Street SpiritJ U S T I C E N E W S & H O M E L E S S B L U E S I N T H E B A Y A R E A

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by Terry Messman

During a long lifetime spent workingfor peace and social justice, DavidHartsough has shown an uncanny

instinct for being in the right place at theright time. One can almost trace the mod-ern history of nonviolent movements inAmerica by following the trail of his actsof resistance over the past 60 years.

His life has been an unbroken series ofsit-ins for civil rights, seagoing blockadesof munitions ships sailing for Vietnam, landblockades of trains carrying bombs to ElSalvador, arrests at the Diablo nuclear reac-tor and the Livermore nuclear weapons lab,Occupy movement marches, and interna-tional acts of peacemaking in Russia,Nicaragua, Kosovo, Iran and Palestine.

It all began at the very dawn of theFreedom Movement when the teenagedHartsough met Martin Luther King andRalph David Abernathy at a church inMontgomery, Alabama, in 1956 as the min-isters were organizing the bus boycott at thebirth of the civil rights struggle.

Next, while at Howard University,Hartsough was involved in some of the firstsit-ins to integrate restaurants in Arlington,Virginia — white-hot confrontations thatwere violently attacked by white suprema-cists and the American Nazi Party.

Just as Hartsough was present at Dr.King’s first campaign in Alabama, he alsowas arrested for taking part in the slain civilrights leader’s very last campaign, the PoorPeople’s Campaign in 1968.

During the Vietnam War, Hartsoughhelped organize a seagoing Peace Blockade

that gained international attention afteractivists in small boats sailed directly intothe path of the USS Nitro. When sevensailors jumped overboard to join the peaceflotilla’s resistance to the Vietnam War, itmade headlines across the country.

He was standing right next to his friendBrian Willson during a blockade ofweapons shipments to Central America,

when a munitions train ran over Willson,severing his legs and fracturing his skull.

Two months later, in November 1987,Concord police broke Hartsough’s armwhile violently removing him from thosesame tracks where he was blocking a train.

Hartsough also was arrested in one ofthe most momentous anti-nuclear actions inour nation’s history, the blockade of the

Diablo Canyon nuclear reactor. When theanti-nuclear power movement evolved intoa movement against nuclear weapons, hewas arrested repeatedly at Livermore Lab.

During a massive uprising in Kosovo,he was arrested for conducting nonviolenttrainings, and the jailing of U.S. activists

A Quaker’s Ceaseless Quest for a World Without War

by Lydia Gans

This autumn, Californians will havethe opportunity to vote for a ballotproposition that promises to bring a

degree of fairness to the criminal justicesystem. Proposition 47, Reduced Penaltiesfor Some Crimes Initiative, would reducethe penalties for most nonviolent crimesfrom felonies to misdemeanors.

Furthermore, the significant amount ofmoney that would be saved by keepingmany minor offenders out of prison isdesignated for mental health and sub-stance abuse treatment, for programs tohelp young people most at risk of drop-ping out of school, and for services forvictims of crime.

Among the crimes that would be sen-tenced as misdemeanors instead of feloniesare drug possession, shoplifting and pettytheft no greater than $950. It is these crimesthat are currently keeping inordinately largenumbers of poor and minority people incar-

cerated, and, when they are released, stig-matizing them with a felony record thatmakes them permanently disadvantaged inseeking a decent living.

Passage of Proposition 47 can make asignificant difference in their lives. Theimportance of this speaks to at-risk youthin our own community. Youth SpiritArtworks (YSA) is an interfaith art train-ing program dedicated to empowering andproviding job training to homeless andlow-income young people, ages 16 to 25.

YSA is located in a large studio spaceon Alcatraz Avenue in Berkeley. Here theyoung people create art that they can sell,for example the individually designed totebags they’re currently selling at BerkeleyBowl. They also create art for the commu-nity, including some beautiful murals.From time to time, the young artists haveexhibits in local venues.

It is through their art that many of the

“Where have all the flowers gone?” David Hartsough is arrested by police in San Francisco for blockingMarket Street in an act of civil disobedience in resistance to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Photo credit:Karl Mondon

See Quaker’s Quest for A World page 6

Young Artists Take a Stand for Prisoners’ Rights

Young artists Alasia Ayler, Brianna Pierce and Vernon Neely displaytheir artistic statement: “You ain't gotta be in jail to be doing time.”See Youth Spirit Artworks page 16

Lydia Gansphoto

“Here at Youth Spirit Artworks, I’m trying to incorporatewhat I think freedom means in my art, as well as trying tospread the awareness of how people are taking others’freedom away.” — Julia Tello, Youth Spirit Artworks

September 2014ST R E E T SP I R I T2

by Lynda Carson

Oakland City Attorney BarbaraParker filed a lawsuit againstthe West Grand Hotel due to“unsafe, inhumane living con-

ditions.” The hotel, located at 641 W.Grand Avenue in Oakland, is a singleroom occupancy (SRO) hotel, primarilyfor low-income and disabled tenants

The West Grand Hotel is owned byOakland JMO LLC, a Georgia companynot licensed to do business in California,according to the Oakland City Attorney.

According to the Oakland City Attorney,the lawsuit filed in Alameda CountySuperior Court on August 4 asked the courtto declare the West Grand Hotel a publicnuisance and to shut it down for a one-yearperiod. The suit also seeks damages foryears of unpaid Rent Program service feesand asks for substantial civil penalties anddamages from the owners.

The lawsuit asks the court to appoint areceiver to take control of the hotel, relo-cate the tenants and make necessaryrepairs, with the owners responsible forall costs. The lawsuit also asks the courtto order the owners to live at the WestGrand Hotel until the nuisance is abated.

The lawsuit was filed against the WestGrand Hotel and its owners for failing toabate building code violations, failure topay rent program service fees, violation ofhotel, motel, and rooming house operatingstandards, violation of hotel rates and reg-istration requirements. In addition, theCity of Oakland charges that the hotel is adrug nuisance in the neighborhood.

In essence, the City of Oakland isalleging that the owners of the hotel areslumlords, and some of the residents andtheir friends at the hotel are involved indrug-related activities.

The suit describes extremely hazardousand filthy conditions at the hotel and“extensive violation of numerous fire andbuilding codes.” Also, the suit charges thehotel owners and managers with allowingheroin, cocaine and other illegal drugs tobe sold in and around the hotel.

As of 7:35 p.m. on August 11, thephone number for the hotel was no longerin service. No one was available for com-ment. The West Grand Hotel was stilloccupied on August 12, and tenants couldbe seen coming and going from the hotel,and a man could be seen sitting at thefront desk. However, a sign in the front ofthe building said “No Visitors,” and thefront door was locked.

Oakland Attorney Andrew Wolff hasclients at the hotel and said: “This is theworst housing condition I have everencountered in my practice, and the levelof tenant abuse is obscene. I commend theCity of Oakland for taking this placedown.”

Wolff added, “I have clients at thehotel and we intend to prosecute our caseto the fullest extent of the law against theowners. I hope the city settles with thesepeople so they not only pay a fine, andrelocate the tenants, but also agree not toown rental property in Oakland again.”

Omid Razi, Richard Spitler and MiHwa Spitler also were named in the law-suit as defendants. According to the suit,the City of Oakland believes that Oakland

JMO LLC, Omid Razi, Richard Spitlerand Mi Hwa Spitler own or manage theWest Grand Hotel.

Omid Razi has a personal injury lawoffice in Beverly Hills called the Razi LawGroup. Numerous websites list RichardSpitler as the manager of the hotel, andaccording to Advanced Back GroundChecks, Mi Hwa Spitler resides in SanLeandro, and is also known as Mi Pitler.

Also, the lawsuit charges that the com-pany that owns the West Grand Hotel,Oakland JMO LLC, is a corporation orga-nized in the State of Georgia, and is cur-rently not in good standing, and is notlicensed to do business in California.

According to the Oakland CityAttorney: “For years, the West GrandHotel at 641 West Grand Avenue hasbeen a nuisance to the neighborhood and adanger to the dozens of people who livethere. The property has long been a centerof drug activity, including sales, storageand distribution of cocaine and heroin.Since April 2013, Oakland police havearrested at least 23 people for drug salesand other drug crimes connected to theproperty, and officers have recoveredfirearms and large amounts of drugs pack-aged for sale inside the building.”

There is no mention in the lawsuit thatthe owners or managers of the hotel havebeen arrested for allowing the allegedcriminal activity to occur on their propertyat the hotel.

It appears that the poor people residingat the hotel are being demonized by theCity of Oakland, and are being displacedfrom their housing, and possibly fromWest Oakland — which the City andwealthy developers want to gentrify underthe West Oakland Specific Plan (WOSP).

At the time the lawsuit was filedagainst the West Grand Hotel, the City ofOakland simply claimed that dozens ofpeople lived there as tenants or occupants,but there is no mention in the lawsuit as tohow many tenants they are actually talk-ing about. Nor does the lawsuit mentionhow many rooms are in the single roomoccupancy hotel, where people share bath-rooms throughout the building.

According to knowledgeable sources,the occupants of the hotel have been resid-ing in dangerous, slum-like conditions, andthe lawsuit alleges that there are numerous

code violations throughout the building. Oakland JMO LLC was incorporated

in Georgia in May 24, 2012, only twoweeks before the company bought theWest Grand. However, the principaladdress for the corporation is 8383Wilshire Blvd, Suite 450, in BeverlyHills. The Razi Law Group’s main officeis located at 8383 Wilshire Blvd, Suite610, Beverly Hills, CA 90211. The firmalso has office locations in Carlsbad,Sacramento, Palo Alto, San Francisco,San Jose, and in Oakland at 1300 ClayStreet, Suite 600.

Attorney Andrew Wolff can be reached at510/834-3300.

Lynda Carson may be reached at ten-antsrule@yahoo.com

West Grand Hotel Sued by City of Oakland “This is the worst housing con-dition I have ever encounteredin my practice, and the level oftenant abuse is obscene. I com-mend the City of Oakland fortaking this place down.”

— Oakland attorney Andrew Wolff

The West Grand Hotel has been sued by the Oakland City Attorney for slum conditions and dangerous code violations.

I Like Blight by Carol Denney

I like blightwhere the rent is lowwhere the music’s hotand the street’s a showand you can’t predictany page you turnand the shadows cryand the echoes burnand the kids run wildand the trains go byand there is no styleand the papers flyand you can’t be seen‘cause it’s so intenseand it’s hard to lovebut it all makes senseand the pressure’s fierce‘cause they want that juicebut it’s all on fireand it won’t kick looseand it can’t be boughtand it can’t be soldand it’s all it’s gotand it’s never oldI love blight‘cause they walk right bynot a thing to seenot a thing to buyno appointments hereno lunch at two‘cause it’s cheap and roughand black and blueand they walk real fastwith their bags clutched tightand their keys held hardin the bright blue light

and it all makes senseas the moon goes numbthey’re ashamed they wentbut they all took someand it was so goodand it was so rightand it was so wrongon a perfect nightand they don’t look back‘cause they might get caughtin the undertowof perfumed rotand love and deathand hate and heartand steam and spitand fire and art

BANG! BOOM!by Claire J. Baker

Having served & surviveda country's premeditated war —(legalized murder & mayhem)survivors may face:PTSD,divorce papers,a dissolved family,loss of limb(s) or mind;social maladjustment,survival guilt —all post-war ticketsfor the embattled landof homelessness whereno one wins, becauseto survive takesspecial skills for whichone is not trained.

Good people,where are we goingwith war after warafter war?

The Homelessby Claire J. Baker

might not slip throughthe social andeconomic safety netif the net didn't haveso many invisibleholes. Or the net wasnot made so flimsyfrom the Get-Go!

September 2014 ST R E E T SP I R I T 3

Contact Street SpiritVendor Coordinator

The Street Spirit vendor program ismanaged by J.C. Orton. If you havequestions about the vendor program,please e-mail J.C. Orton at noscw@sbc-global.net or call his cell phone at (510)684-1892. J.C. Orton, P.O. Box 13468,Berkeley, CA 94712-4468.

by Carol Denney

Neel Kashkari, Republican candi-date for governor, spent animpressive seven days sleeping

on park benches and in parking lots tryingand failing to find work in Fresno. Afterhis fifth day on the streets, he concludedthat all he needed was a job.

“I asked myself: What would solve myproblems? Food stamps? Welfare? Anincreased minimum wage? No. I needed ajob. Period.” — Neel Kashkari, WallStreet Journal, July 31, 2014

Kashkari’s sojourn illuminated a fewissues for him, such as the short radius ofjob opportunities for people who needmeals from a shelter, exactly how far $40will take you, and how little good a roaring

stock market does if you’re on the street. But Kashkari managed, at the other

end of his experiment, to disturb not oneof his free market, pro-growth, anti-regu-lation Republican principles, includingcutting Social Security and Medicare,overturning the Patient Protection andAffordable Care Act (also known asObamacare), weakening collective bar-gaining, as well as promoting frackingand off-short drilling for an oil-basedeconomy, policies which may well berelated to the drought currently drying upfarm jobs in Fresno.

If he’d stuck with it a little longer, ifhe’d committed to six months or a year ofjob search, as most of us have had to do,or used his “free-market” Republican con-nections to insert himself into a low-paidretail position while looking for a “good”job, he would have learned a lot more.

He would have learned that the tatteredsafety net for which he has such disdainneeds more, rather than less, funding. Hewould have learned that a large ratio oflow-wage workers need that safety netand qualify for food stamps despite hav-

ing a job, since their wages are so low andtheir rents are so high that they can’tcover even minimal living expenses,which may have introduced him to differ-ent thoughts about rent control and theminimum wage.

Kashkari’s personal wealth, at onlyaround $5 million, is not impressive byRepublican standards. But it does movehim out of the arena most of us knowwell: the scramble just to stay ahead ofbills and obligations, watching the sunsetof dreams we once had for our communi-ties, our children, and ourselves as ourlibraries and schools scud along with min-imal funding, our after-school programsare put on hiatus, our arts institutionssadly compete against each other fordwindling support.

Let’s respectfully applaud Kashkari’sweek on the streets of Fresno. Let’sencourage him to donate at least one ofhis millions to the Poverello House shelterin Fresno. And let’s encourage him tocontinue his experiment, so that his valueshave a more realistic opportunity to getsome traction in a very real world.

A Republican’s Sojourn on the Street

by Jeremy Rosen, NLCHP

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The UnitedNations Committee on the Elimination ofRacial Discrimination in Geneva todaystated it is “concerned at the high numberof homeless persons, who are dispropor-tionately from racial and ethnic minorities... and at the criminalization of homeless-ness through laws that prohibit activitiessuch as loitering, camping, begging, andlying in public spaces.”

The U.N. Committee called upon theU.S. government to take corrective action.The Committee further included criminal-ization of homelessness in a short list oftopics it wants the United States to “providedetailed information in its next periodicreport on concrete measures taken to imple-ment these recommendations.” The U.S.government’s next report is due in 2017.

The U.N. Committee’s statement ispart of its Concluding Recommendations,

following a two-day review of U.S. gov-ernment compliance with the InternationalConvention on the Elimination of AllForms of Racial Discrimination, a treatyratified by the U.S. government in 1994.

The National Law Center onHomelessness & Poverty (NLCHP),which had submitted a report to the U.N.Committee as part of the review process,applauded the Committee’s findings.

“Criminally punishing people simplyfor having no legal place continues to putthe U.S. on the wrong foot on the interna-tional stage,” said Maria Foscarinis,NLCHP Executive Director.

The organization issued a major reporton the criminalization of homelessness inJuly, and litigates to challenge the practice.“We welcome the Committee’s ConcludingObservations and call on our government totake swift action to solve homelessnesswith homes, not jails and prisons.”

Jeremy Rosen, Director of Advocacy at

NLCHP, was in Geneva for the hearingsand stated, “The Committee’s review alsoaddressed the broader criminalization ofrace, highlighted by recent protests inFerguson, Missouri, around the killing ofMichael Brown. Because homelessnessdisparately affects racial minorities, andbecause homeless persons are often morevisible on the streets, this often com-pounds their profiling and ill-treatment bypolice. Until the U.S. reduces racial dis-parities in housing, we’re going to contin-ue to see them in criminal justice, andvice versa.”

Echoing the recommendations of theU.N Human Rights Committee in March,the U.N. Committee on the Elimination ofRacial Discrimination called on the U.S. to:“(a) Abolish laws and policies makinghomelessness a crime; (b) Ensure closecooperation among all relevant stakehold-ers, including social, health, law enforce-ment and justice professionals at all levels

to intensify efforts to find solutions for thehomeless in accordance with human rightsstandards; and (c) Offer incentives todecriminalize homelessness, includingfinancial support to local authorities thatimplement alternatives to criminalization,and withdrawing funding from local author-ities that criminalize homelessness.”

The National Law Center on Homelessness& Poverty is a national organization providinglegal and legislative advocacy, advocacy train-ing, public education, and impact litigation.

