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March 29, 2021 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

“All the Way to Texas”

Nukewatch Quarterly Spring 2021
By John Heid Through the Prism of Nonviolence

“We’re goin’ all the way to Texas,” a border wall construction worker proudly told me last October. I was on a Tucson Samaritans humanitarian aid “water run” outside Sasabe, Arizona, population 54, at the time. When circumstances allow, I engage border wall workers to better understand what the men (literally) on the ground are thinking.

In the weeks leading up to the presidential inauguration, the work pace of wall construction became frenetic. Two-lane roads in rural southern Arizona were clogged with 18-wheelers transporting 30-foot posts and concrete mix. The border was a swirl of workers and machines going at breakneck speed. Efficient. Driven. Like the red ants of Texas on a bone.

On January 20, inauguration day, everything came to a halt. Like mist evaporating at first light of dawn, all was still along the border line. No more dynamite blasting the granite hillsides. No more trucks roaring down the highway. In surrounding towns, workers were terminating their rental leases or checking out of their motel rooms. A wary calm was settling on the Arizona-Sonora-border lands. Still, a bevy of questions lingered, not the least being, will the other shoe drop? Days turned into weeks. Could it be true? Had the nightmare really ended?

On February 10, a companion and I returned to the wall road at Sasabe to assess the situation. How far had the “all the way to Texas” construction gone? Were there unfinished sections where we might still be able to place water for people crossing this remote desert terrain? We passed the once bustling muster yard. All the familiar office trailers and heavy equipment were present but were still as a ghost town. We began our drive along the border wall road adjacent to the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge and soon noticed some activity.

Off in the distance. Construction workers! A few here, a few there, like ants quietly working away. A pick-up truck approached. Our access was blocked. The driver announced: “This is an inactive work zone. I can’t prohibit you from proceeding, but I have to caution you there’s rock crushing activity ahead. Heavy machinery. It could be dangerous. I advise you to turn back.” He drove off and so did we. In opposite directions. We had to see for ourselves what an “inactive” rock-crushing work zone means. Borderland double-speak.

We drove the wall road for a dozen or so miles. The wall stretched to the horizon like a never ending coil of unraveled wire. In the distance we began to hear the roar of heavy equipment. The myth of “no more wall work” was shattered. The following morning I saw photos taken the same day by another Samaritan crew that accessed the wall road further east. Devastating. Mining scale bulldozers are shown slashing a wide swath over a cacti-covered hill in the Coronado National Forest — pristine wilderness plowed down.

All to say there is a wall. It’s not going away. It’s metastasizing. A low profile presence, double speak, and legal machinations are the strategy. No parade of trucks and workers is crowding small border towns. The destruction goes on, unimpeded, undercover, in plain, albeit remote, sight.

The US Army Corps of Engineers’ line is, “The work is part of the contractor’s obligation to ensure work site safety and security.” Whose safety? Whose security? The only safe solution is to tear down that wall and restore the habitat — all the way to Texas.

—John Heid writes from Tucson, Arizona. He recommends visiting <biologicaldiversity.org> for more information.

Filed Under: Newsletter Archives, Quarterly Newsletter, Through the Prism of Nonviolence

August 1, 2020 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Gone Viral

By Mark Taylor

Through the Prism of Nonviolence

By John Heid
Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2020

TUSCON, Arizona—May 9, 2020, the 99th anniversary of Dan Berrigan’s birth

A half century ago this month Daniel Berrigan, S.J., wrote America Is Hard to Find: Notes from the Underground and Letters from Danbury Prison, Doubleday & Co. 1972.

At the time he was underground. Dan and eight others—the Catonsville 9—had been convicted of multiple felonies for burning draft card files in resistance to the US War in Vietnam. He chose to continue his resistance by surreptitiously appearing at anti-war events rather than willingly submit to imprisonment. “On the lam” for four months, Dan spoke publicly, albeit clandestinely, and wrote ferociously. The times were as volatile as the fire. Dan, his brother, Phil and seven others burned hundreds of 1-A draft files. His reflections during this period offered an incisive lens into American culture. That lens, looked through 50 years later, is still acute, clarion.

Why is America still so hard to find? What is America anyway?  Dan understood the symbiotic relationship between war and the state of our nation, any nation. He also recognized an antidote: resistance. People power.

