Through the Prism of Nonviolence

April 2, 2018 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Spring 2018 Nukewatch Quarterly Newsletter

Click the links below to access articles from our Spring 2018 Quarterly Newsletter. Page numbers show the pdf version of each page. Individual articles are also tagged by issue category.

For years I have felt an edgy tug, like a rip tide, drawing me closer to La Frontera, the US-Mexico border and its wall, the great divide. Last June I finally gave in. I packed my books and sourdough starter and headed two and a half hours west of Tucson to a copper mining community-gone-bust, Ajo, Arizona. It is quintessential small town America, southwestern style.

Ajo has one zip code, one stop light, one grocery store, three gas stations, and three coffee shops. Add to that a mechanic’s garage, two hardware stores, a library, and three private clubs. There is no Walmart, no McDonald’s, no local police department, no hospital, and never a traffic jam except on winter weekends when tourists travel main street—headed to the beaches of the Sea of Cortez, an hour and a half south.

Javelinas, also known as Collared Peccary or skunk pig, roam the streets at night, and coyotes stroll the sidewalks by day. We can see the Milky Way from the historic, palm tree-lined plaza, downtown. Yes, there is little light pollution and few clouds here.

At a glance this town looks like a Norman Rockwell print: idyllic. The postcards at the local gift shop, like the Ajo Red Raider High School yearbook, show our best side. Yet Ajo has another side, a shadow side. It is the shadow of the Wall. Ajo is just 39 miles from the border with Mexico. Thus, well within the 100-mile perimeter of an enhanced border enforcement zone which encompasses the entire United States. This is the wall’s 100-mile shadow even where there is no physical barricade. Some residents call this region a Constitution-free zone. It is the political equivalent of the frost-free bioregion Ajo enjoys. The latter fosters the growth of extraordinary flora; the former permits extra-legal practices that are, at best, constitutionally challenged.

The military-style US Border Patrol checkpoints are a prime example. Nobody leaves Ajo without passing through one—no one. They can be an annoyance for caucasians, but a civil rights violation for people of color, nationality notwithstanding. There are also the home incursions that are unwarranted—literally and figuratively. The incidence of these invasions is markedly higher on the nearby Tohono O’odam Nation than in town. Several years ago, in one of the more dramatic incidents within Ajo proper, three men at prayer were wrested from their pew at the local Catholic Church and arrested just before Mass. In mid-January of this year two patients and a humanitarian aid worker were apprehended in a private clinic. Most of these incidents happen outside public view and are not deemed fit to print in our weekly paper, The Ajo Copper News.

Residents south of the checkpoints live in a state of low-intensity occupation, a form of psychological warfare and a strategy designed to keep people subliminally on edge. Towers equipped with rotating cameras, ground sensors, helicopter fly-overs, and the dull hum of drones remind us that we are being watched—all of us. The escalating number of military personnel and the increase in unmarked government vehicles add to the specter of surveillance.

For most people however, Ajo is, and has been, a place to pass through, or overwinter. The town is situated squarely in a region that has been an historic crossroad for indigenous peoples in a network that stretched from present day Mexico to Utah and from the Pacific coast to New Mexico. Now, as then, the year-round residents are a fraction of the number of those who pass through. Each winter our population more than doubles with the arrival of mostly retired, mostly northern US residents in their recreational vehicles or to their second home. Add to that figure the high volume of tourists we see every winter weekend bound for the beaches of Puerto Peñasco, in Sonora, Mexico.

Migrant Death Map. Source: Humane Borders. Data development by John F. Chamblee, Michael Malone and Mathew Reynolds.

With the ever expanding militarization of the US-Mexico border, we have also witnessed a veritable odyssey of people from the south traversing the harsh Sonoran desert terrain and walking through or around town. To one degree or another these passersby all experience “the shadow.” For northern tourists, it is a potential wrinkle in their vacation, like a long wait at the checkpoint. For our neighbors to the south, it’s another story entirely. The shadow, for many of them, is the shadow of death. Nearby Cabeza Prieta is the most lethal National Wildlife Refuge in the country, and neighboring Organ Pipe, the deadliest National Monument. The number of recovered human remains on these federal lands accounts for a significant percentage of the overall fatalities in the entire Tucson Sector of the border.