United Nations Committee Condemns theCriminalization of Homelessness in the U.S.

Street SpiritStreet Spirit is published by AmericanFriends Service Committee. The ven-dor program is run by J.C. Orton.

Editor, Layout: Terry MessmanWeb designer: Jesse Clarke

Contributors: Jack Bragen, LyndaCarson, Claire J. Baker, Carol Denney,Lydia Gans, David Hartsough, ArtHazelwood, Karl Mondon, NationalLaw Center on Homelessness andPoverty, Steve Pleich, Jeremy Rosen

All works copyrighted by the authors.

The views expressed in Street Spirit arti-cles are those of the individual authors,not necessarily those of the AFSC.

Street Spirit welcomes submissions ofarticles, poems, photos and art.Contact: Terry MessmanStreet Spirit, 65 Ninth Street,San Francisco, CA 94103E-mail: spirit@afsc.orgWeb: http://www.thestreetspirit.org

The art of Art Hazelwood reminds us that homeless people have human rights, yet their constitutional rights are constantly violated by political officials and the police.

How much good does a roaringstock market do if you’re livingon the street and sleeping in apark? Ask Neel Kashkari, GOPcandidate for governor.

September 2014ST R E E T SP I R I T4

Science fiction by Jack Bragen

The group of 25 or so mentallydisabled people sat at a table inthe lunchroom and ate pizzawith great ardor. Some of them,

probably without realizing it, gruntedwhile eating. It was a Friday, and inanother hour or so, during “talk therapy,”half of the “clients” would doze off.

The lunchroom had childlike arts andcrafts pinned to the walls, and on the longtable was a large jug of water with orangeslices — one of the counselors had decid-ed to get fancy.

Jonathan Smith hated the therapyvenue. He was an intelligent man andbelieved he was being treated as an idiot.And today was Jonathan’s day for indi-vidual therapy. John had only a poormemory of the talk sessions and suspectedhe was being hypnotized.

Today, John’s therapist probed moreintently. The psychoanalyst had an agen-da. Jonathan had been found to be toointelligent. Janice Williams, the therapist,had been told to use an intelligence bob-bing unit during the session. Janice’scommander, who went by a number andnot a name — Alpha Centauri aliensdidn’t use names — had ordered John’sintelligence reduced.

Jonathan lived with his elderly mother,and when he got home that day, she knewsomething was amiss.

“Why are you acting like a simpleton?”she asked. “You’re supposed to be smart.”

“My therapist did something to me.”John’s reply oddly didn’t carry any emo-tion. And his manner was uncharacteristi-cally zombie-like.

Jonathan’s mother, Melissa, put anupright index finger in front of Jonathan’sface. “Keep your eyes on this.” Shemoved her finger back and forth, up anddown, and in circles. Soon, her son was inhypnosis. “Do you remember who youare?” she asked him.

“I’m a mentally ill idiot, like the rest.”He paused. He was perplexed. “Why am Ian idiot now?”

“It is as I had feared. Your mentalhealth specialists have an ulterior agen-da.” She sat back in her hard-backed chairin front of John, who was on the livingroom sofa. “I’m going to try to reactivateyour higher functions, but now your intel-ligence must be kept hidden. Your lifemay depend on it.”

Jonathan’s deceased father had been anastronomer, and had passed away undermysterious circumstances. Since then,Melissa had been an avid reader on thesubject of alien intelligence. At somepoint, she had abruptly stopped the activi-ty and could not be made to talk about it.

Melissa said, “Tomorrow when you goback, keep that mouth shut. If they dis-cover that your faculties have beenrestored, they will probably try somethingmore drastic.”

*****Jonathan sat in the waiting room of the

mental health clinic. The wall had a posterwith a picture of a teddy bear wearing aclown hat. The caption read, “I just wantto be taken seriously.” Jonathan wasoffended every time he sat in the waitingroom and saw the poster.

He picked up a magazine. At thatpoint, Jonathan realized that the surveil-lance camera in the waiting room hadswiveled to point at him.

The mental health building was a reno-vated, Victorian-era, two-story house.Cameras and microphones had beeninstalled in all parts of it. Presumably,someone in an observation room some-where was looking at all of the imagesfrom the cameras.

Jonathan tried to be nonchalant, and

started reading an article in the magazinehe held. He wondered why his psychiatristhadn’t yet called him in for his appoint-ment. And then, the therapist, JaniceWilliams, stepped into the waiting room,flanked by two beefy male subordinates.

“Are you reading that article?” sheasked.

Jonathan worried. He had shown intel-ligence by the mere act of reading a maga-zine. He replied, “I was just looking at thepictures.” Jonathan put a finger up hisnose and then showed Janice a space illus-tration in the magazine. He managed togrin stupidly.

Miss Williams spoke under her breathto her subordinates. “False alarm, you cango back.” Janice and her two thugs exitedthe room.

Invaders from Alpha Centauri weresmaller-framed than most humans, andwore suits that disguised them as humanbeings. They periodically needed to get outof their suits, as it was quite tedious to wearthem, and their skin needed to be aired out.The mental health clinic had a basement,which had been built in the 1950s as a fall-out shelter by the previous owners of thebuilding. Mental health consumers were notpermitted into the room.

Janice Williams was assistant directorof Red Bird Mental Health Clinic. Shealso wasn’t born on Planet Earth. Whenshe shed herself of the suit intended tomake her look like an earthling, shebecame a bony, grotesque, scaly creaturewho would be considered repulsive by ahuman, but to an Alpha Centauri residentwould seem quite attractive.

Janice was oddly obsessed withJonathan. She was determined that he notbe successful in life, as it would set a badprecedent and it would affect her reputa-tion as a great spoiler.

Janice sat in her office, a cramped roomat the very top of the remodeled Victorianhouse. She cradled a cup of tea, which wasuniversally appealing even while wearingthe awkward suit that made her look like anearthling. Across from her sat Jonathan, andhe seemed to be staring at her, studying her.Of course, he could not know.

“Tell me about your father,” Janicesaid. It was a session of psychoanalysis,and it was useful for reducing intelli-gence. The areas of the brain that wereactivated when Jonathan worked toanswer a question could be pinpointedand targeted with the equipment.

“My father is none of your business,”Jonathan replied.

“It was merely a question. Are youbeing compliant with your medication?”

Jonathan began to escalate. “How dareyou use intimidation as a part of psy-chotherapy?”

It was going well. In another few min-utes, Janice would be justified in sum-moning a couple of her thugs to subduethe unruly mental health client.

But then Janice’s pager made a sound.This particular pager could only receivemessages sent by off-planet beings. Sheretrieved it from her waist and looked atthe display. Law enforcement officialsfrom Sirius were contacting her.

Janice said, “I have to take this call.We will have to continue tomorrow.”

Jonathan replied, “Gladly. And can I getcontact information of your supervisor?”

I’m tired of this smart-ass humanbeast, she thought. “I’ll get that to you inour next meeting. This call is urgent. Youcan go home.”

“Bye. I’ll be looking for a lawyer.”Jonathan stormed out of the office andwalked out to his car. John looked at hiswristwatch. It was five-thirty and theparking lot of the mental health clinic wasvacant except for his vehicle.

When he was about to pull onto thestreet, a car whizzed past him at a goodclip, and Jonathan barely hit his brakes ontime. The vehicle blasted an extra loudhorn. Jonathan turned his head and sawthat the vehicle was turning around andwas soon to be headed back toward him.

Without time to think, Jonathan pulledout of the driveway and onto the street.He steered in the direction of the oncom-ing car, expecting to pass it on the right.The driver of that vehicle decided to play“chicken” and got in a direct path towardJonathan. In a rush of rage, Jonathanpunched his accelerator, realizing alsothat his vehicle was bigger, for a momentnot caring that this action would probablyput him in legal jeopardy.

Jonathan floored the gas pedal andaccelerated toward the harassing vehicle.

The oncoming car, at the last moment,swerved, barely missing Jonathan, and itcollided with a telephone pole. Jonathanbriskly proceeded home, and didn’t botherto phone police about the incident. Heassumed that his attackers would not wantpolice attention, either.

The following day at the mental healthtreatment center, Jonathan waited an extralong time in the parking lot, with his caridling, so that he could park his car whereit would be visible through the large glassfront window of the clinic. John was in amore alerted mode, one that had the poten-tial of snowballing into full paranoia.

There were no police coming to get

Jonathan. He concluded that his would-beattackers of the previous day were notgoing to try filing a false report. The tele-phone pole that had been hit had a moder-ate-sized chunk of wood missing, andnow stood with a bit of a slant.

Janice did not immediately callJonathan into her office. The interstellarlaw enforcement aliens from Sirius hadissued her a warning. She put in a phonecall to cancel usage of the thugs whomshe had sent after Jonathan. She hoped thealiens from Sirius would not find heractions too improper.

Jonathan was unsure of whether hewould get more hard-knuckle handlingfrom staff, but felt that he needed to provethat he wasn’t trying to evade treatment.Mental health law as well as the structureof the mental health system took a dimview on “noncompliance.”

He hadn’t yet looked for a lawyer butintended to do so. The day was oddlyuneventful, and Jonathan relaxed a little bit.

***Janice had a meeting with the represen-

tative from Sirius, and it had to be doneon an invisible spacecraft in orbit. Siriusaliens, due to their form being radicallydifferent from earthlings, could not be dis-guised as human. The conversation wentlike this:

“My understanding is that Earthresources and Earth beasts were catego-rized as permissible to harvest,” saidJanice, the Alpha Centauri alien. “TheJonathan beast is creating too muchinconvenience. We should be allowed tobob his intelligence like the rest.”

The representative from Sirius said,“We’ve looked at the data from Jonathan,and we think he might be usable to usinstead. He appears to have a good mind,and we might want to put that to ourusage, or at least breed him.”

Janice replied, “We could take a spermsample.” She paused. “Isn’t he more of athreat than he is worth?”

The Sirius representative said, “If toomuch docility is bred into the species youstand the risk of creatures that won’t beable to pick up a spoon to even feed them-selves.”

“That still doesn’t eliminate getting asperm sample and being rid of him.”

“Doing that would be illegal if you takethe circumstances into account. Policy dic-tates that someone of Jonathan’s character-istics must be allowed to continue.”

The Alpha Centaurian said, “Do notrepeat this to anyone: I intend to deal withthis man.” Janice’s tone was quite threat-

Predatory Psychotherapists from Outer Space

Janice Williams, the therapist, had been told to use an intelligence bobbing unit duringthe session. Janice’s commander, who went by a number and not a name — AlphaCentauri aliens didn’t use names — had ordered John’s intelligence reduced.

See Predatory Psychotherapists page 5

September 2014 ST R E E T SP I R I T 5

by Steve Pleich“Oh, a storm is threat’ningMy very life todayIf I don’t get some shelterOh yeah, I’m gonna fade away.”— Mick Jagger-Keith Richards

Beginning at the federal level andaffecting almost every effort to supportpeople experiencing homelessness, the“housing first” model has become themantra for the new “best practices”approach to creating positive outcomesfor the homeless community.

Notwithstanding my belief that the bestpractices approach is simply lazy arith-metic when applied to a homeless popula-tion that is widely divergent in so manyrespects, I have serious questions aboutwhether “housing first” is the best, mostpracticable option. I think it is not and I’lltell you why.

In Santa Cruz, we have an institutionalgroup wrestling with a best practices-based program called “Smart Solutions”to homelessness. This group, whichincludes civic leaders, faith communitymembers, local homeless services agencyrepresentatives and large nonprofit publicbenefit organization stakeholders, is advo-cating for a “housing first” model as ananswer to the challenge of sheltering ourmany unhoused residents.

However, in my view, this approach isimpractical in that it all but ignores thepresent reality of our local housing marketand, worst of all, is seemingly heedless tothe size, character and complexity of ourlocal homeless community.

According to the 2013 HomelessCensus and Survey, there are approxi-mately 3,500 men, women and childrenunsheltered in Santa Cruz County everynight. As an aside, that number is openlyacknowledged by the census takers them-selves to be underestimated by as much as50 percent!

Yet, in the entire county there arefewer than 700 emergency shelter bedsavailable — and of these, less than 200can be accurately described as “emer-gency” short-term shelter spaces.

In this landscape, advocating for hous-ing first while ignoring the vast, crushingneed for simple, safe shelter space is likeadvocating for a “rehabilitation first”model for those suffering from drugaddiction in the absence of any existingprograms for that purpose.

Simply leaving the most vulnerable totheir own devices is not only foolish aspolicy, it is inhumane in practice. And itis not just advocates like myself who are

giving voice to this systemic problem.Homeless people themselves have beenconsistently vocal on the issue.

Every Monday night, CalvaryEpiscopal Church in Santa Cruz, knownby all as the “Red Church,” hosts a cof-feehouse and meal for between 125 and200 members of our local homeless com-munity. I help out as a server and weoften speak of the need for shelter and thelack of real housing.

One comment I hear often is: “I’vebeen on the waiting list for Section 8housing for months and don’t know if I’llever get housing.”

Another comment: “Even if I get myvoucher, landlords in Santa Cruz don’twant to rent to a person like me.”

And another: “Housing? You’ve got tobe kidding. I’m just trying to find someshelter at night.”

And one more: “All the money theysay they are spending on housing. Whatabout some shelter space?”

These comments are not in the leastunusual and reflect the frustration that per-meates the homeless experience in thisregard. Yet the glaring lack of safe, avail-able, nightly shelter receives scant consider-ation when “smart solutions” are so singu-larly focused on a “housing first” model.

And here let me draw the critical dis-tinction between “shelter” and “housing.”Even the most ambitious housing pro-grams, such as the 100,000 HomesCampaign, can only hope to successfullyhouse even a fraction of our HUD-definedchronically homeless population.

In Santa Cruz, the local campaign part-

ner, 180/180, has housed 200 individualsduring the past two-and-a-half years. Afine thing, but what of the other 95 per-cent of people experiencing homelessnesswho don’t even qualify for such a pro-gram and yet have a continuing, nightlyneed for safe shelter?

Here’s my point. The finite financialresources available to programs created toshelter people experiencing homelessnessare almost entirely being devoted to “hous-ing” them. Where are the programs thatbuild shelter space capacity to accommo-date the vast majority of our homeless pop-ulation? Where are the year-round “walk-up” shelters? Where are the armory-styleshelters? Where are the designated familyshelters? Where are the Safe SpacesRecreational Vehicle Parking Programs forthe vehicularly housed? Where are theSanctuary-style villages that could providetransitional shelter for those needing a tem-porary starting point for re-entry into theemployment market?

These options are being ignored, or atthe very least discounted out of hand. Andthis is precisely why “housing first” mod-els are structurally unsound. They do not,and cannot, differentiate between the var-ied and distinct needs of individual groupswithin the homeless community.

Not every person experiencing home-lessness wants to be “housed.” Manywould welcome a safe shelter space butare not prepared to assume the responsi-bility that housing imposes. And here Ihasten to add that the overarching prefer-ence for a housing first model is not borneof statutory or resource restriction, but

rather is solely driven by political will.Indeed, existing law favors the establish-ment of a “shelter” first model.

Senate Bill 2 is a California statuteenacted in 2008 that provides for designat-ed zoning for emergency shelters. But morethan that, it provides that any property orsite in a community may be so designated ifthere is “insufficient shelter space” for thetotal number of people experiencing home-lessness in that community.

In Santa Cruz and Santa Cruz County,that means that walk-up or armory-styleemergency shelters can be establishedanywhere in the city or county withoutgovernment approval because (and here’swhere the arithmetic is not lazy), we haveless than 700 emergency shelter beds toserve a population of 3,500.

In our homeless community, there is a“storm threatening their very lives” everyday. And although many members ofmainstream society wish they would sim-ply “fade away,” we must not waiver inthe humanitarian effort to recognize theirpresence and support their needs.

There are many men and women ofgood will who believe that a “housingfirst” model is the best hope for doing justthat and my words here should not betaken to demean those good-faith efforts.

But in our national rush to house wemust not abandon the vision of creatingsafe shelter space as a fundamental part ofa holistic approach to creating positiveoutcomes for people experiencing home-lessness.

Steve Pleich is an advocate with the SantaCruz Homeless Persons Advocacy Project.

GimmeShelter!

A homeless man sleeps on the sidewalk in Santa Cruz. Almost no thought is being given to all those left without shelter.

According to the 2013 Homeless Census and Survey, there are approximately 3,500 men,women and children unsheltered in Santa Cruz County every night. That number isopenly acknowledged by the census takers themselves to be underestimated by as much as50 percent! Yet, in the entire county there are fewer than 700 shelter beds available.

ening, and it implied possible retaliationthrough the one avenue of hostilities thatAlpha Centauri still had available.

“I wasn’t here,” said the Sirius creature.***Jonathan sat again in the living room

and was hypnotized by his mother.“Young man, we must take action to

deal with these extraterrestrials. They havebegun to infiltrate more organizations andprobably are planning to take over the gov-ernment. This will require bravery...” Andshe repeated: “You are fearless.”