War is antithetical to Civil Society. It blurs our visibility, let alone our humanity. What has changed in a half century? What hasn’t? Today we find ourselves in the grip of a microscopic virus that rivals the size of the split atom. Suddenly our world is turned upside down. It’s become a heyday for doomsday prophets, and profiteers, a free-for-all for conspiracy theorists. Rumor, prediction, and fact have become a sordid ménage à trois.

Meanwhile America and much of the world is “doing time” above ground, and staying at home—those who have one. Will the flippant quip “gone viral” ever sound the same? How can our war machine state save us from what we cannot even see without a microscope? Guns, let alone nuclear weapons, are rendered powerless.

An insight I gleaned from Dan’s youngest brother, Phil, was to pay attention to the larger context of any political moment. Phil said he learned this lesson during the Vietnam War, when most eyes were understandably focused on Southeast Asia. Behind the scene, the US stealthily built up its nuclear arsenal. Thus follows my query: what’s behind the Covid-19 curtain?

For one, the Tucson-based corporation Raytheon Missiles and Defense secured a multi-billion dollar contract to develop the next generation of air-launched and nuclear-armed missiles—at the height of the pandemic.

The coronavirus is unarguably a major health crisis. Still, in terms of casualties, it amounts to a dress rehearsal to nuclear war. There are ways to minimize the impact of the virus. There is no quarantine from nuclear weapons detonations, no safe space, not even deep in the high-tech bunker at Offutt Air Force Base. There will eventually be a vaccine for Covid-19. There is no cure for nuclear war, only prevention through abolition. The virus has become a partisan issue. Nuclear weapons have bipartisan support. In dystopian terms they are the great equalizer. No one is immune. No one gets out alive.

A pandemic allows us, or perhaps forces us, to recognize our vulnerability, our interdependence. Granted, those with more privilege suffer less in a pandemic. Not so with nuclear war. While our eyes are focused on a cure to resolve our current crisis, another is looming backstage. One might ask, Why isn’t the US government investing in a multi-billion dollar research for this pandemic rather than in so-called nuclear security?

There are many smoke screens, so much government subterfuge. Small wonder the heart of America is hard to find. There are war contractor coffers to fill. The heart of America is not underground in resistance. No, it’s at large, in plain sight. We are a nation of nuclear war deniers.

Following his imprisonment for the Catonsville 9 action, Dan Berrigan continued his strident resistance to the US militarism, particularly nuclearism, in the streets, in the dock, in jail cells. Nevermore underground. He took his life-long search for America to the grave, and by example urges us to carry on the struggle for disarmament—of ourselves, of fear, of nukes. Only then will we find the heart of America.

 — John Heid is a humanitarian aid activist living in Tucson, Arizona

Filed Under: Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Weapons, Quarterly Newsletter, Through the Prism of Nonviolence

September 27, 2019 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

The Other Wall

Book Review by John Heid

Don’t Label Me, An Incredible Conversation for Divided Times by Irshad Manji, St. Martin’s Press, 2019

Don’t Label Me — An Incredible Conversation for Divided Times opens with an invitation to expand our moral imagination and concludes with an eleven step moral courage regimen. The pages in between read like a manifesto as radical, i.e. deeply rooted, as any I have come across in years. This is a book acutely for our times. Irshad Manji offers critical analysis, alongside a crash course in nonviolent engagement techniques. Theory and practice all in one. The content is at once a life-size mirror and flashing red lights for the progressive left.

I have subconsciously been waiting for this book since November 2016. One that addresses the gut punch I felt within 24 hours of Donald Trump’s election. No, not the election; it was the response of friends, peers, and even mentors that blind-sided me. The hostile reaction I had feared from the conservative right, was coming instead from my beloved community, from us not them.

Incredible Conversation, as the book is subtitled, is a discussion between two sentient beings, an aged, blind rescue dog, Lily, and Irshad Manji, a queer, Muslim, immigrant, woman of color. While it may seem a paradox to use labels, in the second paragraph of a book review of Don’t Label Me, Irshad Manji writes early on: “View labels as starting points, not finish lines. They eclipse truth. We have relevance beyond our labels.” These two engage in an animated, sometimes humorous, often provocative dialogue. They unpack, debate, and offer a way out of the vicious cycle of the “Us vs. Them” conundrum which defines contemporary US culture.

Conversation is a fertile mixture of stories, personal experiences, queries and challenges. The reader is walked through a labyrinth of hot button topics: racism, white privilege and black, honest and dishonest diversity, multiculturalism, critical theory and more. No stone is unturned, or thrown. The elephants in the living room of the progressive left are exposed by one of our own.

