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Rosalie Riegle has just published a wonderful collection called "Doing Time for Peace: Resistance, Family, and Community," in which she transcribes her interviews of 68 peace resisters, friends, and family members -- selected from 173 whom Riegle interviewed between 2004 and 2007. The book is not in the least polemical, more sociological. The speakers struggle with their memories and goals, and with questions about whether what they do is worth it.The question of whether a sacrifice has been worth the effort often remains an open question for a very long time. This book collects heroic, inspiring, and eye-opening actions and presents them with undeniable honesty and humility. Imagine if millions of people were to read this book. Suddenly countless actions done quietly or with little notice would be having a whole new kind of impact, and actions engaged in decades back would be revived -- perhaps in a more illuminating manner than before, as a result of the insights gained by the participants.
One resister quoted in "Doing Time for Peace," Kathleen Rumpf, recalled an action she was part of in 1983:"[W]e went [into the hangar] and saw the B-52 and began hammering. My little hammer would ping and then almost fly in my face without even leaving a mark. I painted on the plane: 'This is our cry, this is our prayer of peace in the world.' And the symbols we brought with us -- the pictures of the children, the indictment that we put on the plane, the blood we poured . . . . I hung paper peace cranes on the different engines. (The FBI kept calling the cranes 'paper airplanes' like they called blood 'red substance.')
"We had decided we'd do twenty minutes of hammering and putting our stuff around, no more. In reality, we were there for about two and a half hours. We didn't want to do more destruction, and we kept wondering what to do next. We phoned the press from their top security lines. We sang and prayed out on the tarmac. We went back in to go to the bathroom. We went up into a B-52 and looked around. Now, we were charged with sabotage. Had we been about that, we certainly would have had time to do it. Anyway, finally we were able to wave somebody down to arrest us. They were going to take us to the Burger King and drop us off, like they usually do for protests at Griffiss. I said, 'Well, gee! You might want to check Hangar 101 before you release us.'"
"So they go to the hangar and then they get on the walkie-talkies, and then we had about sixteen or eighteen guys with forty-inch necks, marching double time with M-16 rifles. They made us kneel in the sand, holding rifles on us.
"Then sitting on that bus . . . for eight, nine hours . . . with my hands behind my back and hearing this constant 'Shut up! Shut up!' We'd say, 'Well, we didn't join the military, you did.'"
The heroes -- and I use the term intentionally -- in this book include atheists and members of various religions, but they are disproportionately Catholic and part of the Catholic Worker movement. This raises all sorts of questions for an atheist like myself who believes both that the world would be better off without religion and that the world would be better off if more people behaved as do these religiously motivated Catholics.
One resister quoted in "Doing Time for Peace," Kathleen Rumpf, recalled an action she was part of in 1983:"[W]e went [into the hangar] and saw the B-52 and began hammering. My little hammer would ping and then almost fly in my face without even leaving a mark. I painted on the plane: 'This is our cry, this is our prayer of peace in the world.' And the symbols we brought with us -- the pictures of the children, the indictment that we put on the plane, the blood we poured . . . . I hung paper peace cranes on the different engines. (The FBI kept calling the cranes 'paper airplanes' like they called blood 'red substance.')
"We had decided we'd do twenty minutes of hammering and putting our stuff around, no more. In reality, we were there for about two and a half hours. We didn't want to do more destruction, and we kept wondering what to do next. We phoned the press from their top security lines. We sang and prayed out on the tarmac. We went back in to go to the bathroom. We went up into a B-52 and looked around. Now, we were charged with sabotage. Had we been about that, we certainly would have had time to do it. Anyway, finally we were able to wave somebody down to arrest us. They were going to take us to the Burger King and drop us off, like they usually do for protests at Griffiss. I said, 'Well, gee! You might want to check Hangar 101 before you release us.'"
"So they go to the hangar and then they get on the walkie-talkies, and then we had about sixteen or eighteen guys with forty-inch necks, marching double time with M-16 rifles. They made us kneel in the sand, holding rifles on us.
"Then sitting on that bus . . . for eight, nine hours . . . with my hands behind my back and hearing this constant 'Shut up! Shut up!' We'd say, 'Well, we didn't join the military, you did.'"
The heroes -- and I use the term intentionally -- in this book include atheists and members of various religions, but they are disproportionately Catholic and part of the Catholic Worker movement. This raises all sorts of questions for an atheist like myself who believes both that the world would be better off without religion and that the world would be better off if more people behaved as do these religiously motivated Catholics.
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