Happy Conscientious Objectors Day!

Here's the statement I sent couragetoresist.org in honor of Conscientious Objectors Day:

I was 17 when I traveled by chartered bus with about 40 others from St. Louis to Washington, DC, for the Moratorium Against the War. I must be one of the luckiest people alive, because when we rallied at the Pentagon I wound up in the front row of demonstrators. From that position I got to see a young National Guardsman look at one International Red Cross/Crescent photo after another of toddlers whose faces had been napalmed. I watched his expression change from shock to disbelief to anger to fear to resolve. He stood up, said "My mama didn't bring me up to kill little kids!" unslung his rifle & set it on the ground and quit the National Guard right then and there. Being present for that is one of the most beautiful experiences of my life, and I bless that man every time I think of him. A National Lawyers' Guild member was there in about 30 seconds and got his information before the MP's could take him away.

The flame that lit in my heart has helped to carry me through the past 52 years of leftist activism.

I was seventeen in 1967 and, like the rest of the Boomer Males, had to face the Draft that loomed in front of us all. I knew that the war in Viet Nam was a bad War, an unjustifiably bad one. I was called out by my Homeroom/Math teacher at Piedmont High, as early as the Fall of 1964 as to why I was wearing a button that said "No Escalation in Viet Nam." To his chagrin, I answered his pointed attempt to put me on the spot and humiliate (by asking me what I meant by wearing that pin) so articulately that he never tried to put me on the spot again.

I knew how and why it was a dirty, immoral war from the jump. I was familiar with all of the arguments because my mother was the Chairwoman of Women for Peace in Oakland, and the old girls met in the living room at our house in lower Piedmont. On the Sundays when they would meet, I would sit at the top of the stairs, just out of sight as I did my homework, and listen in on their meetings. It was an education.

In the end, I went with the Friends (Quakers) as the mode of avoiding the bloody Draft. The Quakers, Mennonites and the Jehovah's Witnesses were the three Peace Churches who had clearance with the Selective Service and street cred. I didn't subscribe to the doctrine of the JW's and there were no Mennonites in the area, so I went with the Friends. I shall always be grateful for the help they provided me in those days.