At the same time, she knew about many of the actions undertaken against peaceful individuals and groups, and remembered the march in NY discussed in my essay "Who's A Low Level Terrorist? Are You?":
"Indeed the participants of the first antiwar protest against the Vietnam incursion, put together in the mid-1960's by peaceable Quakers and FOR members after having discussed Gandhi's Salt March as a model for a nonviolent demonstration, faced government operatives filming them face by face from rooftops as they moved en masse down Broadway to the UN Plaza. (My mother, a pacifist married to a World War II Conscientious Objector, and I, a child at the time of the march, both were in attendance. When the film crew focused on us, she stood tall, faced the agents with their telephoto lens, glared in disdainful defiance and, simultaneously, throw the corner of her coat over my face. Afterwards, she muttered, "How dare they try to intimidate us!')"
All things considered, she understood perfectly well the reason that members of Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (Mend) would attack an oil pipeline operated by international oil giants Shell and Chevron. Yet she, also, recognized that, incredibly, someone in the USA does NOT have to carry out any attacks whatsoever to be a target of one.
As such, she wasn't surprised one bit that Bette Hoover, the sixty-one year old Clerk (religious leader) of a Quaker Meeting that one of our relatives attends, was in trouble with law enforcement agencies, as THE ENEMY WITHIN - Victims of Md. State Police spying still uneasy explains. It's simply par for the course and, on account, it was equally hard for her to be astonished that members of American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), recipient of the 1947 Nobel Peace award, were harassed, as well as investigated by eleven federal agencies, including the FBI and the CIA.
In fact, any individuals or groups at all could have a serious problem if they somehow managed to upset members of particular federal or State agencies tasked with maintaining the social structure going forward exactly as planned. No one is to disrupt that process and certainly not peace advocates or picayune troublemakers pointing out an inflammatory report discussing the United States's agenda by a despised rebel named Fidel Castro.
So it is with reluctance that I passed along the text of his evaluation to friends even though my mother asked me, on her deathbed, to promise that I would continue to work very, very hard to ensure that the Earth in the future would be a fit place for habitation by humans and other forms of life. While envisioning the world carrying onward without her, she was less concerned about her personal existence ending than furtherance of the underlying purposes to which she had dedicated her time while alive.
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