this energetic sprite's cheerful irreverence. It did not mean they took the densely written anti-militarist tract she was handing out, but sometimes just getting them to smile was more important.
Someone once gave her a sweatshirt that said "Because I'm the Mom, that's why," which she wore to shreds when we were little. It fit her fierceness to a tee. Yep, the world knows her as Elizabeth McAlister, Harrisburg co-conspirator, member of the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary, wife of Phil Berrigan, Plowshares activist, retreat leader and so much more. We just call her mom and pretty much try to do what we're told. Why? Because she is the mom.
I still rely on her fierceness. When I sunk $1,000 into a lemon of a car, she took me to the mechanic and convinced him to give me my money back and keep the car. I was floored that he actually agreed to it and shook by her power. And I was a full on grown-up at the time, ready to walk away from $1,000 the same way I had wanted to walk away from my bike all those times.
She doesn't keep track of her arrests, doesn't keep score like some movement-heavies, doesn't worry about herself at all under arrest or in jail or prison. She did two years for a Plowshares action when my brother and I were in our tweens, and our sister was 3 years old. Those were hard years for her, to be away from us and our dad. But she made it seem like a retreat -- she quit smoking, did yoga, went for long walks, worked on the grounds crew and built lasting friendships. All the while, she knew more about our daily activities, triumphs and tribulations from the Alderson Federal Prison Camp than most moms while living under the same roof as their kids.
But now that I am older, I have a better sense of how hard it was for her to be away from us by watching her struggle with my sister's and brother's arrests and know that she has struggled with mine as well. We can't tell her, "Oh, no big deal. It's just a little arrest." She knows -- better than most -- what it takes to cross the line. I happened to be in Baltimore with her when my sister rappelled off the side of the TransAmerica building in Los Angeles to hang a banner for the Rainforest Action Network.
Kate had told my mom when it was going to happen and gave her the number for one of the organizers just in case. I think her name was Hillary. I remember it because we called her a lot, and mom thought about calling her more. She was praying so hard for Kate to be safe. Mom has never liked heights -- an occupational hazard of a third career as a housepainter with a fearless housepainter husband. So much for the first line of this piece. I guess I should have said, "My mom is fearless... except for heights!" Still, mom invoked our dad's ladder-climbing, height-defying spirit while Kate was harnessed in -- being buffeted about by the Los Angeles winds.
After a long white-knuckle day of prayer, worry and imagining the worst, we heard that Kate was on the ground and under arrest. Mom relaxed a little. Later, she asked Kate if Hillary had to field a lot of phone calls from worried parents while she was doing press work, liaising with the cops and talking to the climbers by walkie-talkie. "No, mom, just from you," Kate replied. The rest of the young people had not told their parents they were dropping off the side of Los Angeles' tallest building that day. Mom could not believe that some kids would not share that with their parents. I asked if maybe she'd be more comfortable just knowing it had all gone well after the fact -- save her the worry. "No," she said firmly. "Always tell me, Kate. Always tell me. I want to pray you to the ground safely."
She is a guide, a shepherd, a midwife, a facilitator. When dad was diagnosed with cancer in fall 2002, she gathered us all in -- not just my brother and sister and I, but the whole community, as well as whole other communities. Hundreds of people came to take care of him, of us, of one another -- to help him die and help us grieve. And through it all, she made it happen -- laughter, tears, meatballs, memories, roses, torches. There was a role for everyone because she shared it.
I have seen her cry only a few times. Once was in complete and total frustration at my brother and me. I remember that like it was yesterday. It was terrifying (and strangely empowering too). She also broke down at my dad's grave, as he was being lowered into it, with the torches and snow and music evoking some sort of timeless Viking ritual. She broke, and then she began to remake herself. For the last 10 years, she has been continuing -- the life of community, of labor, of prayer, of organizing, of resistance, of studying the Bible. And she has been innovating -- art has taken up residence as she devotes time and energy to her prodigious gifts. Donkeys and goats and llamas and guinea fowl now quarrel and push one another at feeding time. Five incredible youngsters call her grandma, showering her with sloppy kisses and clumsy drawings and pawing her with sticky hands. She wears her "Grandmothers for Peace" sweatshirt like a banner -- fiercely and with great love.