***Janice summoned Jonathan into her

office on the top floor of the clinic, theconverted Victorian house. She intendedto put John “in his place” once and for all.Another type of intelligence-bobbingdevice was on Janice’s desk, disguised asa pencil sharpener. It relied onmicrowaves to produce brain damage, andit had a large, obtrusive button on top,which did not look like a normal part of apencil sharpener.

Jonathan sat next to Janice’s desk andsaid, “I know your secret.”

“Are you having delusions aboutextraterrestrials again? It hasn’t been inyour chart for a few years.” Janice was flip-ping through the pages of Jonathan’s four-inch thick treatment chart, and paused on

the last page to make some notes.“How did you get such a good dis-

guise?” said Jonathan. Janice froze. If Jonathan could convince

anyone of Janice’s off-planet origin, itwould spell big trouble for her and the restof the Alpha Centaurians. Janice, becauseshe wasn’t from Earth, didn’t realize that nonormal human being would ordinarily con-sider the possibility that Jonathan could becorrect and non-delusional.

Janice was about to hit the button onthe brain-damaging device. It baffled herthat she was hesitating. Did she feel badfor the young human?

Jonathan moved lightning fast, andproduced a large pocketknife and made alarge slash in Janice’s arm before shecould react to defend herself. Instead ofblood gushing from the wound, green

scaly skin was visible. Janice sat in herchair, apparently immobilized; this wasnot a reaction that a human being wouldhave. The arm of Janice’s costume dan-gled below, separated from her actual rep-tilian arm. Janice sat in her chair, trem-bled, and wailed. John was baffled thatthis “thing” took no action.

Suppressing an urge to retch, Johnreached around Janice’s desk to press herpanic button, which would summon secu-rity people who presumably were human.

“The jig is up,” said Jonathan. Loudfootsteps were audible from the nearbystaircase. Soon, human beings would real-ize that they had been infiltrated by AlphaCentauri creatures, and this discoverywould bring the possibility of interstellarwar.

from page 4

Predatory Psychotherapists

September 2014ST R E E T SP I R I T6

created an international uproar.In all these campaigns and many more,

he seemed to be guided as if by the handsof destiny to to be present at some of themost epochal movements for social change.

QUAKERS IN THE OVAL OFFICE

Perhaps the most striking case ofserendipity occurred when Hartsough, atthe age of 22, ended up in the Oval Officewith a Quaker delegation that urgedPresident John F. Kennedy to take imme-diate actions for disarmament and worldpeace. Hartsough also took the same mes-sage of peace to the Kremlin as the UnitedStates and Soviet Union stood on the verybrink of nuclear war.

Quakers have a long and remarkablehistory of speaking truth to power. In hisrecent book JFK and the Unspeakable,peace activist and theologian JamesDouglass described the significant impactthat John F. Kennedy’s meeting with sixQuakers in May 1, 1962, in the OvalOffice had on the president.

Hartsough called himself “the tokenyoung guy” on a six-person Quaker delega-tion that met with President Kennedy todiscuss world peace and nuclear disarma-ment at a time when the threat of nuclearwar had reached an historic high point.

The others invited to the Oval Officemade up a who’s who of prominent Quakerpeace advocates: Ed Snyder and SamuelLevering, executive secretary and chairper-son, respectively, of the Friends Committeeon National Legislation; Henry Cadbury, aprofessor at Harvard Divinity School andthe chairperson of the American FriendsService Committee; Dorothy Hutchinson,president of the U.S. section of theWomen’s International League for Peaceand Freedom; and George Willoughby,who had sailed on the Golden Rule into thenuclear testing area in the Pacific.

In an interview with Street Spirit,Hartsough described his meeting withJFK. “Kennedy met with us in his office,sitting in his rocking chair next to the fire-place, and we sat around him, and he lis-tened to us. We told him there was anuclear submarine that was to be namedthe William Penn, and that was totallyunacceptable.”

Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania,was a Quaker and a pacifist. Naming anuclear submarine the William Penn isexactly the same as naming a battleshipthe USS Gandhi or a jet bomber the St.Francis of Assisi.

Hartsough said, “Kennedy just grinnedand told us, ‘I’ll see that it doesn’t hap-pen.’ ” The president was as good as hisword, and the nuclear-armed submarinewas not named after the Quaker pacifist.

Then, the delegation proceeded to makeeven more utopian requests on the presi-dent. “At that time, in China, there was adrought and many people were dying,”Hartsough explained. “China was, ofcourse, our arch-enemy then, in addition toRussia. And the United States was spend-ing millions of dollars to store food in grainsiloes. So we suggested giving food toChina.”

Kennedy said, “You mean feeding theenemy?’

The delegation said, “Yes, that’s exact-ly what we mean.” The Quaker teamreminded the Catholic JFK that uncondi-tional love and feeding the poor went tothe heart of the New Testament.

Then, they addressed the terriblyurgent concern that had brought them tomeet with the president as the world facedthe very real possibility of nuclear war.They asked Kennedy to stop nuclear test-ing and to move the nation away from thegrowing threat of nuclear disaster.

CHALLENGING JFK TO PEACE RACE

“I encouraged Kennedy to challengethe Russians to a peace race,” Hartsoughsaid. “Instead of having an arms racewhere one side builds an atomic bomb, sothe other side gets an atomic bomb, andthen the first side gets a hydrogen bomb.So why not try to go in the other direc-tion, towards disarmament.”

Kennedy’s thoughtful response placedsome of the responsibility back on theshoulders of peace activists. He said theidea of a peace race was a very interestingconcept. But he added, “If you guys areserious about us moving in that direction,the military is very strong, so you aregoing to have to build a powerful move-ment to help me make that decision.”

The president’s secretary came in after25 minutes and said, “Mr. President, yournext appointment is here.” Kennedy said,“Tell them to wait, I’m learning some-thing from these Quakers.”

All six members of the Quaker delega-tion were highly impressed by Kennedy’slistening with an open mind to the radicalantiwar values of the delegation, and hisevident sincerity in understanding theurgent need to work for world peace.

“I think most important to me was,first, that he listened,” Hartsough said.“He wasn’t just pontificating as if he wasthe president and we were lowly peons.And, second, we were speaking truth topower in the White House, and Kennedywasn’t just rejecting it as hogwash.”

Kennedy only had 18 more months tolive from the time of this meeting to hisassassination in November 1963. In thatshort time, he stopped atmosphericnuclear weapons testing, de-escalated theCuban missile crisis instead of pushingthe button to unleash nuclear weapons onthe Soviet Union, took important steps tostop the escalation of a nuclear confronta-tion in Berlin, and made the decision tobring U.S. advisers out of Vietnam.

Hartsough said that Kennedy had runfor president as a Cold Warrior, and hisgrowing awareness of the need for peaceand disarmament was a hopeful sign.

Hartsough said, “As Jim Douglass, Ithink, would agree, our meeting may havehelped plant some seeds about takingsteps for peace later in his presidency. ButI think it was the Cuban missile crisis thatreally scared the daylights out of him andKhrushchev, and helped Kennedy decideto take the courageous steps for peace hedid in the latter part of his presidency.”

True to his Quaker beliefs in speakingtruth to power, the young DavidHartsough spoke out for disarmament onboth sides of the Cold War. While a stu-

dent at Howard University, he studied fora year abroad in East and West Berlin.

“At that time,” he said, “the UnitedStates and the Soviet Union were threat-ening to blow each other off the map andkill hundreds of millions of people in anuclear war because we had so dehuman-ized ‘the other.’ They were no longerhuman beings. They were enemies.

“We had psyched ourselves up in ouranti-communist crusade. And the SovietUnion had taken a similar stand againstthe capitalist, imperialist, American war-mongers. So Berlin was the one place inthe world where I could study both in theCommunist world and the Western world,and get a deeper understanding into whatboth sides were saying.”

Again, a fateful sense of timing landedhim in Berlin in 1961, the year that theBerlin Wall was built, a time of rising ten-sion and perilous confrontation betweenthe United States and the Soviet Union.

CAMPING IN THE SOVIET UNION

Hartsough had learned that was it per-missible to go camping in the SovietUnion, and it only cost two dollars perday for the visa and the permission tocamp. As Hartsough and four other stu-dents started off on the road betweenBerlin and Moscow, he said, “all of a sud-den tanks and trucks full of soldiers wereheaded toward Berlin to help build theBerlin Wall.”

He had studied Russia in college andseized the opportunity to “get to know theRussian people — these people we werethreatening to bomb off the face of theearth.” His group spent about a month on a6,000-mile trip through Russia and theUkraine. They camped out and were invitedinto people’s homes for meals. One of theirguides spoke fluent Russian, so they had in-depth conversations with people in theirhomes, churches and farming villages.

Hartsough took two more groups of 18students into Russia in the next two years.He wrote an AFSC booklet about the tripcalled Backyard Russia: Getting to Knowthe Russian People. He said, “When youget to know the people as human beings,it’s even more difficult to think aboutbombing their homes and their families.”

Yet he was dismayed to find that theRussian people’s view of the UnitedStates was distorted with the same ColdWar propaganda he had heard at home.

“ They had the same kind of mentalitythat Americans had. They had been fedpropaganda also, and saw their nuclearbombs as peaceful bombs.”

Some questions that the Russian peo-ple asked about the United States reallystruck home. “We were in Russia during

the Freedom Rides when buses wereburning up and people were being beatenfor riding them,” Hartsough said. “So theyreally challenged us, saying, ‘You callyourselves a democracy, but why is yourcountry doing this stuff?’”

THE QUIXOTIC QUAKER VERSUS THE

PENTAGON AND KREMLIN

A month after his meeting withKennedy, Hartsough was arrested forholding a prayer vigil in front of theWhite House calling for an end to nuclearweapons testing. His sign said, “BombTests Kill People,” and he was jailed inWashington, D.C.

Later that summer, he was in Russia,and realized nobody was going to chal-lenge the Russian bomb tests. SoHartsough and a fellow student carried theexact same message to Red Square, hold-ing a sign saying, in Russian, “BombTests Kill People.”

They stood in a silent vigil holding thesign right next to the Kremlin and theLenin mausoleum. People would come upand say, “Why are you against our peace-ful bombs?” And, “Go back to the UnitedStates and demonstrate there.”

Hartsough replied, “We did demon-strate in the United States, and they toldus to go demonstrate in Russia!”

Then the Soviet police came and toldthem it was illegal to demonstrate againsttheir “peaceful bombs” and they could get20 years in prison. “We told the police wehad been arrested a month ago in front ofthe White House for offering the samemessage,” Hartsough said.

The police left, saying they had to talkwith their superiors about what to do. Theywere not arrested, but Russian officialsdecided not to let Hartsough back in Russiafor 26 years. “For 26 years, I was personanon grata — until Gorbachev,” he said.

The first time I met David Hartsoughwas in February 1982, right after many ofus were arrested at Livermore Laboratoryin the first major act of civil disobedienceat the nuclear weapons facility. A photoon the front page of that day’s Livermorenewspaper showed Hartsough beingdragged away by the police in handcuffs.

First impressions are interesting. Thephoto showed a man in a sports coat withshort hair, glasses and a conservativeappearance. Yet he had gone limp andrefused to cooperate with the cop arrestinghim. Somehow, he looked like the quin-tessential Quaker, once again in handcuffsas Quaker dissenters so often were.

David’s father, Ray Hartsough, was acongregational minister who had refused

A Quaker’s Quest for a World Without Warfrom page 1

See Quaker’s Quest for A World page 7

A sit-in challenges segregation at People’s Drug Store in Arlington, Virginia, in June 1960. David is seated on the far right.

September 2014 ST R E E T SP I R I T 7

to become a chaplain or be involved in theU.S. military. Ray Hartsough went toGaza with the AFSC and the UnitedNations in 1949, and spent nine monthsgoing through the battle lines and bring-ing food, medicine and tents to refugees.

This made a deep impression on 8-year-old David. “He was willing to put hisown life on the line for people he hadnever met,” he said of his father.

Hartsough’s father became a Quakerand began working with the AFSC, andDavid got to know the “amazing people”his father brought to their home — civilrights activists Ralph David Abernathyand Bayard Rustin, and Quaker activistsSteve Cary and Clarence Pickett.

David also became a Quaker at age 13,and he has been a Quaker his entire adultlife. His wife, Jan Hartsough, a dedicatedactivist on food and hunger issues, is alsoa Quaker. Both David and Jan are peaceand justice activists who worked with theAFSC for nearly two decades.

Quakers are a very tiny denomination inthe United States — as tiny as leaven. Yetthey have had a major impact on peace andjustice movements, out of all proportion totheir numbers. Quakers have been an inte-gral part of the movement to abolish slav-ery, the Underground Railroad, the suffragemovement to win the right to vote forwomen, the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the Sanctuary movement,the anti-nuclear movement, and the prisonreform movement.

Quakers have been such a central part ofso many campaigns for peace and justice, itis hard to believe that there are only an esti-mated 87,000 Quakers in the United States.By comparison, there are 75 millionCatholics, 13.5 million Lutherans and 8million Methodists in the U.S.

I asked what being a lifelong Quakerhas meant to him. He explained thatQuakers try to speak out for justice andpeace in the world, both as individualsand through the organizations they havecreated, including the Friends Committeefor National Legislation (FCNL), theAmerican Friends Service Committee(AFSC) and their denominational body,the Religious Society of Friends.

“Quakers believe that all people arecreated by God,” he said. “We’re all chil-dren of God, so we are brothers and sis-ters. So we have a responsibility to oneanother if someone is hungry or in prisonor in a war zone. Quakers try to live bytheir values and beliefs: love and compas-sion and caring for one another, and forthe planet and the environment.”

It is a central article of faith to seekjustice for homeless and hungry people,and for prisoners and refugees. And it iscrucial to alleviate the suffering caused bywarfare. “The causes of war are national-ism and greed and imperialism and wehave a responsibility to address thosecauses of war,” Hartsough said.

JOHNNY APPLESEED

The metaphor that best explains for methe life path of David Hartsough isJohnny Appleseed. Like JohnnyAppleseed, he has planted many seeds,and catalyzed many movements andsocial justice campaigns, and then hemoves on over the next horizon to plantmore seeds of peace.

His uncanny ability to be at the rightplace at the right time is a source ofamazement to me. As the director ofAFSC’s Nonviolent Movement BuildingProgram for nearly two decades, Davidworked to help form the Pledge ofResistance and Nuremberg Action Groupto oppose U.S. military intervention inCentral America. He did the nonviolence

trainings to prepare Witness for Peaceteams on peacemaking missions toNicaragua, and then spent several monthsin Nicaragua with their volunteers.

He helped form the Peace Navy thatjoined longshoremen in blocking theunloading of South African cargo ships inthe anti-apartheid movement. He conduct-ed nonviolence trainings for the AbaloneAlliance, and he worked with NativeAmericans in the Four Corners area of theSouthwest and at DQ University when itwas threatened with closure.

Another apple seed that Hartsoughplanted was the creation of AFSC’sHomeless Organizing Project, a programthat organized many years of housingtakeovers and civil disobedience, andbegan publishing Street Spirit in 1995.

The Nonviolent Movement BuildingProgram launched the homeless program,Hartsough explained, to “challenge oursociety’s inhumanity and neglect ofhomeless people, challenging the govern-ments that criminalized homeless people.”

My past 30 years of work on homelessissues — along with all of the housingtakovers and arrests and the entire 20-yearhistory of Street Spirit — is only one ofthe innumerable projects that Hartsoughhas catalyzed, just one of the many appleseeds he has planted along the way.

A QUIXOTIC QUAKER

Hartsough was only 14 when he orga-nized his first nonviolent protest at a Nikemissile plant. Now, 60 years later, heremains as actively involved as ever.Many people begin their lives as idealistsor radicals, but as the years pass by, theybecome more moderate, more “reason-able,” often even more conservative.

By contrast, David Hartsough remains,more than ever, the utopian believer inglobal peace and economic justice for all.His latest campaign is called A WorldBeyond War, and it is perhaps the mostquixotic and utopian campaign of all. Itdreams the impossible dream of a worldthat has abolished war.

“Imagine all the people living life inpeace,” as John Lennon sang.

World Beyond War is just such a dar-ing attempt to imagine a world at peace,and then organize for the creation of sucha world. More than 4,000 people havesigned its Declaration of Peace, pledgingto work nonviolently to end all wars.

“You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’mnot the only one,” Lennon reminded us.

Hartsough recently returned from a tripto Southeast Asia in April. He met with

peace activists in South Korea and joinedpriests and nuns on Jeju Island protestingthe construction of a massive militarybase at the port of Gangjeong by nonvio-lently blocking bulldozers and cementtrucks. [See “A Journey of Peace in Koreaand Vietnam” on pp. 6-7 of this issue.]

COMING HOME TO VIETNAM

He then spent two weeks in Vietnamas part of a Veterans for Peace delegationhosted by a group of American Vietnamveterans living in Vietnam.