It is not uncommon for people crossing by night from the south, to slip past the public campsites of vacationing northerners at Organ Pipe. One seeking reunion, the other recreating together. Herein lies a slice of the pathos and paradox of life in the shadow.

Every wall casts a shadow. Our nation’s immigration policies and enforcement have constructed hundreds of miles of border wall, and there’s a vigorous push for more. Take warning from those of us who live on the nation’s rim: the shadow is always longer, darker, and more insidious than the object that casts it—concrete, wrought iron, or racism.

—John Heid works with the group No More Deaths in Ajo, Arizona.

December 14, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

America is Hard to Find

By JOHN HEID

When I was 13 my mother announced to me: “I want you to meet your elderly Aunt Mary before she dies.” Without further discussion mother sent me off to Glassport, Penn. for a weekend visit. I’d never met Aunt Mary, and all I knew was that she didn’t speak a lick of English—and I no Polish. I was not fired up about spending the weekend with her. Following mother’s orders none the less, off I went on the Greyhound for three days that keep coming to mind every time the burning matter of immigration flares up.

I fell into the rabbit hole of culture shock meeting the Ruthkowski side of my otherwise very German family. These folks were a passel of blood relatives who spoke differently, kept their homes differently, and cooked differently than in my house. And I had the time of my life, language barriers notwithstanding. We were family, tho’ culturally miles apart. Without saying a word of English, Aunt Mary opened windows in my mind, and widened, if just a bit, my view of what America looks like.

Flash forward a couple decades to Baltimore in the mid ‘80s. I was serving 6 months in a federal halfway house on the far east side of the city. Every inmate was required to work outside the facility and I was granted permission to do my work hours as a volunteer at Viva House, the Catholic Worker several miles across town. Four days a week I would peddle across the city on my bicycle through neighborhoods I never knew existed, let alone been in. I recall hearing language after language flowing through the open windows into the sultry, summery streets of Baltimore as I passed by. And the fragrances coming from the kitchens linger in my taste buds. Each neighborhood unique. One city. Many cultures. Side by side.

Every time I see somebody wearing a cap that reads “Make America Great Again” a tidal wave of questions arise. What is America? Who is American? Who am I looking at? Where am I looking? And when, if ever, was it great? When wasn’t it?

For starters the term “America” is an incomplete, specious, and culturally challenged moniker for the United States. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, writes in An Indigenous Peoples’ History Of The United States: “I refrain from using ‘America’ and ‘American’ when referring to the United States and its citizens. Those blatantly imperialistic terms annoy people in the rest of the Western Hemisphere, who are, after all, also Americans.”

The Earth has just gone full circle around the sun since the last US presidential election. I call 2017 the year of the looking glass, which culminates years of navel gazing. The deep rifts in the core values of our nation have been exposed. They are in our face. The comeuppance was inevitable. These differences didn’t happen overnight, any more than earthquakes do. The tectonic plates of sociological structures move slowly, often imperceptibly. Voices at the edge have been warning us for decades—even longer, from the beginning. Our history celebrates and haunts us; mostly from the closet. Now we’re face to face with ourselves. The emperor’s clothes lie scattered on the ground, alongside ours. And our national wounds are exposed to the light of day.

“We are very cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are. And we cannot possibly become what we would like to be until we are willing to ask ourselves just why the lives we lead on this continent are mainly so empty, so tame and so ugly.” —James Baldwin, “Mass Culture and the Creative Artist: Some Notes,” The Cross of Redemption

I believe that self-education is a worthy first step to unraveling our national identity crisis. Or better said, we need to undo the single course menu of US history we’ve been spoon fed from the get go. In his 1963 “A Talk to Teachers,” James Baldwin wrote: “American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has said about it.”

A worthy remedial education course could begin with Ms. Dunbar-Ortiz’s Indigenous Peoples’ History, Michael Bronski’s A Queer History of the United States, Kim E. Nielsen’s A Disability History of the United States. Not to mention Howard Zinn’s masterpiece A People’s History of the United States.

