Doing Time for Peace: Resistance, Family, and Community

Preface

Preface Coming to the Project E ver since the Vietnam War, when I walked in candlelight vigils and visited draft boards with Catholic Workers and Quakers and students and friends, I’ve been a protester working for peace in the world, like many other people. One day I found myself crossing the line from protest to nonviolent resistance, from saying no to “acting no,” as Jim Wallis characterizes the direct action that disobeys the law and has consequences in jail or prison time. In 1984 Wallis wrote, “To protest is to say that something is wrong; resistance means trying to stop it. To protest is to raise your voice; to resist is to stand up with your body.”1 I decided to stand up with my body and walk through an open gate onto a military base near Omaha, kneel down, say an Our Father, and refuse to leave when asked, in order to send a message, that STRATCOM, the Strategic Air Command, was endangering the world.2 Then I thought, “Whoa! What will my grandchildren think if their granny is in jail?” Then, “Can their granny take it? Can she give up her creature comforts, her computer, her glass of wine at 5:00?” Well, I didn’t have to go to jail. After three court visits and a bench trial, I received only a fine and a scolding from a judge who said I was “old enough to know better.” But this brush with prison—I could have “done time” for six months—was the genesis of this, my third oral history project.3 I wanted to know why people would take that risk, why they would make what many of us see as huge sacrifices, and what it was like for them when they did. Civil disobedience that results in prison is not new: the most significant victories for justice issues in the last one hundred years have been achieved at least partially because nonviolent resisters have stood up with their bodies and spent time in jail for doing so—Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., and countless others, known and unknown. From India to Poland to Egypt to the United States, citizens have taken pacifist Barbara Deming’s advice and moved from “words of dissent to acts of disobedience.” From these nonviolent actions, the world has been changed. The “peace people,” as they sometimes call themselves, stand up with their bodies to change our foreign policy to one of peace instead of endless war and preparations for war. xiii Now, I must have always known that peace resisters were connected to someone—were mothers and fathers and grandparents and aunts and uncles and members of communities. But before I started to interview for this project, I’d never thought of the implications of that connection, both for those who did the actions and went to prison and for those in the family and community left behind. Barb Kass of Luck, Wisconsin, explains: “The person at home does the time. Absolutely. For instance, in a family, he or she makes up emotionally for the other parent being gone. And also, that person is always answering to the larger community who says, ‘Why don’t you just write letters?’ I volunteered a lot at school and people do look at you and try to figure out what resistance means. So if you have relationships with them, they can’t write you off quite as quickly.” The people I interviewed call nonviolent direct action by several names— civil disobedience, divine obedience, and lately civil resistance—because they feel it is their government that disobeys the law, especially international law, not they. Although they see the web of connections between war and oil and caring for the earth and for the poor of the world, they speak here about their peace resistance. These narrators are mainstream in many ways (white, mostly college educated , and from the political Left) but they are people who have come to see resistance as normative for a moral person. While diverse in lifestyle, motivation , and experience, they are alike in another important aspect: their resistance decisions spring from a Christian or Jewish faith. Often, but not always, they evidence a profound commitment to that faith. In fact, one hears them called “faith-based activists.” Because their religious and moral choices run counter to the well-funded waving of flags and teabags, they provide a strong counterpart to the current conception of religion as...