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Standing Together to Stand Alone
I am sort of a wimp when it comes to rule breaking. No really, it is true. You would think that the eldest daughter of rabble-rousing peace activist parents would have been born with a devil-may-care attitude towards society's dos and don'ts, but the exact opposite is actually true. I heed the signs. If it says: "do not walk on the grass," I am taking the long way around. If it says "no ball playing," you won't catch me tossing the pigskin around.
Mar 16, 2013
I am sort of a wimp when it comes to rule breaking. No really, it is true. You would think that the eldest daughter of rabble-rousing peace activist parents would have been born with a devil-may-care attitude towards society's dos and don'ts, but the exact opposite is actually true. I heed the signs. If it says: "do not walk on the grass," I am taking the long way around. If it says "no ball playing," you won't catch me tossing the pigskin around. If it
My brother would argue the point: "we're not playing ball, sir... it just dropped and we were running to catch it," while I tried to look as though I did not know who he was, or was illiterate, or from a foreign country; or if I tried hard enough, all three.
My mom loves to touch things in museums. This drives me nuts. The signs are pretty clear (and ubiquitous). Afternoons set aside to commune with art at the National Gallery or the American Visionary Art Museum have been spent hissing at my mom and pointing out that the "do not touch" signs do not have an invisible "except for Liz McAlister" clause.
My sister devoted a lot of time to activist climbing a few years ago. Down the side of the TransAmerica building in Los Angeles to protest Ford Motor Company, up a huge crane to demonstrate against the paper company Weyerhauser. That is hardcore. Ropes, harnesses, hard hats, adult diapers (if you remember), and walking past lots of "no trespassing" signs.
My dad visited me once at Hampshire College and lit a cigarette right below a "no smoking" sign. I was scandalized. "Daaaaad, you can't smoke in here" (this was before you could not smoke in anywhere). Phil Berrigan giggled.
I will break the law. I have been arrested. I have knelt and "died" and blocked and obstructed and harangued and failed to quit. I have dug through dumpsters, crossed under barbed wire, climbed over chain link. I have pulled secret banners out of my pants and out from under my coat. I have wheatpasted posters in the middle of the night. I have even organized nonviolent direct actions involving lots of people getting arrested. But I have never acted alone.
Rosa Parks, Tim DeChristopher, Peter DeMott and all those other peacemakers and justice-seekers who have faced the powers that be with no one standing beside them display a depth of courage I cannot fathom.
They were not all alone, of course.
Rosa Parks, whose 100th birthday we celebrated last month, was a trained and committed activist when she refused to give up her seat to a white fellow passenger. She was not alone on the bus; the driver asked all of the blacks sitting in her row to move. And she was not alone in the cause; there was a peaceful army of activists from the Women's Political Council, the NAACP and other groups waiting to organize the Montgomery Bus Boycott after her arrest. But she was alone when she said no. She was alone when she was arrested.
Tim DeChristopher was a college student and environmentalist when he participated in a demonstration outside an auction of federal lands to oil and gas companies. He probably held a sign and joined in some of the chants, before deciding to go inside. He thought he might make a statement or disrupt the proceedings. But, after sitting and watching, he started bidding. Before he was led away, he had bought more than 22,000 acres of land for about $1.8 million. He did not have the money. But, during his trial and sentencing, people raised that and more, hoping to keep that land in the public trust. Tim DeChristopher went to jail for the better part of two years for his action on behalf of the environment.
Peter DeMott was a Vietnam veteran and a peacemaker, a husband and father with four daughters. He died in a tragic accident in 2009. In 1980, Peter was at the christening of a nuclear submarine in Connecticut along with other demonstrators opposed to the investment of billions of dollars in machines with just one purpose -- nuclear annihilation. He saw an empty van, the keys in the ignition. He left his friends and community and climbed into the van, ramming it into the side of the submarine. It was not exactly sword into plowshares or spears into pruning hooks, but the action was a symbolic transformation (very minor denting--those subs are sturdy!). He went to jail for that and other acts of disarmament.
I know it takes a village to be a peacemaker, and these three peacemakers did have a community of support. But when I step over the line, I want that community breathing down my neck, not waiting in the wings.
As I meditate on the courage of these men and women in their solitary witness (and I know the Waging Nonviolence readership can add countless other examples of people who stand alone for peace and justice), I am so grateful for the deep and broad community of peacemakers given to experiments in truth that has pushed me out of my wimpiness, passed all sorts of "do not" signs -- further than I ever thought I could go. Who knows, they may still push me to stand alone someday.
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