Then comes the disciple of critical listening. And to whom shall we listen? How about First Nations people for openers? Those who were here before the conquest, before there was a United States. In An Indigenous Peoples’ History, Willie Johns, from Brighton Seminole Reservation in Florida says, “We are here to educate, not forgive. We are here to enlighten, not accuse.”

In poetic form Langston Hughes weighs in: “Say, who are you that mumbles in the back? And who are you that draws your veil across the stars? / I am the poor white fooled and pushed apart, / I am the negro bearing slavery’s scars. / I am the red man [sic] driven from the land, / I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek– / And finding the same old stupid plan / Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak. / Let America Be America Again” (an excerpt)

The task of remembering rounds out the prescription for our identity dilemma. Angela Davis reminds us, “We live in a society of an imposed forgetfulness, a society that depends on public amnesia.”

Re-membering is, after all, simply putting together the myriad stories of all those who inhabit this land thereby exposing and breaking through the cycle of cultural amnesia.

Where do we go from here? There are no quick fixes. No one-size-fits-all legislation. A change in Administrations in and of itself does not interrupt the status quo of colonization and its subsequent repression. Revolution? Isn’t that what got us here in the first place? Perhaps, what is needed is a revolution of heart, as Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker said.

“O let America be America again– / The land that never has been yet– / And yet must be–the land where every man [sic] is free. / The land that’s mine–the poor man’s [sic], Indians, Negroes, ME” —Langston Hughes

I can imagine my beloved Aunt Mary smiling over a platter of steaming homemade pierogis smothered in buttered onions saying, “Eat and you will eventually understand.” #####

October 13, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

On the Trail of Death

Through the prism of nonviolence

Fall Quarterly 2017

By John Heid

On my first trek across the Growler Valley in the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge some years back, I was smitten to the core. A stillness I have rarely known settled within me even as a bone dry wind piqued my sensibilities. Mountains rim the horizon of this seamless plain in every direction. Few trees or rock formations interrupt the valley floor. The world is half earth, half sky—no in between. Time collapses in the Growler. Only the sun seems to move, and slowly at that.

While this valley’s horizons are well defined, they are distant and illusory. Like an outgoing tide, they recede as you approach them. Never before have I experienced this sort of motionlessness. As if I was walking in place, all day.

Austerity understates the character of this Sonoran desert expanse. Herein lies the Growler’s wonder, and paradox. Its plainness is a ruse. An unassuming landscape disguises both power and fragility, innocence and danger. While vast, the valley offers scant water and no shelter, save the many burrows where all sorts of small lizard and mammal reside. Most are nocturnal. Conditions are harsh in summer and not much kinder in winter.

Her stories are hidden in plain sight. Petroglyphs and murmurs in the wind offer hints that there is more to what you see than you can imagine. Sometimes I have heard whispers in the zephyrs in languages I do not recognize. And I ponder. Who has walked here before? Who scribed the rocks? And why?

Mardy Murie, grandmother of the conservation movement, encouraged people to know their places of enchantment. To cherish them. To protect them. The Growler Valley is one of those places for me.

Edward Abby too was drawn to this valley. In life. And in death. It is here that he was clandestinely buried in 1989. His undisclosed grave site is reportedly marked by a simple head stone that reads: “Edward Paul Abbey, 1927-1989 No Comment.” Ed is not alone out there. Not anymore, if he ever was.

“We did believe that geography would be an ally to us. It was our sense that the number of people crossing the border through Arizona would go down to a trickle”

— Doris Meissner, Commissioner of the US Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1993-2000

The others simply don’t have grave stones, let alone identities. These unknown ones are part of the growing number of desert fatalities which I wrote about earlier this year. (Spring 2017 issue of the Nukewatch Quarterly.) The marked increase in the number of bodies recovered in the desert in the months between writings compels me to revisit this crisis from a more personal perspective. I cannot get these disappeared ones off my mind, or heart. One-hundred and thirty-one sets of human remains have been recovered in the Tucson Sector of the US-Mexico border this year, dozens in the Growler Valley alone. One cartographer calls this route “the trail of death.” Cabeza Prieta which boasts “one of the most biologically diverse deserts in the country” in its brochure is our deadliest National Wildlife Refuge. It’s grandest valley, the Growler, has become a veritable cemetery of the unknown. This is neither an accident nor a miscalculation. It is a premeditated crime against humanity and nature.

