We moved to Orange, Virginia, for a job in Culpeper. Then I picked up a job in D.C. at a place called the Bureau of National Affairs and began a crazy daily commute. I'd accepted a job there writing for two newsletters, one for labor unions and the other for "human resource managers." I'd been promised I would not have to write against workers or unions. In reality, I was required to take the same piece of news, such as a ruling by the National Labor Relations Board, and report on it in terms of how to build up a union and then in terms of how to screw your employees. I refused to do it. I quit. I had a wife now with her own job. I had a mortgage. I had no job prospects.
I took a temporary job knocking on doors to raise money to save the Chesapeake Bay. The first day I set some kind of record. The second day I sucked. It was work I believed should be done. But it sure was a drag doing it. I clearly could not do a job with a supervisor editing me, or a job I opposed morally, or a job that didn't challenge me. What in the world could I do? Here's where ACORN came in, and the model I've followed ever since of working for people based at least 500 miles away from me.
ACORN had gone for decades without ever having a public relations person, someone at the national level to write press releases and schmooze with journalists, to train activists in speaking to TV cameras, to place op-eds, ghost-write speeches, or go on C-Span to explain why restaurant lobbyists don't actually know better what's good for workers than workers do. I took the job. Anna took a DC job. We moved to Cheverly, Maryland. And I became a workaholic. ACORN was a mission, not a career. It was all-in and I was all into it.
But it did sometimes seem like we were taking one step forward and two back. We'd pass local minimum wage or fair lending laws, and lobbyists would preempt them at the state level. We'd pass state laws, and they'd move on Congress. When 9/11 happened, my immaturity and naivete' were staggering. When everybody working on domestic issues immediately understood that nothing could be done anymore, that the minimum wage would not be having any value restored to it as had been planned, etc., I'll be damned if I could see any logic or connection. Why should people earn less money because some lunatics flew planes into buildings? Apparently this was the logic of war. And when war drums began beating I was flabbergasted. What in the world? Hadn't 9/11 just proved the uselessness of weapons of war to protect anybody from anything?
When the Bush-Cheney wars started, I went to every protest, but my job was domestic issues at ACORN. Or it was until I picked up a second job working for Dennis Kucinich for President 2004. A presidential campaign is a 24/7 job, just like ACORN. I worked them both for months before switching over to Kucinich alone. At that point, my colleagues in the communications department of the campaign let me know that (1) the campaign was a disastrous pile of in-fighting and incompetence, and (2) I was now going to be in charge of it as "press secretary." Yet I was and remain grateful for having been brought on, I grew ever more to admire, and still do, our candidate, whom I found generally terrific to work with, and I simply proceeded to take few bathroom breaks, eat at my desk, and bathe infrequently, until I could do no more for the hopeless cause.
Years later ACORN was destroyed in large part by a right-wing fraud. I wished I was still there, not because I had a plan to save ACORN, but just to be there to try.
Kucinich for President was my first peace job. We talked about peace, war, peace, trade, peace, healthcare, war, and peace. And then it was over. I got a job for the AFL-CIO overseeing their organization of labor media outlets, mostly labor union newsletters. And then I got a job for a group called Democrats.com trying to stop a disastrous bill in Congress on bankruptcies. I'd never been a fan of most Democrats or Republicans, but I'd supported Dennis, and I thought I could support a group aimed at making the Democrats better. I still have many friends I fully respect who believe in that agenda to this day, while I find independent activism and education more strategic.
In May 2005, I proposed to Democrats.com that I work on trying to end the wars, in response to which I was told I should work on something easier like trying to impeach George W. Bush. We began by creating a group called After Downing Street and forcing news of what was called the Downing Street Memo or the Downing Street Minutes into U.S. media as evidence of the obvious, that Bush and gang had lied about the war on Iraq. We worked with Democrats in Congress who were pretending that they'd end the wars and impeach the president and the vice president if they were given majorities in 2006. I worked with many peace groups during this time, including United for Peace and Justice, and tried to nudge the peace movement toward impeachment and vice versa.
In 2006, the exit polls said the Democrats won the majorities in Congress with a mandate to end the war on Iraq. Come January, Rahm Emanuel told the Washington Post they'd keep the war going in order to run "against" it again in 2008. By 2007, Democrats had lost much of their interest in peace and moved on to what seemed to me like the agenda of electing more Democrats as an end in itself. My own focus had become ending each and every war and the idea of ever starting another one.
On Armistice Day 2005, and expecting our first kid, and with me able to work by internet from anywhere, we moved back to Charlottesville. We made more money by selling the house we'd bought in Maryland than I've made from any job. We used it to pay for half of the house in Charlottesville that we're still struggling to pay for the other half of.
I became a fulltime peace activist. I joined the board of the local peace center here. I joined all kinds of coalitions and groups nationally. I traveled to speak and protest. I sat-in on Capitol Hill. I camped out at Bush's ranch in Texas. I drafted articles of impeachment. I wrote books. I went to jail. I built websites for peace organizations. I went on book tours. I spoke on panels. I debated war advocates. I did interviews. I occupied squares. I visited war zones. I studied peace activism, past and present. And I began getting that question everywhere I went: How did you become a peace activist?
How did I? Are there patterns to be found in my story and others'? Does something in the above help explain it? I now work for RootsAction.org, which was created to serve as an online activist center that would back all things progressive including peace. And I work as the director of World Beyond War, which I co-founded as an organization to push globally for better education and activism aimed at abolition of the systems that sustain war. I now write books arguing against all justifications for war, critiquing nationalism, and promoting nonviolent tools. I've gone from writing for publishers to self-publishing, to publishing with publishers after I've published a book myself, to just now pursuing a major publisher despite knowing that it will require editing as the tradeoff to reach a larger audience.
Am I here because I like to write and speak and argue and work for a better world, and because a series of accidents planted me in a growing peace movement in 2003, and because I discovered a way to never leave it, and because the internet grew and has been -- at least thus far -- kept neutral? Am I here because of my genes? My twin sister is a great person but isn't a peace activist. Her daughter is an environmental activist though. Am I here because of my childhood, because I had lots of love and support? Well, many people have had that, and many of them are doing great things, but usually not peace activism.
If you ask me today why I choose to do this going forward, my answer is the case for war abolition as presented on the website of World Beyond War and in my books. But if you're asking how I got into this gig rather than something else, I can only hope that some of the preceding paragraphs shed some light. The fact is that I cannot work under a supervisor, I cannot sell widgets, I cannot be edited, I cannot work on anything that seems overshadowed by anything else, I cannot seem to write books that pay as well as writing emails, and the job of resisting wars and weapons dealing never seems to have enough people -- and sometimes, in certain corners of it, seems to have nobody at all -- working on it.
People ask me how I keep going, how I stay cheerful, why I don't quit. That one is pretty easy, and I don't usually dodge it. I work for peace because we sometimes win and sometimes lose but have a responsibility to try, try, try, and because trying is far more enjoyable and fulfilling than anything else.
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