Hartsough had been arrested manytimes during the war for acts of resistanceto the massacres, bombings and battlefieldatrocities. He also was a full-time lobbyisthired by the Friends Committee onNational Legislation to try to stop theVietnam War in the 1960s. His work wasto lobby Congress and interact with peacegroups around the country. Hartsough andother Quakers had been arrested weekafter week for reading the names of thewar dead to the U.S. Congress.

When I asked what it felt like to finallytravel to Vietnam for the first time afterspending so many years of his life organiz-ing to end the war, he called it a profoundlyemotional homecoming. “In a way, it wasjust like coming home,” he said. Yet, hewas coming home to a place he had nevereven visited before this year.

He explained, “I had put in so manyhours every day when I was a Quaker lob-byist trying to help members of Congressand the American people understand thereality of what that war was doing to thepeople of Vietnam. I was arrested andjailed a number of times for trying to pre-vent the bombs and weapons from beingsent to Vietnam, and to stop the horren-dous war the United States was inflictingon them. But I had never been there.

“So it was like coming home to get toknow the Vietnamese people. Here is myfamily that I really cared deeply about,but I had never met them. And the friend-liness and the openness of the Vietnamesepeople was so deeply moving to me.”

It was hard to fathom the friendlinessand humanity he found in a land ravagedby U.S. bombs and where the toxic after-effects of Agent Orange have created anepidemic of human suffering.

“It was my country that had droppedmillions of tons of bombs and AgentOrange, and the unexploded ordnance fromthat war is still killing their children now,”he said. “Yet, their humanity to us, asAmericans, was just mind-boggling. Ifsome other country had bombed the United

States to smithereens, and 30 years laterthey came to the U.S., I can’t imagine we’dbe inviting them into our homes, and be sofriendly and open with them.”

It is a small miracle, this friendlinessfrom the citizens of a country that theU.S. targeted with saturation bombing,napalm and anti-personnel weapons.

The word “Friend” is synonymouswith the word “Quaker.” It seems fittingthat a Friend from North America wouldfind friends in Vietnam — a country thathe had always steadfastly refused tobelieve was an enemy.

A Quaker’s Quest for a World Without Warfrom page 6

David HartsoughBay Area Book Readings

Sunday, November 2, 1 p.m San Francisco Friends Center

65 Ninth StreetSan Francisco

Sunday, November 9, 7 p.m. Berkeley Unitarian Universalist

1924 Cedar (at Bonita)Berkeley

Come meet author and activist DavidHartsough. David will read from hisnew book Waging Peace: GlobalAdventures of a Lifelong Activist, anddiscuss his adventures in peacemaking.

David and friends come to the aid of Brian Willson just after he was run over by a muntions train at Concord, Sept. 1, 1987.

Waging Peace: Global Adventures of aLifelong Activistby David HartsoughPublished by PM Press, 272 pagesNovember 2014Available on Amazon.com

September 2014ST R E E T SP I R I T8

Interview by Terry Messman

Street Spirit: Looking back at a life-time of nonviolent activism, can youremember the first person who helped setyour life on this path?

David Hartsough: Gandhi. My par-ents gave me Gandhi’s book, All Men AreBrothers, on my 14th or 15th birthday.And Martin Luther King who I met whenI was 15.

Spirit: Why was Gandhi’s All Men AreBrothers such an inspiration?

Hartsough: Because he said that non-violence is the most powerful force in theworld, and he believed that, and he prac-ticed it. His entire life was made up of hisexperiments with nonviolence, his experi-ments with truth. He took nonviolencefrom being kind of a moral, theological,philosophical idea, and showed it could bea means of struggle to liberate a country.

That was a great model for me thatnonviolence is not just morally superior tokilling people, but was a more effectiveway of liberating people. Also, his beliefthat all people are children of God. Weare all one. We’re not black versus white,Americans versus Russians, good guysversus bad guys. We’re all brothers andsisters. I took that seriously and that’swhat I believe.

Spirit: What was your first involve-ment in a social-change movement as ayoung activist?

Hartsough: When I was 14, there wasa Nike missile site near where I lived inPhiladelphia. This was when people werehiding under their desks in school orgoing into air raid shelters to try to be safewhen we had a nuclear war — which isabsolutely ridiculous. So I organized otheryoung people to have a vigil at this Nikemissile site over Thanksgiving. We fastedand we walked around with our picketsigns in front of the place, and that’swhere my FBI record started.

Spirit: How do you know that?Hartsough: I got my FBI records back

in the 1970s. The records said: “DavidHartsough, son of Ray Hartsough, orga-nized a vigil at the Nike missile site.”

Spirit: That is despicable. They didn’thave anything better to do than investi-gate a kid who is concerned about peaceand nuclear war. Why did you getinvolved at such a young age?

Hartsough: Well, the AmericanFriends Service Committee, at that time,had programs and seminars for highschool students in Washington, D.C., andin New York at the United Nations. Mydad was working with the AFSC and withthe people running these seminars where Imet other young people from around thecountry that shared the vision of workingfor a just and peaceful world. That feltvery empowering to me that I wasn’talone, and nourished my young heart thatthis is what I wanted to do with my life.

Spirit: How in the world were you for-tunate enough to wind up in Montgomery,Alabama, during the bus boycott? Youwere there at the very birthplace of thecivil rights movement.

Hartsough: My dad worked at AFSCas the Peace Education secretary, and hewould take people like A.J. Muste andBayard Rustin speaking at churches allacross the Northeast. He would oftenbring those speakers back to our homeafterwards. So during the Montgomerybus boycott, my dad organized speakingtours for Ralph David Abernathy.[Abernathy was a close associate ofMartin Luther King, Jr. and an organizer

of the bus boycott.]When he brought Ralph to our home in

Pennsylvania, Ralph told us this was thefirst time he had ever dined in a whitehome. He was telling us about the boycott,and Ralph said to my dad, “Why don’t youbring your boys down to Montgomery?”

So during spring vacation of 1956,that’s what we did. We saw up front theinjustice and the oppression people faced.On the way there, we stopped at Koinoniacommunity, an inter-racial community inGeorgia, and in the room where we slept,there was a bullet hole in the wall from aweek earlier. That’s the way people weretreating folks who were living inter-racial-ly. So that was my introduction.

Then Ralph took us aroundMontgomery, and we saw one of thechurches that had just been bombed, andthe pews were all in splinters, and thecross was hanging on its side. But peoplewere getting up an hour earlier to walk towork every day, and people had caught avision of a world that could be very differ-ent and were willing to struggle nonvio-lently. And they supported each other.

We went to the prayer services thathappened every night. We saw the carpools, and we saw the police arrestingpeople for having an “illegal transporta-tion system,” just for giving people rides.But people found the courage to face thatviolence and oppression.

Spirit: When you witnessed the racismand violence people faced simply fororganizing a bus boycott, what affect didthat have on you at age 15?

Hartsough: Well, it was much morethan just reading Gandhi. This was a formof struggle where a whole community ofpeople supported each other in workingtoward a vision of justice. They did notgive up and were willing to suffer for it.Even when their churches were bombed,they still maintained their love and nonvi-olence and human dignity.

Spirit: What a gift that was for ayoung person to be around Ralph DavidAbernathy at the very beginning of thestruggle for civil rights. Did you also meetMartin Luther King on this trip?

Hartsough: Yes, we met MartinLuther King and came to a meeting of theMontgomery Improvement Association,which was essentially made up of the pas-tors of all the black churches and one

white church involved in the bus boycott.Martin Luther King introduced me and

my brother Paul to the whole group. Hesaid, “These young boys have come downfrom Pennsylvania to see our struggle andsupport us.” That was quite amazing,although I had no idea in 1956 that he wasgoing to become this extraordinary figurewho was going to help transform America.

Spirit: You got to meet my all-timeheroes — the people who launched thebus boycott, and triggered the entireFreedom Movement. What else do youremember about meeting Dr. King?

Hartsough: Well, he seemed older tome, but he was really very young. He was26 or 27. He was very congenial, eventhough we were just these young kidsfrom out of town. He showed us hisunderstanding and support and welcomingand friendliness.

I think, even at that time, the other pas-tors were realizing that this guy was a giftfrom God. And the way he was conduct-ing the meeting, it wasn’t a rush job, like,“I know just what to do.” Instead, he wasgathering the ideas and suggestions andconcerns from everybody, and then help-ing them find a solution, and helping tobuild that movement to be the effectivemovement that it became.

Spirit: When we visited King’s firstchurch, Dexter Avenue Baptist Church inMontgomery, a couple years ago, I sawthe impact that visit had on you. What didit mean to find yourself walking insideKing’s church again, an entire lifetimeafter you had first visited it in your youth?

Hartsough: I remembered how inspiredI had been at the very beginning, inspiredby this man and this movement, and thenseeing it develop into a powerful movementthat helped transform this country. Thatmovement not only challenged racial injus-tice, but challenged militarism and povertyand economic injustice. And I was somepart of that, and I took part in the PoorPeople’s Campaign.

But my feelings had changed frombeing inspired to now feeling reverencefor this man’s life and the struggle that hehad given important leadership to, evenbeing willing to risk his own life to helptransform this country. I rememberedsomething King had said once in a churchbasement where there were 35 people. Hesaid, “We have the power in this room, if

we mobilize it, to totally transform thiscountry.” He believed that, and he wasable to help inspire other people to believethat and act on that belief.

Spirit: King really was a prophet — agift from God who delivered the ultimatechallenge to the powers that be. What canwe learn today from his example in build-ing a movement to overcome injustice?

Hartsough: Well, first, like Gandhi, hewas taking the idea of nonviolence andreally making that an effective means ofstruggle. King looked at the system ofsegregation and horrendous injustice inthe United States, and applied the theoryand practice of nonviolence in the strug-gle for the liberation of black people inthe United States.

Many Americans now do not reallyunderstand how destructive it was that inthe mid-1950s, at the time of theMontgomery bus boycott, black peoplecould not ride on the buses, could notdrink at water fountains or go in the bath-rooms, and could not stay in the motels.Children could not play in the parks. Ifyou tried to register to vote in some of thedeep Southern states, you could getlynched or fired from your job or find aburning cross in front of your house.

The United States talks about terrorismnow, but black people in the South experi-enced a lot of terrorism from a very earlyage, starting back centuries ago and intothe 1900s and through the 1960s.

So, in the face of that terror, and in theface of all that fear and injustice andhatred and discrimination, Martin LutherKing helped people in the South find thecourage and the determination to strugglenonviolently. I experienced that inAlabama in the spring of 1956 during theMontgomery bus boycott. It just reallychallenged me to the core that nonvio-lence and the method that King was usingin Montgomery was a method that couldbe used to help transform this country. Iwas also inspired by the gunshot fired intothe Koinonia house in Americus, Georgia.

Spirit: Why in the world would a gun-shot in the house you’re in inspire you?

Hartsough: Well, it showed how deepthe system of injustice and racism is inthis country. They were willing to shootinto a house where they didn’t know thepeople, but those people believed in inte-

Milestones on a Lifelong Path of Nonviolence The Street Spirit Interview with David Hartsough

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David Hartsough demonstrates in Moscow’s Red Square against Soviet nuclear weapons testing. Soviet police threatened himwith 20 years in prison for the protest. Hartsough had just been arrested at the White House for protesting U.S. nuclear tests.

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gration and brotherhood. They were say-ing that they were not going to live by theSouthern mores that we must be separate.

So partly inspired by King and theKoinonia inter-racial community, andpartly inspired by Bayard Rustin, I decid-ed to go to Howard University, which wasan all-black university at that time.

Spirit: How did Bayard Rustin influ-ence you?

Hartsough: I got to know Bayardwhen I was a young kid. He was a manwith a vision. He’d been in federal prisonfor two years as a conscientious objectorduring World War II. He was the personthat, perhaps more than anybody else,influenced Martin Luther King to deepenhis understanding and his practice of non-violence in the struggle for justice. Hewas a good strategic thinker, always veryclear, and lived by his principles.

Bayard was black, he was a pacifist, hewas gay, and he was a Quaker — justabout everything where society could say,“Well, those are second-class citizens, andun-American” [laughing]. He was all ofthose things, and he was proud of it.

He understood the importance of build-ing a broad-based, powerful movement. Heorganized the famous March onWashington in August of 1963, bringingtogether the largest demonstration that hadever happened at that point in Washington.

And I could actually talk to BayardRustin at key times in my life as a youngkid when I was wondering if I should goin this direction or in that direction.

Spirit: What did attending HowardUniversity mean to you?

Hartsough: I really felt it was a steptowards integration. My dad actuallyknew the president and vice-president ofHoward, both of whom were friends ofGandhi. Mordecai Johnson, the presidentof Howard, was a very close friend ofGandhi. William Stuart Nelson, the vice-president, also was a student of Gandhi,and he taught my first class on nonvio-lence at Howard Divinity School.

Spirit: How did you get involved incivil rights sit-ins while at Howard?

Hartsough: I started at Howard in thefall of 1959. In February 1960, when fourstudents sat down at the Woolworth’s inGreensboro, North Carolina, we at HowardUniversity felt we should do something. Soimmediately after the four students werearrested in Greensboro, we started picketingat the Woolworth’s store near Howard.

We did some research and found thateverything in Maryland and Virginia wassegregated. Even African ambassadors tothe United Nations traveling on the mainhighway in Maryland could not eat at thesegregated restaurants. So we decided wewould sit in at lunch counters in Marylandto challenge the segregation laws.

Usually within a very short time, theywould close the lunch counter and call thepolice, and we would be arrested, put inhandcuffs and taken to jail. We’d spendthe weekend singing freedom songs injail, go to court Monday morning and goback to class on Monday.

American Nazi Party leader GeorgeLincoln Rockwell lived in northernVirginia and was threatening violence toanybody who challenged the segregationlaws there. In June 1960, we decided wehad to challenge that law in Virginia.

We did some additional nonviolencetraining, then went to the People’s DrugStore, a chain store. We sat down at thelunch counter and it was closed immedi-ately. The owner refused to serve us, butdidn’t have us arrested because he didn’t

want the publicity. So we actually endedup sitting there for two days, and it wasthe most challenging two days of my life.

Spirit: What happened? And did theAmerican Nazi Party ever get involved?

Hartsough: People came out andwould spit at us in the face. They put litcigarettes down our shirts, and otherspunched us in the stomach, sometimes sohard that we would fall on the floor, andthen they would kick us.

The American Nazi Party did comewith signs saying, “Is We or Is We Ain’tEquals,” and a picture of an ape. Theywere yelling white supremacist nonsenseand telling us to go back to Russia. Eachtime we were attacked we would try torespond in a nonviolent, peaceful way. Itwas very difficult.

Spirit: Given that much violence andhostility, your very lives were in danger.

Hartsough: Towards the end of thesecond day, I was reading from theSermon on the Mount: love your enemiesand do good to those who hate you. A guycame up behind me and said, “You[expletive], if you don’t get out of thestore in two seconds, I will stab thisthrough your heart.”

His face had the most terrible look ofhatred I’ve ever seen, and in his hand wasa switchblade, a half-inch from my heart.

I realized I had two seconds to decideif I really believed in nonviolence. But wehad had a lot of practice for these kinds ofsituations. So I looked him in the eye andI said, “Friend, do what you believe isright, but I’ll still try to love you.”

It was quite miraculous. His face hadbeen contorted with hatred, but his jawbegan to drop and the hand holding hisknife began to drop to his side — and heleft the store. To me, at the age of 20, thatwas a pretty powerful experience.

Nonviolence is not just a morally supe-rior way of relating to people, but it’sprobably the only thing I could have doneand come out alive.

But then we did something even morechallenging. There were about 500 peopleoutside the store with rocks who werethreatening violence. We went to the frontdoor and read a statement that we’d writ-ten appealing to the religious and commu-nity leaders in Arlington, Virginia, to usetheir influence to integrate all the eatingfacilities in Arlington. And this is the hardpart: We said that if nothing changes,we’d be back in a week.

Spirit: You were surrounded by hun-dreds of hostile people. How many of youwere actually doing the sit-in?

Hartsough: About 12. Some friendlymedia people got us out of there alive.Their cars were right outside the door.When we crossed the bridge back intoWashington, D.C., it was like entering thefreedom land, and getting away from allthat. We literally shook in our boots forthe next six days at the idea of having tofind the courage to go back and do thatagain. On the sixth day, we got a phonecall that the religious and communityleaders had met. They went and talkedwith the business leaders and had gotten acommitment that within 10 days, the eat-ing facilities would be opened (desegre-gated) in Arlington. And they were!

Spirit: This sounds like it was a majorturning point in your life. Was it?

Hartsough: At the age of 20, this wasthe most important lesson of my whole life.

Spirit: How would you describe thelesson you learned?

Hartsough: When you see an injusticeor violence or something terribly wrong,you can curse the television set or thepresident. Cursing the television doesn’thelp very much. But instead, you can findsome other people that share your visionof a just society, and who are committedto nonviolence in addressing that injus-tice, and have the courage to change it.