Immigration and Naturalization Service personnel predicted fatalities decades ago when they proclaimed the desert as their “ally.” Militarization and enforcement plans have intentionally funneled people into some of the harshest terrain on the continent. These policies have taken countless lives and irreparably torn up the desert’s fragile cryptobiotic soil crust. Border Patrol 4-wheelers have cut hundreds of miles of unauthorized roads on land ostensibly protected by the Wilderness Act. US border policy has turned the region into a weapon and desecrated it.

The desert is not to blame for these deaths. For its part, the Sonoran has done the best it can with the bodies forced upon the rugged terrain. Celestial and terrestrial burials involve vultures, coyotes, and bone-bleaching heat. It is human policy, not Mother Earth, that is culpable, if not indictable, for what is happening here. The desert is no ally of any government.

In a recent administrative change, Refuge personnel revised the annual land use permit. As of July 1, 2017, it is illegal to distribute humanitarian aid sup- plies on Cabeza Prieta. While the Refuge brochure emphasizes the need to carry water, the revised permit prohibits the supplying of water.

Many in the humanitarian aid community have strenuously criticized this change in policy, just as we have denounced the border enforcement policies which have pushed people into isolated terrain in the first place. We grieve and decry the calculated loss of life and the lethal implications of this procedural change.

As I hustle this article to meet a publication deadline, aid workers are preparing to hand-carry gallons of water to the Trail of Death and other refuge sites. Access to potable water is a human right. We intend to make water available to anyone in need, no exceptions. Humanitarian aid is never a crime. Not now. Not ever.

May the Sonoran desert one day be at peace again. May no one take their final steps there. May the voices one hears be the rustling western wind whistling through the creosote bushes. May the last words be stillness as loquacious Ed Abby’s last words remind. “No comment.”

— John Heid is a humanitarian aid worker with No More Deaths and Humane Borders. He lives in Ajo, Arizona 40 miles from the US-Mexico border.

June 23, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

The Trouble with Our State

Through the prism of nonviolence

By John Heid

Summer Quarterly 2017

Jamar Clark, 24, was shot and killed Nov. 15, 2015 by Minneapolis police officer Dustin Schwarze while officer Mark Ringgenberg held him on the ground. No criminal or civil charges were brought against the officers. In June his family filed a federal lawsuit against the officers saying the police subjected Clark to unreasonable seizure and excessive force.

The trouble with our state / was not civil disobedience, / which in any case, was hesitant and rare./… / The trouble with our state / — we learned it only afterward / when the dead resembled the living who resembled the dead / and civil virtue shone like paint on tin / and tin citizens and tin soldiers marched to the common whip / — our trouble / the trouble with our state / with our state of soul / our state of siege — / was / Civil / Obedience.

— Excepted from “The Trouble with Our State” by Daniel Berrigan

“I am troubled by the ongoing civil disobedience.”

— Judge Christian Sande, Hennepin County District Court, Minn., March 29, 2017

The verdict in most political trials is usually anticlimactic. The heart of such trials lies in our testimony, and, once in a blue moon, in a prosecutor or judge’s statements. Every now and then a ray of light makes its way through the decorum into the “halls of justice.” This actually happened in Hennepin County District Court in late March when Eddie Bloomer of the Des Moines Catholic Worker and I were tried on charges stemming from an April 2016 Black Lives Matter/Catholic Worker action in Minneapolis.

