Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for SANE (or rather its successor, Peace Action)
Markin comment:
As I have mentioned in earlier blog entries my very first public political act occurred in 1960 when I attended a SANE anti-nuclear weapons demonstration on the Boston Common. I was thrilled, if somewhat apprehensive as a fourteen year old (and youngest participant in the demo, as I recall), to be marching in the same cause as Doctor Spock, Eleanor Roosevelt and other liberal luminaries of the day. I was also somewhat naïve, as to be expected, about how that task, in my mind the task of American unilateral nuclear disarmament, was to take place. The naïve part then was really the failure to know that such a task would take a revolution, would take a life and death struggle against American imperialism, and was not going to take place with Doctor Spock, Eleanor Roosevelt, and those other liberal luminaries at my side. But such is political life.
So much for nostalgia. Or at least nostalgia for the old days. The central purpose of this entry is rather to mark my 50 years of “professional” protesting with a few comments, more random musings than anything else. Those quote marks around the word professional are placed there because this is what an old girlfriend back in the days called me. Especially every time I balked at a date because I had some pressing political task to do. But see, here is where she was wrong (as I told her at the time). If by professional she meant that I was getting paid for my profession (which WAS her meaning) then over the last fifty years of political work I have a net loss balance. If I had to subsist on “earnings” from politics I would be on the dole. This same girlfriend (who, by the way, at that time was no mean politico herself) called me, on another occasion, a “chronic” protester. Well, perhaps, but I think that if she had, in either case, just called me a wannabe-Bolshevik I would not have quarreled with that. Although that is my assessment now, more so than then. Needless to say that girlfriend and I did not last long. The last I heard, several years back, she was married to a dentist and a happy grandmother. I hope so.
At that first SANE demonstration, beside the thrill of being there with my liberal heroes at my back (not literally, of course), I had my first “red-baiting” incident. Needless to say I was furious because then although I was rather agnostic on working with communists, known or unknown (mostly the latter as I found out later), I was emphatically not one myself. I was in my family-of-the left phase (although I would not have known then to call it that) where anyone who was for nuclear disarmament, black civil rights in the South, and other good things was my kindred. Funny, how things turn around though. Later in some causes, especially in the later parts of the anti-Vietnam War struggle, when "redness" was a badge of political correctness I was worried when I was not called a Bolshevik. So be it.
I will not bore the reader with a list of various demonstrations, meetings, conferences, sit-ins, and strikes that I have participated in, one way or the other, over the past fifty years. Praise be. Except to say the following and kind of bring things to the present. At that now hallowed SANE demonstration, with its twenty or thirty participants, there were mainly Quakers, pacifists, closet “reds”, and little old ladies in tennis sneakers (to use a phrase of the day to designate oddball political types). Recently, on December 16, 2010, I was down in Washington, D.C. in support of the Veterans For Peace-led civil disobedience action in front of Obama’s imperial White House in order to protest his Afghan and Iraq war policies. Among the few hundred demonstrators (and 131 civil disobedience arrestees), beside the veterans, were Quakers, pacifists, and little old ladies in running shoes (progress on the foot apparel front, right?).
But know this, apart from obvious political disagreements with other participants, this action was an appropriate way to end my first fifty years of political activism. And I hope as long as I can I will be that chronic "professional" protester of that long ago girlfriend’s fury. More importantly, mark this date- December 16, 2010-haltingly or not, politically naïve or not, few in number or not-The Resistance Has Begun!
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