Those are the alternatives we have. Wecan do nothing. We can get depressed andlet the world go to hell. Or we can findothers that share that vision and commit-ment and work with them. So, to me, thatwas a life-changing experience, and that’sthe reason I’ve been involved in nonvio-lent movements and actions ever since.

Many of the people that were part ofthese demonstrations in Virginia andMaryland became key people in SNCC,and were part of the Freedom Rideswhere the bus riders were beaten andbuses got burned up, and the MississippiSummer voter registration drive. So wewere all cutting our teeth during thesefirst sit-ins.

Spirit: King and other civil rightsleaders began speaking out against theVietnam War in the mid-1960s. Didn’tyou also become deeply involved in theanti-war movement at this time?

Hartsough: I was doing peacemakingwork in my job with the FriendsCommittee on National Legislation(FCNL). Starting in the mid-1960s, FCNLasked me to be their lobbyist to try to stopthe Vietnam War. My work was to inter-act with Congress and interact with peacemovements around the country, includingthe Vietnam Moratorium.

Quakers started reading the names of thewar dead every Wednesday to theCongress, and they were arrested for doingthat. I was arrested at these protests. Afterabout four weeks of being arrested, I wentto Rep. George Brown from SouthernCalifornia. He was a very good person.

[Editor’s Note: Rep. George Brown, aDemocrat from L.A., was a Quaker and astrong advocate of civil rights and peace.]

I said, “George, we’re reading thenames of the war dead at the Congressand they just throw us in jail. Is there any-thing you can do to help us?”

He was a typical-looking Congressmanwith a big cigar, and he sat back in hisswivel chair and said, “Yeah, I’m going tojoin you. And I’ll write a letter to everymember of Congress telling them that I’mjoining you and inviting them to join you.”

He wrote the letter, and the next day, wehad four members of Congress reading thenames of the war dead on the front steps ofthe Capitol. So when we were all arrested,the congressmen kept reading the names ofthe war dead because they had congression-al immunity. They got through the whole40,000 names of American war dead, orwhatever it was at that point.

Within a week or two, Look Magazinehad a picture of every American that hadbeen killed in Vietnam. And then peoplein the peace movement were reading thenames of the war dead all over the coun-try, at federal buildings and at postoffices, inspired by what we had done. Itwas a small step to try to help build thatmovement. Our actions gave courage toCongress people and then other congres-sional representatives became involved.

Spirit: While you were workingagainst the Vietnam War for FCNL,Martin Luther King began speaking aboutthe need to resist racism, militarism andpoverty simultaneously, a vision that cul-minated in the Poor People’s Campaign.Were you involved with the Poor People’sCampaign while at FCNL?

Hartsough: I had followed the civilrights movement very closely, of course.When King got the Nobel Peace Prize, hestopped in Washington, D.C., on the wayback from Norway and met with PresidentJohnson. He said, “Mr. President, we needa voting rights bill.”

The president essentially said, “I agreewith you Dr. King, but we just passed thecivil rights bill, and you’ve got to wait.It’s going to take a few more years.”

So King didn’t waste any more time inWashington. He went south and helpedorganize the voting rights campaign. That

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Protesters kneel in prayer and block the road into Livermore Laboratory in resistance to the nuclear weapons designed there.

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mobilized the conscience of the nationand within several months, we had a vot-ing rights bill. Here I was a lobbyist inWashington, but that taught me that realchange doesn’t come from the top down -it comes from the bottom up.

Because of that, I was even moreinspired by King and the power of nonvi-olent movements. So when he had thevision of the Poor People’s Campaign, mypaying job was still lobbying to try to endthe war. But on weekends, I had offered todo nonviolent trainings of people thatwere going to participate in the PoorPeople’s Campaign. Also, we were build-ing the shacks, the shanties where poorpeople would live in Washington, D.C.

Spirit: Amazing! You actually helpedbuild the wooden shacks that made upResurrection City?

Hartsough: Yes, on the weekends webuilt the shacks with plywood and two-by-fours. We actually were building themon the grounds of a church on the edge oftown, and then they were all going to betaken by truck to the Capitol.

When the organizing for the PoorPeople’s Campaign began, King wasspeaking quite often at gatherings wherehundreds of people would come from allover the country. It was just so very mov-ing. I really had a feeling that we couldtransform America.

Spirit: It seemed like the entireFreedom Movement had been building upto this moment — a showdown with thefederal government to end poverty.

Hartsough: I felt this was going tobring this country to its senses and buildthe kind of nonviolent people’s power thatwould mean that the power structure wasgoing to have to address these issues.

As you know, it was a very, very rainyspring and summer in 1968. So theshanties were often in two or three feet ofwater, and we had to build boardwalks sopeople wouldn’t get mired in the mud.

Spirit: So Resurrection City becamemired in the mud, and far worse, everyonewas shocked and demoralized by King’smurder. It’s amazing that people wereable to carry on with the campaign at all.

Hartsough: Yes. But each day, awhole bunch of people from the PoorPeople’s Campaign would go and try tomeet with Congress, and with people fromthe Health, Education and WelfareDepartment, and with various governmentagencies, trying to encourage them to dowhat needed to be done about poverty,housing and jobs.

They developed a list of demands andwalked from Resurrection City all theway down to the Capitol grounds to deliv-er these demands to Congress, trying tofundamentally address the poverty andinjustice in this country. But when theygot to the Capitol grounds they were allarrested — hundreds of people.

Quakers were having a conference upin New Jersey at the time when they heardabout the arrests. They decided that this isKing’s last dream and vision of trans-forming this country, and when peoplenonviolently take their list of demands toCongress, they are arrested and thrown injail. So we’ve got to do something. Wecan’t just be sitting around here talking.

So several people from this conference,including Steve Cary, one of the mostprincipled and courageous voices in theAFSC, went down and had a Quakermeeting for worship at the exact placewhere people had been arrested at theCapitol grounds. They brought a list oftheir demands and tried to walk up to the

Capitol — and then we were arrested.

Spirit: What role did Steve Cary playin getting Quakers to abandon their ownconference to risk arrest with the PoorPeople’s Campaign?

Hartsough: At the time, Steve Carywas the acting executive secretary of thenational American Friends ServiceCommittee. He was just a very thoughtful,courageous spokesperson who articulatedthe Quaker values of reverence for everyhuman being and courageous struggle tofight injustice and war and militarism.And he walked his talk.

Steve Cary was the head of AFSC pro-grams in Europe after the Second WorldWar when AFSC was awarded the NobelPrize for its humanitarian work in post-war Europe. Europe had been devastatedand AFSC got lots of Americans to go inand rebuild and get food to children.

So after the mass arrests of peoplefrom the Poor People’s Campaign, SteveCary led us in holding a Quaker worshipin front of the Congress. Then we took thedemands of the Poor People’s Campaignto Congress, and we were all arrested andspent two weeks in jail.

Spirit: Many AFSC activists andQuakers worked with the civil rightsmovement through the years, so it seemsfitting that they would end up in jail aspart of King’s last campaign.

Hartsough: We spent the next 14 or15 days in the top floor of the D.C. jail,together with the hundreds of people fromthe Poor People’s Campaign from all overthe country. In addition, there were hun-dreds of people, mostly black, that hadbeen picked up off the streets in the riotsafter King had been assassinated. Peoplewere thrown in jail with very little evi-dence of what they had done, and none ofthem had been given a chance to go tocourt. And essentially, their story had noteven gotten out to the public.

One of the things we did after we gotout of jail was to share with AFSC and thebroader public that all of these folks hadbeen sitting in jail since April 4. And theywere still in jail in June! So that was thebeginning of AFSC’s pretrial justice pro-gram where they were really challengingthat whole unconstitutional practice. Youhave a fundamental right to appear beforea judge before being thrown in jail andleft to rot for months.

Spirit: In looking back, how would youmeasure the significance of the PoorPeople’s Campaign? What did it mean to

you and what did it mean to the country?And what effect did King’s assassinationhave on this vision?

Hartsough: Well, in the Poor People’sCampaign, Martin Luther King was call-ing not just for an end to segregation, andnot just an end to the Vietnam War andmilitarism, but a transformation of thiscountry so there would be economic jus-tice for every human being.

It was a brilliant and strategicallythoughtful campaign to bring poor peoplefrom all over the country to Washingtonto camp out and nonviolently get in theway of business as usual until our govern-ment listened to the people and committeditself to ending poverty and injustice, andcommitted itself to developing realdemocracy and respect for every humanbeing in this country.

Unfortunately, he was assassinatedbefore that could happen, but his staff andthose of us who were left did our best totry to put together the Poor People’sCampaign. Many of us had been psycho-logically wounded by his assassination,and it was nowhere near as powerful as itcould have been if he’d been here with us.But I do believe that the assassin mayhave killed King, but didn’t kill his dreamand his vision of justice for all.

For me personally, it was very impor-tant that I didn’t stand aside and say,“Well, good luck to these people that aretrying to carry out King’s last campaign.”

It was vital to be a part of it and to seecourageous people from all over thiscountry, from all backgrounds and all col-ors, standing up nonviolently and speak-ing truth to power in the halls of Congressand in the Justice Department and theWhite House and all over Washington.

To be in jail with hundreds of thesepeople in that nonviolent struggle was agreat experience for me. Some peoplethink that the worst they can do is put youin prison. Yet it is really a privilege to bein prison with other people of consciencewho are willing to put their lives on theline for justice. And getting to know peo-ple across the division lines of class andrace and economic background is veryimportant in strengthening our own sensethat we’re all brothers and sisters, andwe’re all children of one God. It sustainsus and strengthens our commitment forthe long struggle ahead.

Spirit: You were involved in manyactions during the struggle to end theVietnam War. One action that reallystands out is the People’s Blockade of

ships transporting weapons to Vietnam.Hartsough: Around Christmas in

1971, a season when we’re thinking aboutthe life of Jesus and his teaching to loveone another and love our enemies, theUnited States started a major bombing ofHanoi and Haiphong. So now we werebombing major cities with children,women, old people, hospitals and schools.

Many of us in Philadelphia in theMovement for a New Society decided thatwe had to do something more than just getout with a sign and protest. We had tosomehow put our bodies between thebombs and the men, women and childrenthey were killing in Vietnam.

We found that there were bombs andmunitions being shipped from theLeonardo Naval Weapons Station in NewJersey. So we scouted it out and foundthat napalm, anti-personnel bombs and allkinds of munitions were being shippedfrom Leonardo. We were able to recruit26 canoes with 52 people, two in eachcanoe, and we decided to go out and try toblock a ship called the USS Nitro.

As we paddled out along the piers, theanti-personnel bombs and crates ofnapalm were just stacked high, ready tobe loaded onto the ships. A militarypoliceman yelled at us over his loud-speaker that we would be charged withcriminal conspiracy if we didn’t leave thisarea, and could get 20 years in prison. Weshouted back that 20 years would be terri-ble, but nowhere near as bad as the deathand destruction that would be caused ifthese bombs reached their destination.And we kept paddling.

We were actually able to get out infront of the ship each day for seven days.On the sixth day, some of the sailors wemet told us it was leaving at 6:00 the nextmorning. Not only the hold of the ship,but all the decks were stacked 20 feet highwith these crates of bombs and munitions.

We got out there the next morning, andwere paddling hard to stay right in frontof the boat. As they lifted anchor, sevenof the sailors jumped off the ship into theocean and then joined our blockade.

Spirit: Oh my God! Did they climbinto your canoes?

Hartsough: They tried to, but the mili-tary police grabbed them and put themback on the ship. But we had called themedia, so the New York Times and thenational television stations were there intheir helicopters. So it was on the eveningnews, not only our blockade but also the

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David Hartsough (left) and Dorothy Granada (right) block the first truck with munitions headed for El Salvador as part ofNuremberg Actions at Concord Naval Weapons Station, June 1987.

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seven sailors jumping ship. The sevensailors were then jailed in the brig.

The news went all across this countryand around the world, and the sailors toldus later that when their ship went throughthe Panama Canal, word about the sailorson the USS Nitro jumping ship had spreadto navy and military people all over theworld, and the guys on the other ships gavethem fists of solidarity and peace signs.

Spirit: So the ripples from this actionhad spread very far and very quickly. Didit spark other acts of resistance?

Hartsough: My feeling was that ouractions had given these Navy sailors thecourage to do what they knew was right todo, and their courage, in turn, gavecourage to a lot of other soldiers in theU.S. military, and that was a beginning ofa strengthened resistance within the armedforces to carrying out the terrible deathand destruction in Vietnam. Our blockadespread from Leonardo, New Jersey, all upand down the East Coast and the WestCoast of the Untied States. The nationalboard of the American Friends ServiceCommittee actually decided to supportand endorse the People’s Blockade and tosupport AFSC staff working on it.

Spirit: That was an incredible stepinto civil disobedience for AFSC to take.Were you part of the AFSC at this time?

Hartsough: Yes, I was on AFSC’sNonviolent Training and Action Committeeat the time. Robert Levering and several ofus that were part of that committee heardthat there were also ships going fromNorfolk, Virginia. So we went to Norfolk,and there was an aircraft carrier called theUSS America that was preparing to leavefor Vietnam. Aircraft carriers are massive. Ihad my nine-foot sailboat, so we organizeda blockade down there with canoes and oursmall sailboat.

They were very uptight as the USSAmerica prepared to take off for Vietnam,and the military police came and capsizedour canoes and sailboat. Then Navy frog-men came after us, grabbed us out of thewater and took us on their ship. They putus in handcuffs face down on the shipwith guys with guns pointed at us whilethe aircraft carrier sailed out to sea. It wasa little bit scary.

Another ship came with a water can-non when all these sailors were up on thedeck of this aircraft carrier. Many of themwere giving us signs of support and verbalencouragement. We thought the watercannon was going to be directed againstus, but it was directed against the sailors.

Spirit: They blasted the sailors withthe water cannon just because they werecheering you on?

Hartsough: Yes, because they werecheering us on! Next day, the Norfolknewspapers had a big photo of this massiveaircraft carrier with our little boat in front ofit. The ship was called the USS America, sothe headlines said, “America Defeats PeaceFlotilla.” America was standing tall again!They had defeated the enemy.

Spirit: You mentioned earlier that theAFSC national board supported peaceblockades around the country?

Hartsough: AFSC members in bothNorthern California and down in SouthernCalifornia were actively involved in help-ing organize blockades on the West Coast.In the Bay Area, it was called the CarrierProject, an official AFSC project. TheAFSC board had decided it was willing tocommit civil disobedience and supportnonviolent resistance to the endlesstragedy in Vietnam.

Up in Bangor, Washington, activistsactually camped out along Puget Sound ata place where they could see the shipscoming. They had a flotilla ready to goout and try to block naval ships, day ornight. One of the guys, a very gutsy,courageous fellow, got right in front of amoving ship and it actually pushed himfor a quarter of a mile in his boat.

[Editor’s note: George Walker, a Navyvet, put his kayak right in the path of theUSS Joseph Merrell. The USS Merrellfinally sailed right over his small kayakand dunked Walker into Puget Sound.]

Spirit: A photo in your new bookshows you and your wife Jan Hartsoughbeing arrested with your two young chil-dren. What happened at that protest?

Hartsough: In 1971, Quakers whowere very distressed about Nixon’s con-tinuing this horrendous war in Vietnamdecided to have a Quaker meeting forworship in front of the White House.About 250 Quakers sat down on the side-walk in front of the White House. Mywife Jan and I and our two young chil-dren, Peter and Heidi, were sitting on thesidewalk with all of the Quakers, and thepolice interrupted our worship service andordered us to leave or be arrested.

Nobody left, and people like SteveCary, who was the associate executive sec-retary of AFSC, were there with us. All theother Quakers except my family werearrested. They apparently didn’t think itwas good publicity to arrest this familywith young children. So here we were, sit-ting on the sidewalk after everyone elsehad been hauled away in jail buses, and theD.C. chief of police came over andimplored us to leave, saying that if we werearrested, our children would be taken awayand put in juvenile hall.

We told him that we certainly love ourchildren, but we also love the children ofVietnam, and we’d be happy to leave ifour government commits to stopping thebombing of Vietnam. He spent about halfan hour trying to convince us to leave, andthen placed us under arrest in a police car.He took us to a police station inGeorgetown and let us out behind thepolice station — smart P.R. on his part.

The Washington Post and AP and UPIhad photographs of the police chief lean-ing over our family, trying to convince usto leave. The photo and article went outacross the country, so many of our friendssent us photos from local newspapers allacross the country. Those photographs arein our kids’ baby books.

Spirit: Was it a hard decision for youand Jan to risk arrest with two children?

Hartsough: I think a lot of people saythat when you get married and have a fami-ly, you have to leave your values behind,

and your concern about the rest of the peo-ple in the world. But we’re still a part of thehuman family, and people who get killed ormaimed or imprisoned in another part ofthe world are also part of our family. Sowe’re not willing to give up our values justbecause we have children.

