3. You accidentally become an activist: Being a dork, you want to be a groupie for this guy, but you don’t have the nerve to quit college and join the woman who actually follows the band around the country.
Instead, after the 1979 Three Mile Island accident, you go to the No Nukes rally in Washington DC – your first big demonstration – because you want to see him. It’s seven years past 12th grade, when you’d written to the War Resisters League to get all that draft info. Now for the first time you meet real war resisters. The banner over their table says so. You sign their mailing list, buy their merch. Jackson’s on stage telling everyone to go home and get involved. Again you are breathless.
4. You find community: You join the local SEA Alliance, organize buses to the September NYC No Nukes rally, serve as a peacekeeper, and get to go to that fantastic three-night series of concerts at Madison Square Garden* https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081242/
A few months later, you go through nonviolent civil disobedience training and take part in your first action, a blockade at the headquarters of the utility company that owns Three Mile Island. Terrified, you follow the rules and go limp as four cops drag you away. You’re too scared to do what the experienced leaders do: refuse to cooperate and go to jail. You pay $25 to go home. (Maybe. Or you might be mixing that fine up with a later arrest.)
(That’s me in the bottom left photo, turned away from the camera, next to the guy in sunglasses.)
You meet more boyfriends. Start a local War Resisters League chapter. Your first date with your future husband is graffitiing Rutgers with a pizza box containing a spray paint can and a stencil that says, “Resist the Draft.” It’s fun, as are all the other little “stealth” and in-the-open actions:
- walking into a lecture hall where a frat is showing Debbie Does Dallas and gently pouring several bottles of bleach down the floor so people would have to leave, then running like hell (it was the era before Internet porn and the time of a lot of feminist pushback against porn)
- climbing up to hang banners from train trestles and billboards
- staging die-ins at military recruiting events on campus
- etc. (Who can remember anymore?)
In 1981 you get fired from your first job after college – teaching English to adults in a business school – because you’re tired of the stupid grammar workbooks and decide to teach them proofreading via antinuclear leaflets and that long, unpunctuated passage in Johnny Got His Gun. Before that, you persuade the school’s owner to let you create a library. He gives you an empty storage room and $200 ($800 now). You go to a fabulous used bookstore in a tiny NJ town and fill the new library with everything you like, including Living My Life by Emma Goldman and every other leftist book you can find.
5. You and your future husband decide to shape your lives around activism: You live as cheaply as possible so you don’t have to waste much time on jobs. You teach writing workshops. He works part-time fixing bicycles and has left-over bar mitzvah money. The bike shop owner gives you space for the War Resisters League chapter to become a peace center. You get a printing press donated and set up Plowshares Press, a “movement” print shop supporting leftist causes. You talk the nonprofit in charge of poet/dead soldier Joyce Kilmer’s birthplace into letting you live as caretakers in the two-room apartment upstairs, paying only $50 for rent. (An old man and two dogs live in a van in the parking lot. You’ll cross paths again in five years, become friends, then publish his eulogy in eight. https://wordsforabetterworld.org/nanopoblano-day-28/) You decide to have a kid and tell the future husband he has dibs on being the father but he must decide soon because three others have offered. (You’ve gone from being a dork to being an idiot.)
* I wrote about this on Day 8 – Things We Believed Were Possible.