My defense to the charges of trespass and obstruction of transit was based on my claim of right to stand precisely where I did, in front of a Metro Transit light rail vehicle, in order to raise awareness and create a tension that would pressure Minneapolis police to address their lethal policies and practices toward people of color. Our vigil focused particularly on the murder of an unarmed young man, Jamar Clark, who was shot in the head by a Minneapolis police officer. The investigation into Jamar’s killing was closed earlier in the year by the Minneapolis Police Department without charges against the officer involved.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. carefully laid out the rationale for the practice of creative tension in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” I referenced this hallowed letter in laying out my “claim of right” defense. Throughout the three-day trial presiding Judge Christian Sande paid careful attention. Then during pre-sentencing remarks he gave a stern, thought- provoking rebuke to the rationale for my defense. He began by saying: “I am troubled by the analogies that I see—particularly, the Letter from a Birmingham Jail…. Dr. King talks about constructive tension. But again, the constructive tension he was citing in the Letter… had to do with a direct challenge to an unconstitutional law and a public sentiment that supported that unconstitutional law. This (Eddie’s and my cases) was much more amorphous and so it’s much harder for the community and the Court in a situation like this to really do much to address the issues.”

Judge Sande’s comments are a rare courtroom gift. They summarize the mindset of status quo “liberal ideology—for the record. True, we were not protesting the trespass laws or the right-of-way for public transit. What we were protesting was the violation of Jamar Clark’s constitutional right to due process, civil and human rights, and to a fair trial by a jury of his peers. A Twin Cities police officer had robbed him of these rights by playing the roles of accuser, prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner. In a single irretrievable moment in time.

With a bullet. There is no appellate court for Jamar, let alone a trial. This killing was not an isolated incident in the Twin Cities or in our country for that matter. It is a nation-wide matter of fact and an epidemic.

Our vigil followed carefully what Dr. King laid out from his Birmingham jail cell. He wrote: “Its (Birmingham’s) ugly record of police brutality known in every section of this country.” Minneapolis’s track record of death-by-cop is not so widely published, but is well known in the black community. Dr. King was labeled an outside agitator. Yet he had local ties. We, catholic workers were invited to the Twin Cities by local human rights workers including people of color. Regardless, Dr. King reminded us from his cell that, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We were victims of a broken promise… and the dark shadow of disappointment settled upon us. So we had no alternative except for that of preparing for direct action.” In Minneapolis the investigation into Jamar Clark’s murder closed without charges. Negotiations had failed.

Judge Sande’s comments articulate the point of view that believes the system can self-correct by means of checks and balances, by petitions, sanctioned rallies, town hall meetings, and the ballot.
These activities do not change the fundamental character of the system. They don’t rock the boat. Activist Philip Berrigan called these “acts of consent. Ones that go along with business as usual.” The difference between consent and dissent lies in whether one believes that the system is fundamentally just—or not. The principle attitude underlying our direct action in Minneapolis was
dissent, challenging the system at its roots, which is what radical means. Dissent recognizes that the system is in need of radical transformation. Dr. King reminds: “My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily.” Howard Zinn wrote in his A Peoples’ History of the United States that no social change has occurred in this country without both consent and dissent.

Two more black men were killed by Twin Cities police officers between the time of our vigil and our trial.

The challenge that Judge Sande laid out—however inadvertently or intentionally—is for activists to more clearly and consistently articulate the necessity and efficacy of dissent. Which, simply put, means more creative tension, more court time.

I close where I began with Daniel Berrigan. In the early 1970s, he and exiled Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn shared a series of midnight conversations in Paris. These were printed in The Raft Is Not The Shore. Daniel said: “But nothing is understandable while it’s going on—the sixties are only understandable when they’re over, which makes most people into morticians—ready to bury the dead. But it costs something to say while the killing is going on, ‘No one should die!’ And the killing is going on.”

Over the past 10 years, 100 percent of the people killed by the Minneapolis Police Department have been black or brown. I rest my case. Again.

—John Heid volunteers for the immigrants’ rights groups No More Deaths, and Humane Borders in Ajo, Arizona.

America is Hard to Find

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Through the Prism of Nonviolence

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Through the prism of nonviolence

Fall Quarterly 2017

By John Heid

“We did believe that geography would be an ally to us. It was our sense that the number of people crossing the border through Arizona would go down to a trickle”

— Doris Meissner, Commissioner of the US Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1993-2000

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