Spirit: When were you hired as anAFSC staff in San Francisco?

Hartsough: I was hired in 1973 to bepart of the Simple Living Program withmy wife Jan Hartsough. Then I formedthe AFSC Nonviolent MovementBuilding Program in 1982.

Spirit: As an AFSC staff, how did youbecome involved in the massive protestsat the Diablo Canyon nuclear reactor inthe late 1970s and early 1980s?

Hartsough: In the Simple LivingProgram, we were concerned that nuclearpower was promoted as a way to haveendless consumerism and endless energy.

Spirit: Consumerism fueled byradioactive plutonium.

Hartsough: Yes, without any thoughtof an environmental future for our world.So when the Mothers for Peace in SanLuis Obispo came to the AmericanFriends Service Committee around 1976,they were struggling to stop this nuclearpower plant being built in their backyard.They had tried everything legally possibleto stop it and the government didn’t care.

So they asked if we could help build anonviolent movement to try to stop theDiablo Canyon Power Plant from goinginto operation. Our AFSC Simple LivingProgram decided we would support theirstruggle and help them build a statewidemovement to stop that plant. About 30different groups from all over the stateformed Abalone Alliance to stop nuclearpower and the Diablo Canyon reactor, andto promote alternative energy.

We had about 100 people trained asnonviolent trainers, and AFSC played animportant role in helping build that move-ment. AFSC published “Decision atDiablo Canyon,” a very well-researchedbooklet about the dangers of the DiabloCanyon plant being built on an earthquakefault. AFSC also put together the nonvio-lence training manual. The movement wasalso successful in stopping the nuclearplant up in Humboldt County, and theRancho Seco plant near Sacramento.

Spirit: Were you arrested for civil dis-obedience during Abalone Alliance’scampaign to shut down Diablo Canyon?

Hartsough: Yes, in 1977 and again in1978, I was arrested. The first year, in1977, there were 47 people arrested, andthe next year, more than 470 were arrest-ed. We’d multiplied our numbers by 10times. And then, in 1981, when the

license was finally granted, nearly 2,000people were arrested at Diablo Canyon.

In 1981, the Nuclear RegulatoryCommission said this was the safestnuclear reactor in the world as it gave itsapproval for Diablo Canyon to go intooperation. And here were hundreds andhundreds of us sitting in jail down atDiablo Canyon feeling we’ve done every-thing we can, and what more can we do?

Then somebody threw a newspaper overthe fence of our exercise area, and one ofthe engineers at the plant had gone publicthat the blueprints for the seismic supportfor the cooling systems of one of the reac-tors had all been put on backwards.

So it took Pacific Gas and Electricanother couple years to retrofit all of thatand they had to spend another couple bil-lion dollars before it could go into opera-tion. That plant — built with the coolingsystems in one of the reactors totallywrong and totally unsafe — is what theNuclear Regulatory Commission calledthe safest nuclear reactor in the world!

So we were not successful in stoppingthat plant, but I think our resistance atDiablo Canyon and the resistance atSeabrook, where AFSC also played a veryimportant role, and Three Mile Island,where Quakers were very involved, helpedsend a message to our government so thatno new nuclear reactors were licensed inthe United States for about 30 years. AndCalifornia passed a proposition saying nomore nuclear power plants until they founda safe way to store nuclear waste — whichthey’ve never found.

Spirit: Abalone Alliance not only raisedpublic consciousness about the dangers ofnuclear power, it also educated peopleabout how to build nonviolent movements.The actions at Diablo Canyon helped buildan anti-nuclear movement that went on toorganize opposition to nuclear weapons atLivermore Laboratory.

Hartsough: Yes, all these actionsraised a lot of public consciousness. All ofthat grew out of this movement. Andmany, many of the people that wereinvolved in the Diablo Canyon strugglehave continued to be involved in themovement ever since.

Spirit: A very large number ofAbalone Alliance activists went on to helpspark the Livermore Action Group in theBay Area. Why did you decide to becomeinvolved in the Livermore protests?

Hartsough: Nuclear power andnuclear weapons are very connected. Itseemed to be a very logical next step inthe struggle. Dr. John Gofman, who hadbeen the head of biomedical research atLivermore Laboratory, was one of our

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David Hartsough and his parents, Ray and Ruth Hartsough, before being arrested blocking a weapons train at Concord, 1988.

September 2014ST R E E T SP I R I T12

speakers at our rally in San Luis Obispoagainst Diablo Canyon. Gofman madethat connection between nuclear powerand nuclear weapons, and how dangerousnuclear power was. And I had beeninvolved in the struggle for nuclear disar-mament and the efforts to try to stopnuclear testing for all of my life.

Spirit: Beginning at age 14 when youprotested the Nike missile plant.

Hartsough: Yes, and then when I was18, I went on the walk from Philadelphiato the United Nations in 1958 when weasked all nations to stop nuclear weaponstesting. That was the year when fourQuakers risked their lives trying to sail theGolden Rule into the nuclear weaponstesting area of the Pacific Ocean.

That motivated many of us to walkfrom Philadelphia to the United Nations— about 100 miles — calling for an endto nuclear weapons testing. When we gotto New York, we had about 500 peoplemarching down the streets to the UnitedNations. At the time, it was the largestpeace protest I’d ever seen in my life[laughing]. It was very inspiring.

Spirit: The anti-nuclear movementmay have started small but it would ulti-mately lead to far larger demonstrationsat Livermore Lab and all over the nation.

Hartsough: Livermore was the placethat had developed the hydrogen bomb,the MX warhead and the neutron bomb,which could kill all the people and leavethe buildings intact. So I was absolutelydelighted when people in the Bay Areadecided to begin a campaign to convertthe Livermore Laboratory from buildingthe next generation of nuclear weapons todoing positive peacetime research.

Spirit: Thousands of people werearrested for blockading that holocaustlaboratory. The Livermore actions were avery dramatic confrontation with the fed-eral government.

Hartsough: That’s right. And whenmore than a thousand of us were in jail in1982, and again in 1983, the authoritiesused fear as a means of trying to controlus. But I think most of us had overcomethat fear and we were willing to spendtwo weeks in jail or whatever it took to tryto help turn the arms race around.

Instead of being afraid while in jail, weused that time to organize workshops andtrainings. People shared their life storiesand Dan Ellsberg taught us everything heknew about nuclear weapons develop-ment. It was a massive teach-in! I orga-nized a strategy game using civilian baseddefense as a nonviolent means of defend-ing a country.

So we became much stronger throughthat time in jail. The authorities finallyrealized that their system of intimidationand fear through holding us in jail was notworking. They decided it was a poor useof their money to give us free room andboard to do workshops to strengthen ourmovement [laughing].

Spirit: We found out later that wewere nearly bankrupting the city ofLivermore because of the massive costs ofimprisoning thousands of people, and thehuge court costs.

Hartsough: That’s why in subsequentyears, after they arrested us they wouldnever even bring charges because theyrealized it’s not going to stop us.

Spirit: The nuclear arms race was somassive, and the military-industrial com-plex so powerful, that many thought resis-tance was futile. Yet those who actuallystepped forward and resisted the arms

race found great new levels of hope. Hartsough: What our government

wants us to do is to just sit back and eithersupport or silently condone all of the hor-rendous things they do, including devel-oping nuclear weapons which could putan end to life on earth. Having peoplewho are willing to speak out and get in theway of the arms race through blocking theentrances at Livermore Lab is the kind ofthing we had hoped the German peoplewould do during the Third Reich in NaziGermany. They could have said, “Enoughis enough! Stop this madness!”

And here at Livermore, we had thou-sands of people who were willing to dothat. And this resistance was also happen-ing at Los Alamos Laboratory and theNevada Test Site, and all over Europe. Amassive movement arose in Europe and atGreenham Common in resistance toCruise and Pershing missiles. It was andis an example of nonviolent people’spower saying no to the madness that ourgovernment was trying to inflict upon us.And that gives me hope.

Spirit: Many anti-nuclear activistssoon began working with the Pledge ofResistance to oppose U.S. military inter-vention in Central America. What role didyou play in forming the Pledge?

Hartsough: After many of us hadexperienced the horrors of the wars in ElSalvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala, wefelt that we had to do something evendeeper to try to stop the killing. UnderReagan’s presidency, his number-one for-eign policy objective was to overthrowthe Sandinista government in Nicaraguaby supporting the Contras’ attacks.

So we formed the Pledge of Resistance,which organized thousands of people allover the country who signed a pledge say-ing if the United States escalated the warsin Central America, we would do nonvio-lent direct action to protest the atrocities theU.S. government was inflicting.

For several years, we were carrying outactions every time Congress voted moremoney for these wars, and when theUnited States blockaded the ports ofNicaragua, and when the Jesuit priestswere murdered and the nuns were killedin El Salvador. We would have actionswhere hundreds and hundreds of us wouldbe arrested. Here in San Francisco, weshut down the Federal Building a numberof times during those years, and therewere protests at federal buildings and mil-itary bases all over the country.

Spirit: Your Nonviolent MovementBuilding Program played a key role insupporting the Pledge in the Bay Area.

Hartsough: Our program supported

Ken Butigan to work on helping developthe Pledge of Resistance. You and I orga-nized nonviolence trainings for thePledge, and trained nonviolent trainers.That played a very key role in helpinginfluence the nonviolent spirit and tone ofthe actions. We funded the Pledge ofResistance nonviolent training handbookand it became a manual for people allaround the country. [Editor’s note: KenButigan and Terry Messman were mem-bers of AFSC’s Nonviolent MovementBuilding committee and co-authoredBasta: No Mandate for War. A Pledge ofResistance Handbook ]

Spirit: How would you analyze theeffectiveness of the Pledge of Resistance?

Hartsough: A lot of people that wereinvolved in the Pledge around the countrycame out of the religious community.Somebody in the White House said at onepoint, “We could go ahead and overthrowthe Sandinista government in Nicaragua ifit weren’t for these Christians.” Meaningthe Pledge of Resistance!

We were a formidable force. Everytime our government did anything to esca-late these wars, they would have peopledoing sit-ins in Congressional offices,shutting down federal buildings, andmarching in the streets, and they’d have toput hundreds of people in jail. That was areal problem for them.

I think the Pledge was an example ofAmerican people who were in touch withtheir consciences, and were willing to puttheir freedom on the line, and spend timein jail if necessary, to speak out againstthe horrors that our government wasinvolved in. We desperately need thatspirit again as we resist wars in the future.

Spirit: How did you become involvedwith Nuremberg Action Group in blockingshipments of weapons to Central Americafrom Concord Naval Weapons Station?

Hartsough: Brian Willson, CharlieLiteky and members of Veterans for Peacehad fasted on the steps of the U.S. Capitolfor 40 days to try to stop Congressionalsupport for the wars in Central America.Brian Willson then went on one of the vet-erans’ peace action teams to Nicaragua.When he came back, he was in tears atwhat he had seen in Nicaragua. TheContras had come across the border toattack communities in Nicaragua, includ-ing children’s nurseries, cooperative farmsand medical clinics. He said, “We’ve got todo much more to stop this.”

Spirit: The Nuremberg principles wereestablished during the trial of Nazi lead-ers accused of war crimes, crimes againsthumanity and crimes against peace.

Hartsough: Yes. We called these

actions Nuremberg Actions because wefelt we were upholding not only God’slaw, but international law: the Nurembergprinciples. So indiscriminately killinginnocent men, women and children in ElSalvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala arecrimes against humanity. And to do noth-ing in the face of those war crimes is to becomplicit in those war crimes. So we wereupholding international law by trying tostop these arms shipments.

Spirit: Why did the veterans for peacechoose the Concord base to begin uphold-ing the Nuremberg principles?

Hartsough: Concord Naval WeaponsStation was a major shipping point formunitions to Central America, so in 1987,we decided Concord was the place wherewe needed to hold a blockade. On June 10,1987, Russ Jorgenson, Dorothy Granada,Wendy Kaufmann and I were arrested forsitting on Port Chicago highway and block-ing the first munitions truck at Concord.We spent the weekend in jail.

Then people held a vigil at the Concordbase every single day of the entire summer.Brian decided that starting on September 1,1987, he would begin a fast and block trainscarrying munitions. He had written to theNavy and to the press that the governmenthad a choice to either stop the arms ship-ments to arrest them and take them to jail,or run over them.

Spirit: So Navy officials had advancenotice that Brian and others would be sit-ting on the train tracks?

Hartsough: There were three veteransthat decided to block the trains onSeptember 1. We had an interfaith worshipservice and a press conference and then senta delegation to tell the Navy again that wewere going to be blocking the trains. About11:30 in the morning, after the worship ser-vice, the train started moving towards us.

We had a big banner across the trackssaying, “Stopping the War Starts Here:Nuremberg Actions.” I was in front of thegroup looking at the two guys on the trainand I was yelling at the top of my voice:“There’s people on the tracks. Stop thetrain!” The train actually hit my arm andknocked me down, just outside the tracks.

Instead of slowing down, the train waspicking up speed as it approached BrianWillson and Duncan Murphy and DavidDuncombe sitting on the tracks. Duncanand David jumped off the tracks. Brianwas sitting on the tracks with his legscrossed and the train ran over him. I couldsee Brian being smashed from one side toanother and the train was grinding up hisbody, with blood spurting everywhere.

As the train passed by, I found one of

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Interview with David Hartsoughfrom page 11

The first demonstration David Hartsough ever organized was at the Nike missile site near his home in Pennsylvania.

September 2014 ST R E E T SP I R I T 13

Brian’s severed legs with a shoe and wentrunning toward him. There was a big holein his head, so I put my hand over the holeto try to hold the blood from gushing out.His wife of 10 days, Holly Rauen, was amidwife and had medical training and shewas able to put a tourniquet around his legto stop the blood flow.

The Navy ambulance came and I saidto them, “Take this man to the hospital.He’s dying.” And they said, “We’re notallowed to.”

Spirit: That is so heartless. It makesyou sick. They were just following orders,like the original Nuremberg defendants.

Hartsough: So somebody had to run toa pay phone, and it was another 23 minutesbefore another ambulance came. None of usthought we’d ever see Brian alive again. Hewent through many hours of surgery. Bonesthroughout his body were broken, his skullhad been fractured, and there was a big holein his head. One leg was gone and the otherhad to be amputated.

Luckily after that surgery, he was stillalive. When I went to see him in the hos-pital, he had bandages all over his wholebody, and bandages around his face so Icould only see his eyes. He was not onlyalive, but his commitment to nonviolenceand his commitment to continuing thestruggle at Concord had intensified, ifanything. We had decided to have a rallythat Saturday to recommit ourselves tostopping the trains and stopping the armsshipments. I asked him if there was any-thing he’d like to say to the rally, and Irecorded his statement.

Brian said, “We have to continue thisstruggle because these bombs are killingpeople in Central America, and as soon asI can get out of the hospital, I’ll be backthere with you.”

We had 9,000 people out there atConcord the next Saturday, includingJesse Jackson and Joan Baez and RosarioOrtega, the wife of Daniel Ortega.

We now know it was a decision inWashington, D.C., not to stop the trains,but to essentially scare us into stoppingour actions against the war.

Spirit: Instead of stopping NurembergActions, the Navy’s assault on BrianWillson outraged people, and inspiredthem to come out in more massive num-bers than ever before.

Hartsough: Exactly. For close to threeyears, the Nuremberg Action Group hadpeople blocking the trains and the trucksevery day. Sometimes they would have toarrest two busloads of us to get us off thetracks so they could run their trains andhave their war and keep killing people inCentral America.

Spirit: Brian Willson beat all the oddsand not only survived, but dedicated hislife to working for peace and justice.

Hartsough: He has spent the rest ofhis life acting on that belief that we’rereally all brothers and sisters. And he wasa very inspiring example to people allover the world that there are Americansthat care enough about the death anddestruction that our government is causingthat they’re willing to put their lives onthe line to try to stop it.

Spirit: Hasn’t he become a hero to peo-ple in Nicaragua and Central America?

Hartsough: Yes, to people inNicaragua and throughout Latin America,and people in Israel and Palestine, andmany other countries. He was invited tocome everywhere. They wanted to meetthis person who really acted on his beliefthat American lives aren’t more important

than everybody else’s lives, and we haveto speak out to stop this madness — notjust with words, but with our bodies.

Spirit: One of the most inspiringthings I ever saw was on the 25th anniver-sary of Nuremberg Actions. Brianreturned to the Concord base to speak outfor peace, then he danced on his prosthet-ic legs on the same railroad tracks wherehe had lost his legs.

Hartsough: Governments have thepower to throw us in jail and shoot at usand intimidate us, but they don’t have thepower to kill our spirits, and they certain-ly didn’t kill Brian’s spirit. Our actions atNuremberg were an example of what peo-ple all over this country can do, and havea responsibility to do, if we’re to stop ourgovernment from fighting one war afteranother, and causing misery around theworld.

Spirit: Can you remember back towhat you felt the very first time you visitedBrian in the hospital right after he wasrun over by the train — but before all thatinspiring stuff happened with 9,000 peo-ple gathering in solidarity at Concord?

Hartsough: It was horror, especiallythat first day when this had just happened.Here we were still at the tracks, and ourdear friend had been taken off to the hospi-tal and was presumably going to be dying.Brian and I had talked about doing that firstaction together, and up until that morning, Iwas planning to be on the tracks.

But we had an agreement that anyonewho would block a train or truck had to gothrough a nonviolence training first. Therewere a bunch of people out at the trackswho wanted to block a train, and I was theonly person there who could do a training.So I agreed not to block that first train, butto do a nonviolence training and then wewould block the next train.

Brian and I had been two of the peoplethat had envisioned and planned and orga-nized this. So I felt tremendous responsi-bility that I had caused this guy’s death.Then, when I found him alive — and hisspirits were very much alive even thoughhe was all in bandages and without hislegs — there was tremendous joy in myheart that he had survived this.

This developed a very close kinshipbetween the two of us. I realize how,every day since then, Brian has had to suf-fer. He has suffered from not having hislegs, and he had to suffer the physical andpsychic pain from that train hitting him.So I’ve wanted to be supportive of him inevery way I can. And we’re obviouslyvery, very dear friends. It’s inspiring to

me to know somebody with as much lovein his heart as Brian has for all the peoplein the world.

Spirit: It can be costly to resist warcrimes. The Concord police also beganusing torturous pain holds to remove non-violent demonstrators from the tracks.

Hartsough: Yes. Three of us had ourarms broken by police using pain holds inNovember of 1987 — Rev. David Wylie,Jean Bakewell and I. I was kneeling onthe tracks when the weapons train wasapproaching, and the sheriff’s deputy toldme I had to get off the tracks because thetrain was coming. I said, “I’ll be happy toget off the tracks when you stop shippingarms to kill people.”

So he grabbed my arm and begantwisting it, and when it got so painful Ihad to get up and start walking with him. Iwalked about 20 feet, and he said, “This isto make sure you get off the tracks nexttime.” Then he gave my arm another twistand broke it. I went unconscious.

Spirit: Didn’t the three of you win alawsuit that barred the police from usingthese pain holds?

Hartsough: It was not just pain holds,but they were breaking bones. The ACLUdecided to sue them and it was finally set-tled out of court because the governmentdidn’t want to go to trial. But they agreedto give $50,000 to cover our medicalexpenses. I gave my part of it to Witnessfor Peace and Peace BrigadesInternational. The most important part ofthe settlement was an agreement on thepart of the Sheriff’s Department in ContraCosta County not to use violence againstnonviolent demonstrators.

Spirit: You went on several marcheswith the Occupy movement in Oaklandand San Francisco, and you also helpedorganize forums where the issue of nonvi-olence in Occupy was debated. On amarch to the Port of Oakland, you saidthat Occupy was the most remarkablemovement you had been involved in. Whydid you think that then, and what do youthink of its significance in retrospect?

Hartsough: I think the Occupy move-ment was a tremendous outpouring ofpeople throughout this country in resis-tance to the terrible inequality of thisnation. Instead of a democracy of, by andfor the people, we have a plutocracy — agovernment of, by and for the rich and thecorporations.

In hundreds of cities across the UnitedStates, people tried to stop business asusual, and demanded that our country getback to its basic values and principles.

I think like all other social movements,in order to have a chance, you have tobuild a mass movement, and you have tobe willing to put your lives on the line,blocking the banks and challenging thecorporations that are stealing our democ-racy. And you have to keep marchingeven if the police say it’s illegal.

And all that was happening. And thespirit among the people that were part ofthat movement was absolutely over-whelming. It did bring together homelesspeople and students and old people andlabor unions and religious communities. Ithink we had tremendous potential and Ihope we still do.

Spirit: How do you understand theswift rise and sudden fall of Occupy?

Hartsough: I think the federal govern-ment decided it was a threat to have tensof thousands of people marching andcamping out in the parks and challengingthe unjust institutions so dramatically. Sothey decided to come down very, veryheavy on the Occupy movement. Partly, ithad gotten to be winter and people werecold and wet and tired. I think it was aweakness, if you will, that we allowedourselves to be intimidated by the govern-ment repression and the violent tactics bythe police when they cleared the encamp-ments and arrested people.

Fear and repression is the Achilles’heel of any movement, and almost allgovernments will use fear as a way ofcontrolling people. Unfortunately, wedidn’t have the understanding and com-mitment to realize that was what the gov-ernment was doing, and not let them getthe upper hand.

But I think the Occupy movement doescontinue to live and those people have notjust disappeared. Occupy people are chal-lenging foreclosures around the country.They’re still there and working in manysmaller, less visible ways. I still think apowerful nonviolent movement can beresurrected and turn this country around.

Spirit: Tell me about the events thatled to your working with activists inBosnia and then your arrest in Kosovo.

Hartsough: In 1996, I went to Bosniawith the Fellowship of Reconciliation andthat was right after the shelling ofSarajevo had ended. We saw literally hun-dreds of cemeteries all over Sarajevo, thecapital of Bosnia, all with fresh gravesfrom that war.

In Kosovo, more than 90 percent of thepeople were Albanians, and they werebeing ruled by less than 10 percent of the

Twenty thousand students in Kosovo march nonviolently toward their former university demanding the right to study there.

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Interview withDavid Hartsoughfrom page 12

September 2014ST R E E T SP I R I T14

people who were Serbs. It was anapartheid country. Many Albanians hadlost their jobs, and could not study in theuniversity. Instead of getting guns andturning to armed struggle, they werechoosing nonviolent means to challengethat oppression and that apartheid regime.

So I decided to go there and I met AdemDemaci, who had spent 29 years in prison,very much like Nelson Mandela. He wasthe head of the human rights commissionthere. I met students that were challengingtheir exclusion from the university. I metpolitical prisoners, women’s organizationsand teachers. I spent a couple months withthem and they were all saying they werefacing an apartheid regime.

They told me that Kosovo was anexplosion waiting to happen, and theywanted to form a more active andassertive nonviolent struggle. To do that,they needed international people to cometo Kosovo and be present with them tomake it safer. They asked me to find inter-national people to come and help themengage in nonviolent struggle.

When I went back to Kosovo with asmall group of American students in thespring of 1998, hundreds of thousands ofpeople were marching in the streets —everything from young families with theirbabies in strollers, to old people with theircanes. Yet, the massive protests barely gotany publicity in the rest of the world.

I began doing nonviolence trainings ofthe students, which they had asked for,and the next day, all five of us Americanswere put in prison, and we got major pub-licity for our arrests around the world. Itwas kind of ridiculous because hundredsof thousands of people marching nonvio-lently were ignored, while five interna-tionals who got arrested for trying to sup-port these folks got all this publicity.

Spirit: How long were you held andwhat were conditions like in the jail?

Hartsough: We were sentenced to 10days in jail, but after the third day, there hadbeen so much publicity around the worldthat they came to the jail and took us to theMacedonian border and stamped in ourpassports that we couldn’t come back forten years. We used the publicity to try tobring attention to the nonviolent struggle inKosovo and the need to support it.

The conditions in jail were terrible. Itwas very cold, and there was no heat.They had shaved our heads. There were ahundred rules posted on the wall and thefirst rule said: “Obey all the rules.” It waspretty harsh and inhumane.

Then, in 1999, when some more ethniccleansing had started, President Clintonwent on international television and saidwe have two choices: We can look theother way and do nothing, or we can go inand start bombing. From my perspective,neither of those alternatives are accept-able. We had a third alternative, whichour country and the world had refused totake, and that was to support the nonvio-lent struggle. That was a terrible lostopportunity. If we had done that, I thinkwe had a good chance to help make thattransition to a more democratic societyhappen peacefully, rather than through ahorrendous war. The hatred that existsnow between people in Kosovo and theSerbs will last for generations. And that’swhat happens in every war.

Spirit: Is that what led to your workwith the Nonviolent Peaceforce?

Hartsough: That experience was theimpetus to start the NonviolentPeaceforce. I realized we needed hundredsof trained, nonviolent peacekeepers —courageous people that could go to

Kosovo or anywhere there was a nonvio-lent struggle to help support those folks tosuccessfully challenge oppression.

In the spring of 1999, the HagueAppeal for Peace was happening in theNetherlands where 9,000 peace activistsfrom all over the world came together tolook at how we could end war. So a num-ber of us who were at the Hague Appealcommitted ourselves to building a globalnonviolent peace force.

We started a two-year process of shar-ing this vision with people from otherparts of the world. Then, in 2002, we heldour founding conference in Surajkund,India, outside of Delhi, and started theNonviolent Peaceforce, with peaceactivists from 49 countries present.

We now have a couple hundred trainedinternational peacekeepers that can go intoconflict areas at the invitation of localpeacemakers, and help protect civilians thatare being killed or injured in conflicts.About 80 percent of the people that die inwars and armed conflicts are civilians,many of them children. We’re also there toprotect human rights workers and localpeacemakers whose lives are endangered.

We have been in Sri Lanka. We’represently in Mindanao in the Philippineswhere there has been a decades-longstruggle between the government militaryand the Muslim community. We’re also inSouth Sudan which is in tremendousupheaval right now, and we’re starting aproject in Burma where there are stillsome major conflicts.

Spirit: What was your role in develop-ing the Nonviolent Peaceforce?

Hartsough: Mel Duncan and I wereseen as the cofounders of the NonviolentPeaceforce. We were seen as the peoplewho really took this vision and continuedto reach out to people all around the worldto help bring this vision into being. I wasthe strategic relations director and wasresponsible for reaching out to organiza-tions and groups all around the world.

We wanted the Nonviolent Peaceforceto not just be a group of North Americans.We wanted this to be truly a global forceof people from all over the world. Bothour decision-making body and our volun-teers on the ground are really a mixture ofpeople and races and nationalities fromthe whole world.

Spirit: This idea seems to build on thework of groups like Witness for Peace andPeace Brigades International.

Hartsough: Yes, I started the FriendsPeace Teams, and had worked with PeaceBrigades International and Witness forPeace, and saw that nonviolent peaceteams can have a very important impact,and we wanted to expand this.

Gandhi first envisioned a Shanti Sena,or nonviolent army, so this idea has beenkicking around for a long time. And it wasvery exciting to actually find the people indifferent parts of the world who wanted torealize this vision of Mahatma Gandhi.

Today, the United Nations and manyfriendly governments are beginning tounderstand the power of nonviolentpeacekeeping as an alternative to armedpeacekeeping. Our hope eventually is tohave this seen as an alternative to war andviolent intervention.

Spirit: Have you led peacemaking del-egations to countries in the Middle East?

Hartsough: I have led two peace dele-gations to Iran, and one to Israel andPalestine in the last four or five years.Bush called Iran part of the Axis of Evil,and these countries were seen as the ulti-mate enemies. So what we were reallydoing was just getting to know the Iranianpeople as people. When you know people,it’s very hard to think about killing themor blowing up their society.

We met with members of Parliamentand religious leaders and all kinds of peo-ple in the country, and then came back to

share their stories. Iran has not started awar with another country in 200 years.The United States overthrew their democ-ratically elected government in 1953.

[Editor: Iranian Prime ministerMohammad Mosaddegh was overthrownin 1953 by the United States in a coupafter he nationalized Iran’s oil industry.]

The U.S. also shot down a civilian air-liner and never apologized for that. Wehave troops and bombers surroundingtheir country, and yet we see them as athreat to us. That reality motivated us totry to stop a war with Iran, and to get ournation to resolve its conflicts at the nego-tiation table, not on the battlefield.

Spirit: What happened on your peacedelegation to Israel and Palestine?

Hartsough: Scott Kennedy and I led adelegation to Israel and Palestine in 2009-2010. What most influenced me is that,similar to Kosovo, there is a very broad-based movement, especially in the WestBank, where Palestinians have been chal-lenging the wall, and challenging theirapartheid system where they are treated assecond-class citizens.

They have been resorting to nonviolentstruggle, but unfortunately, Israel has notresponded very positively to that nonviolentstruggle. And there are also many Israelisthat are very committed to justice forPalestinians, and are actually joining inweekly nonviolent demonstrations acrossthe West Bank. It is important to try tobring this to light for the rest of the world.

This is a nonviolent movement where,week after week, people are marching tothe walls that are separating their commu-nities from their fields, and they are beingtear-gassed and shot with rubber bullets.And there are Israelis from the religiouscommunity called Rabbis for HumanRights that are supporting them and actingin solidarity with them.

Israel is using massive bombing and atotal blockade and locking the borders sopeople can’t get in or out — all in aneffort to try to find security. It is exactlythe opposite of what is needed. The onlyreal peace that can be created there is apeace where there is a sense of justice,and where every person is respected fortheir religious beliefs and nationality.

Spirit: It is fascinating to me that,after a lifetime of being involved in manyidealistic campaigns for peace, instead ofbecoming more “practical” or “realis-tic,” you are now involved in perhapsyour most utopian campaign of all — aWorld Beyond War. Is there any real hopeof abolishing warfare?

Hartsough: It’s called World BeyondWar: A Global Movement to End AllWars. The overwhelming numbers of peo-ple in the world do not benefit because ofwar, and are suffering because of war.Our governments continue this anachro-nistic practice of fighting wars becausethat’s how they think they’ll get security.

We know that wars are not working.Wars are bankrupting us. Trillions of dol-lars are being wasted on wars and prepa-ration for wars. And that forces the gov-ernments to cut funds for every social pro-gram and from schools and environmentalprograms and parks and homeless pro-grams and low-income housing and pro-grams for the elderly and children.

Spirit: How are peace activists build-ing this movement to abolish war?

Hartsough: We have over 4,000 peo-ple who have signed a Declaration ofPeace. [This is available at www.worldbe-yondwar.org.] We have 68 countrieswhere people have signed the Declarationof Peace. People who have signed thisdeclaration are committed to not engagein or support wars of any kind and towork nonviolently to end all wars.

We have committees that are workingon strategy, fundraising, outreach, nonvio-lent training, and the use of social media.

We have people doing the research todocument that wars are not working andthat there are viable alternatives to warright now. The campaign is still in its ini-tial stages. We have to do a tremendousamount of education not only amongpeace people, but all the groups that couldbenefit by ending war.

Ending war is possible if the people ofthe world realize that those of us whowant peace are the massive majority, andwe have to force our governments to lis-ten to us. We need to challenge our gov-ernments to stop this nonsense, and if theydon’t listen to us, we will engage in mas-sive nonviolent resistance.

Spirit: You have recently written abook about your lifetime work for peaceand justice. Can you tell us about it?

Hartsough: My book is Waging Peace:Global Adventures of a Lifelong Activist. Itshares my experiences with nonviolentmovements over the last 60 years. I thinkthat we all need to be inspired by the storiesof people that have been engaging in nonvi-olent resistance around the world.

Hopelessness is maybe our greatestenemy. So people end up feeling disem-powered, and that there’s nothing we cando to change things. In this book, I’m try-ing to challenge that sense of hopeless-ness and powerlessness. The status quowants us to believe that we’re powerlessand that we’re nobodies.

But people in the Philippines, inLiberia, in Eastern Europe, in Tunisia, inEgypt, and in many other parts of theworld understand that they’re not power-less, and that nonviolent struggle is themost effective means to challenge oppres-sive governments. This book shares myown experiences with nonviolent move-ments that have made an enormous differ-ence in changing the world.

Spirit: In light of your involvement incountless social-change movements, whatare the three movements that you found tobe the most inspiring?

Hartsough: I would say the CivilRights movement in this country, theOccupy movement, and the movementagainst the Vietnam War.

Spirit: Why do these three movementsstand out as the most extraordinary?

Hartsough: During the movement toend the Vietnam war, communities allacross this country — churches and laborunions, university and high school stu-dents, women’s groups — decided thatthe war in Vietnam was a lie and waskilling millions of people in our name andwith our tax dollars, and they were goingto have to stop it. That same commitmentis what we have to create again in theWorld Beyond War movement today.

The Civil Rights movement started withone woman, Rosa Parks, in Montgomery,Alabama. It started with four students inGreensboro, North Carolina. Both of thoseactions were sparks that ignited people allover the South, and then eventually peopleall over the country, to stop the insanity ofsegregation and second-class citizenship.People put their own lives on the line tocreate a society that could truly be called ajust and democratic society. Those sparksignited a whole movement of thousands ofpeople willing to risk arrest and violence.

The Occupy movement was a real signof hope. Occupy was the most recent ofthese movements and, again, it wassparked by people at the grass roots of oursociety. People saw a totally serious flawin our society. They saw that the govern-ment is really being controlled by the richand the corporations while ignoring thewell-being of the people. We’ve got totake back our government for the peopleand the Occupy movement was trying todo that. It was inspiring that so many peo-ple left their comfortable homes and wentout on the streets and acted to get thiscountry back on track.

Interview with David Hartsoughfrom page 13

September 2014 ST R E E T SP I R I T 15

by David Hartsough

Irecently returned from three weeks inKorea and Vietnam, countries still suf-fering from the ravages of war. North

and South Korea are caught in the tragicCold War mentality with a divided countryimposed on them by the United States backin 1945 and solidified in 1948. Ten millionfamilies were separated by the division intoNorth and South Korea.

People in South Korea cannot phone,write or visit relatives or friends in NorthKorea and vice versa. One Catholic priestfrom South Korea I met spent three-and-a-half years in prison in South Korea for visit-ing North Korea on a peace mission.

The border between North and SouthKorea is a battle zone where hot warcould break out at any moment. The U.S.and South Korean military regularly con-duct full-scale, live-fire war gamesinvolving up to 300,000 troops simulatingboth defensive and offensive war, includ-ing armed war planes right up to the bor-der of North Korea. North Korea regularlymakes threats of war as well.

The Soviet Union is no more and it istime for the United States to ask forgive-ness of the people of South and NorthKorea for imposing this state of war onthe two countries, sign a peace agreementwith North Korea to officially end theKorean war, recognize the government ofNorth Korea and agree to negotiate all dif-ferences at the conference table, not onthe battlefield.

RESISTANCE ON JEJU ISLAND

I spent most of my time in Korea onJeju Island, a beautiful island 50 milessouth of the South Korean mainlandwhere between 30,000 and 80,000 peoplewere assassinated back in 1948 underorders from U.S. military command. Thepeople of Jeju Island had strongly resistedthe Japanese occupation during WorldWar II and, along with most people inKorea, were looking forward to a free andindependent nation.

However, instead of a unified country,the United States imposed a strongly anti-communist government on South Korea.Especially on Jeju Island, all who resisteda militarized and anti-communist SouthKorea were assassinated.

Because of the anti-communist dicta-torships in power for decades after 1948,the people of Jeju Island were not allowedto even talk about this past or they wouldbe suspected of being communist sympa-thizers and severely punished.

Only in 2003, President Roh Moo-hyunapologized on behalf of the Korean govern-ment for the massacre of the people on JejuIsland in 1948. Jeju Island was thendeclared an “Island of Peace” and was alsodeclared a “World Heritage Site” becauseof its coral reefs and natural beauty.

But now the U.S. government has decid-ed on the “pivot to Asia” and plans to movethe focus of U.S. military operations toAsia, presumably to encircle China withmilitary bases and prepare for the next war.The village of Gangjeong has been chosenas the port for a massive military basewhich officially will be a Korean militarybase, but in reality is seen as a place forU.S. military ships to help “contain” China.Thus, the fear is that Jeju Island couldbecome a focal point for a new war.

Since plans for the base were firstannounced seven years ago, the people ofGangjeong have been resisting the con-struction of the base and for the past fouryears, they have been nonviolently block-ing bulldozers and cement trucks comingonto the base. Activists from South Korea(many in the Catholic church) have joinedin this nonviolent resistance.

Every day there is a Catholic Mass in

which priests and nuns block the mainentrance to the base. They are then carriedoff by the police when many cementtrucks are lined up trying to get onto thebase. When the police step aside after thetrucks have entered the base, the priestsand nuns carry their chairs back to contin-ue blocking the entrance to the base — allthe time in deep prayer.

I joined them for the last two days Iwas on Jeju Island. After the mass eachday which lasts about two hours, theactivists come and do a dance blockingthe main gate for another hour or so.Some of the people acting on their con-science blocking the entrance have spentover one year in prison. Others have hadheavy fines imposed on them for their actsof conscience. But still the nonviolentresistance continues.

Some Koreans are working hard forreconciliation and peace between Northand South Korea. But the governments ofthe United States, South Korea and NorthKorea continue their military confronta-tion. And now, if this base is built, therewill be another very large military base inSouth Korea. Concerned Americans needto support the nonviolent movement ofthe people on Jeju Island to stop the con-struction of the military base there.

I believe that the American peopleneed to demand that our government stopthe Pax Americana way of relating to therest of the world. We need to settle ourdifferences with China, North Korea andall nations by negotiations at the confer-ence table, not through projecting our mil-itary power through threats and the build-ing of more military bases.

And now on to Vietnam. In April of thisyear, I spent two weeks in Vietnam as partof a Veterans for Peace delegation hostedby a group of American veterans living inVietnam. The focus of our visit was to learnabout how the people of Vietnam continueto suffer from the American war in

Vietnam which ended 39 years ago. I encountered the friendliness of the

Vietnamese people who welcomed us,invited us into their homes, and have for-given us for all the suffering, pain anddeath our country inflicted on them in theAmerican war in Vietnam, with a hope thatwe can live in peace with one another.

I reflected on the horrendous suffering,pain and death caused by the war inVietnam. If the United States had abidedby the Geneva accords which ended theFrench war with Vietnam in 1954 and hadallowed free elections in all of Vietnam in1956, three million Vietnamese would nothave had to die in the American war inVietnam. Two million of those who diedwere Vietnamese civilians.

The U.S. military dropped more thaneight million tons of bombs on Vietnam— more bombs than were dropped by allsides in World War II — killing, maimingand forcing people to flee their homes andforcing many of them to live in tunnels. InQuang Tri province, four tons of bombswere dropped for every person in thatprovince, the equivalent of eightHiroshima-sized atomic bombs.

The people of Vietnam are still suffer-ing and dying from the unexploded ord-nance and the Agent Orange dropped onVietnam by the United States during thewar. Ten percent of the bombs dropped onVietnam did not explode on impact and arestill exploding in people’s back yards, intheir fields and in their communities, caus-ing people of all ages, including many chil-dren, to lose their limbs, eyesight or bekilled or otherwise maimed.

An estimated 800,000 tons of unexplod-ed ordnance is still in the ground inVietnam. Since the end of the war, at least42,000 people have lost their lives andanother 62,000 have been injured or perma-nently disabled due to unexploded bombs.

More than 20 million gallons of herbi-cides were sprayed on the Vietnamese peo-

ple and countryside, including 15 milliongallons of Agent Orange, to defoliate thetrees and crops. There are three millionVietnamese victims of Agent Orange withdeformed bodies and minds who are stillsuffering from this highly toxic chemicalthree generations later. Agent Orange getsinto the genes and is passed from genera-tion to generation so children are still beingborn deformed in mind and body.

We visited orphanages of children tragi-cally affected by Agent Orange who willnever be able to live a normal life. We vis-ited homes where children were lying onthe bed or floor, not able to control theirbodies or even recognize that people werenearby. A mother or grandmother spends24 hours a day with the child, loving andcomforting them. It was almost more thanour hearts could bear.

The (American) Veterans for PeaceChapter 160 in Vietnam is helping sup-port projects like Project Renew in whichthe Vietnamese are trained to safelyremove or detonate bombs or other explo-sives found in their communities. Theyare also supporting the VietnamFriendship Village and orphanages andfamilies where one or more family mem-bers cannot work by buying them a cowor putting a roof on their home or helpingstart enterprises that can generate incomefor the family.

Our delegation contributed $21,000toward the orphanages and in support offamilies suffering from Agent Orange andunexploded explosives — a drop in thebucket compared with the need, but it wasdeeply appreciated.

The U.S. government should takeresponsibility for alleviating the sufferingand pain our war is still causing the peo-ple of Vietnam and contribute the hun-dreds of millions of dollars necessary toclean up both the Agent Orange and unex-ploded ordnance and support the families

A Journey of Peace in Korea and Vietnam

During his recent trip to Vietnam, David Hartsough met mothers and children suffering from the effects of Agent Orange.

The U.S. military dropped more than eight million tons of bombs on Vietnam — morebombs than were dropped by all sides in World War II. The people of Vietnam are stillsuffering and dying from the unexploded ordnance and the Agent Orange dropped onVietnam by the United States during the war.

See Journey of Peace page 16

September 2014ST R E E T SP I R I T16

and victims still suffering from the war. The Vietnamese are ready to do the

work, but need financial assistance. WeAmericans have caused this tragedy. Wehave the moral responsibility to clean it up.

It was powerful to experience Vietnamin the company of U.S. veterans who hadbeen part of the killing and destructionduring the war and who are now findinghealing from the pain of their war experi-ences 40 or more years ago, throughreaching out to the people of Vietnamwho are still suffering from the war.

One U.S. veteran told us that after thewar, he could not live with himself orwith anyone else, and lived as far away ashe could from other people — about ahundred miles north of Anchorage,Alaska. He said he worked on an oilpipeline by day, and was drunk or high ondrugs the rest of the time to escape fromthe pain of his war experience. He saidthere were hundreds of other veterans alsoliving in the backwoods of Alaska whowere going through the same experience.

Only after enduring 30 years of helldid he finally decide to go back toVietnam. Now he has gotten to know thepeople of Vietnam and has found pro-found healing for himself. He said theworst decision of his life was to go toVietnam as a soldier and the best decisionwas to come back to Vietnam as a friendof the people of Vietnam.

A bill has passed Congress allocating$66 million to commemorate the war inVietnam in 2015, the 40th anniversary ofthe end of the war. Many in Washingtonhope to clean up the image of the war inVietnam by showing that it was a “goodwar” and something for which Americansshould be proud.

After my recent trip to Vietnam, I feelvery strongly that we must not allow ourgovernment to clean up the image of theVietnam War. The Vietnam War was ahorrible war, as are all wars. Hopefullywe will learn from history, as well as fromour religious teachings, that war is not theanswer. War does not solve conflicts, butinstead sows the seeds of future wars.

War is a moral disaster for everyone,

including those who do the killing. There isa very high number of suicides by bothactive-duty soldiers and veterans, and thesouls of all the rest of us are also wounded.

The United States could be the mostloved nation in the world if we movedfrom our Pax Americana way of relatingto the world to a worldview of a globalhuman family. We need to work forshared security for all people on earth andact on that belief by spending the hun-dreds of billions we currently spend onwars and preparation for wars for humanand environmental needs in the UnitedStates and worldwide.

We could help end world hunger, andhelp build schools and medical clinics incommunities around the world. We couldhelp build a decent life for every personon the planet. That would be a much moreeffective means of fighting terrorism thanour present effort to find security throughever more armaments, nuclear weaponsand military bases circling our planet.

I invite you to join many of us who arebuilding a Global Movement to End AllWar. Go to www.worldbeyondwar.organd sign the Declaration of Peace. Look atthe ten-minute video and become active in

this movement to end the addiction to vio-lence and war which is so endemic in thiscountry and around the world.

I believe that 99% of the world’s peo-ple could benefit and feel much safer andhave a much better quality of life if wewere to end our addiction to war as ameans of resolving conflicts and devotethose funds to promoting a better life forall people on the planet.

My experiences in Korea and Vietnamhave only strengthened my belief that this isthe path we must take if we are to surviveas a species and build a world of peace andjustice for our children and grandchildrenand for all generations to come.

For more information about the strug-gle on Jeju Island, Korea, see thewww.savejejunow.org website and thefilm, “Ghosts of Jeju.”

For more information about Vietnamand what the Veterans for Peace aredoing to help support those sufferingfrom Agent Orange and unexploded ord-nance, see http://vfp-vn.ning.com/

To find out more about theMovement to End All War, seewww.worldbeyondwar.org.

young people are able to express theirpassions and their concerns for social jus-tice. For some months now, they havebeen engaged in the subject of prisons andall that is associated with them.

It all came about when J.R. Furstdropped in at the YSA studio. Furst, age30, is an artist, musician, street performerand writer. “Art is sort of like my salva-tion,” he says.

Furst explains how he “gravitatedtoward letter writing” and has connectedwith many pen pals. He recalls seeing themovie “Hurricane” about Ruben“Hurricane” Carter, “a boxer who wassent to prison for a murder he didn’t com-mit and a young man writes to him.”

Furst says, “That stuck in my head. Iwent to this website called writeaprison-er.com.” He now has five incarcerated penpals. One of those five, Glen Robinson,made a profound impression on him.

“He has a very powerful message,”Furst says. “From the beginning is hisstrong desire and pledge to be of serviceto the community and to find a level oftranscendence. He’s there (in jail) 24hours a day with the ghost of the past, butthe powerful part is not victimization andself-pity. He really dug deep on somelevel of acceptance.”

For two years, he has been correspond-ing with Robinson and saving all his let-ters. He set up a website, beyondthis-prison.com connecting specifically withGlen Robinson, and a project he callsBeyond This Prison for “bringing out histhemes and ideas in the community andcreating art based on that.”

Seeking to involve young people, Furstapproached Youth Spirit Artworks withthe project and found they were interest-ed. He brought them some of Robinson’sletters and it lit a spark with the youth.

Furst said it was very meaningful tosee the young people of YSA respondintently to Robinson’s letters. “They oftensay he’s saying things that I’m experienc-ing that I didn’t have words for,” Furstsays. Several began their own correspon-dence with Robinson.

YSA Executive Director SallyHindman and Art Director VictorMavedzenge decided that the summerwould be devoted to the Beyond ThisPrison Project, “making art on the topic offreedom and imprisonment.” It would tiein with the campaign for Proposition 47.

They decided to work on “art actions,”

which will be flash exhibits at local mallswhere they will pass out literature aboutthe ballot initiative.

Teacher and artist Mavedzengeexplains, “What this project aims to do isto make the youth reflect on what freedommeans to them. So the whole concept offreedom can be looked at from a lot ofdifferent angles, but when you considerthe fact that some people go to jail forminor crimes such as stealing diapers,then the whole question becomes: whydid somebody have to steal diapers?

“It’s such a basic necessity and theyget a jail record for that. This is why wesupport Proposition 47. So within thisproject, we then question what is it thatled people to be in a situation that limitstheir freedom, like being in prison. And itall boils down to the economic situationwe’re living in. People of color have beensubjected to less opportunity, stigmatiza-tion, police brutality. So many things havegone on in the community that has affect-ed people’s freedom.”

Mavedzenge refers to the correspon-dence with Robinson whose writings haveinspired the youth. “He writes to us abouthis reflections about what life means.What does it mean to be on the street anddealing and hustling and living a life ofcrime to survive? And these reflectionsreally have told us to look into ourselvesand ask what life is all about.”

Mavedzenge recites one of his favoritequotes from Robinson’s letters: “Themask we wear to fool others is the samemask we wear to fool ourselves.” One ofthe young artists at YSA, Brendon Harris,used this quotation on his painting.

According to Mavedzenge, it is impor-tant for the young artists to see “thesereflections from somebody who is inprison calling out to the youth to say, ‘Donot walk the road I walked.’ There arebetter choices to be made — no matterwhat circumstance you are under.”

Approaching the subject of Prop. 47and incarceration from the aspect of free-dom, Mavedzenge invited the young peo-ple to write short statements on “whatfreedom means to me.” He received somethoughtful and inspiring responses. Wequote a few short excerpts.

Julia Tello observed that, “We cannottruly exercise our freedom until we alloweveryone to be free, and most important,free ourselves.”

She also said, “Here at Youth SpiritArtworks, I’m trying to incorporate what Ithink freedom means in my art, as well as

trying to spread the awareness of howpeople are taking others’ freedom away.”

“When freedom comes to the mind, itmakes me think about the Black Panthersor the Civil Rights movement,” wroteZayfi RA Ashe. On another note, he said,“Possessing freedom in your imaginationhelps you create things that you neverthought you could ever do, and in thatprocess you might become an inspirationto more people.”

Georgina Woodlaw wrote, “Freedomto me means free of judgment to expressyourself in life — not to judge people —be caring, kind to one another.” Referringto her participation in the Beyond ThisPrison project, she added, “I also think theprison project helped me through withwriting my dad more while he’s in jail.”

Michael Blanco got straight to the point.“The system we live by is flawed. That’swhy 38 percent of the prison population isBlack and 21 percent of the prison popula-tion is Hispanic. That’s why I get butterflies

and cold sweats when I see an enforcer ofthe law. A man that is supposed to by mysavior becomes my tormentor.”

The art that the young people have cre-ated over the summer on the YSA BeyondThis Prison program is impressive. Talentand inspiration and a dedicated teacherhave produced an exhibit that is a pleasureto view and carries an important messageas well. Calling it Front Line Art, theywill be taking it to 10 locations in the areaand distributing flyers supportingProposition 47. They expect to start inmid-September.

from page 1

Youth Spirit Artworks and Prop 47

Georgina Woodlaw works with Youth Spirit Artworks. She said sheloves working with color. She calls her painting, "Abstract of a Lady."

Lydia Gansphoto

To learn more about gettinginvolved in Youth Spirit Artworks orsupporting YSA’s work to pass Prop.47, email shindman@youthspiritart-works.org or call 510-282-0396. YSAalways needs new volunteers, includingBoard members and other volunteers!Also, YSA hopes you will “Like”Youth Spirit Artworks on Facebook!!!”

Journey of Peace in Korea and Vietnamfrom page 15