Manji’s insights flow from diverse sources. She crosses ideologies and eras from Audre Lourde to Thomas Aquinas, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Andrea Dworkin, Bruce Lee to Cornell West, theologian Walter Wink to Mississippi rap artist, Genesis, to name a few.

While her premises are timeless, there is timely relevance to the insights Manji offers. We are just over midway between elections. As a nation, we have not been so divided since the War Between the States. Why? One reason, Manji argues, is negative polarization. That’s when voters take sides not out of faith in a candidate, but out of fury with the other side. Even after their side wins, it is consumed with ensuring that the other camp keeps losing; such is their disdain for the “enemy.”

Manji explains: “Near as I can tell, much of today’s polarized politics stems from the shaming that the diversity movement’s been doing—not only to authentic racists, but to anyone who’s got an honest disagreement with us. I take it as a warning for worse to come. We have underestimated the power of humiliation. Dishonest diversity labels people as a substitute for understanding them. Honest diversity moves people beyond prefabricated labels. If diversity of opinions, ideas, and perspectives won’t be tolerated in movements that prize emancipation, then what kind of utopia are we emancipating into? If you won’t make peace with different points of view, what’s inclusive about your diversity?”

These lines hit me right between the eyes. I have been asking myself, Why are thinking people digging in their heels against what I consider their best interests? Manji posits that Mr. Trump is empowered by the chronic shaming of his supporters. So, can I, can we, disagree in a shame-free environment? She reminds us that listening does not translate into losing. If we want to see change, we need to risk unusual conversations with unfamiliar people—the Other.

Still, Manji is not focused solely on developing personal relationships. She writes: … honest diversity needs diverse forms of advocacy. Voting. Petitions. Walkouts. Sit-ins. Strikes. Satire. Formal deliberations. The last seven pages of Don’t Label Me offer an 11-step exercise which Manji calls a moral courage training regimen. Her prescription for change begins by inviting us to examine the systems within ourselves as we struggle to change the systems within which we live.

It is a gross understatement to say there is much to disagree about in this country. Manji views this disagreement as an invitation, something to be approached with courage and dignity, not shaming. Otherwise we perpetuate an ideological border wall and hunker down deeper into our gated realities. The long term consequences of this stand-off will reach far beyond an election in 2020.

—John Heid is a house painter who lives in Ajo, Arizona and volunteers with the groups No More Deaths and Humane Borders.

 

Filed Under: Newsletter Archives, Quarterly Newsletter, Through the Prism of Nonviolence, Uncategorized

December 31, 2018 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

In the Face of Immigration

Through the Prism of Nonviolence

By John Heid
Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2018-19

“And the resistance actually has roots that stretch to the beginning of the human race. In every age, no matter how cruel the oppression carried on by those in power, there have been those who struggled for a different world. I believe this is the genius of humankind, the thing that makes us half divine: the fact that some human beings can envision a world that has never existed. Perhaps no one living today will see a major change. But it will come. And living in that world that is working to make it happen lets us know that our lives are worthwhile.” —Anne Braden

Finding Another America
The image of this mother with young daughters fleeing teargas launched by the US Border Patrol brought the humanity to the US-Mexico border when it went viral.

More and more these days I wonder what difference it would make if each of us in the US could see firsthand the human face of immigration—without media lenses, without political agendas, without ideological spins—simply eye-to-eye.

Last month while replenishing Humane Borders water tanks along remote desert roads, several of us humanitarian aid workers encountered Luis, a young man who had mired his 4-wheel drive pickup in an arroyo near a dilapidated windmill. After freeing the vehicle we talked with Luis about the risks of traveling solo in the desert. I asked, “Why are you out here alone anyway?” He replied that he was looking for his father who left Mexico for Phoenix on foot weeks ago and had not shown up. In his father’s last phone call 10 days earlier, he said that he was alone near an old windmill and nearly out of water. All this young man, an only son, wanted was to bring his dad back home to Phoenix where he had resided for decades. So he drove on and off road, in a place he had never been before, hoping against hope to find his father.

Last week I accompanied several members of the Tucson-based humanitarian aid organization Samaritans to a rugged mountainside 30 miles north of the US-Mexico border, where the desiccated remains of 25-year-old Jesús Lopez Villa were found last October. He too was simply trying to get home to his mother. At her request we planted a cross at the site of his death.

These stories are innumerable, and growing. The Pima County coroner’s office reported that another 122 bodies were recovered in the Tucson sector of the border between Sept. 2017 and Sept. 30, 2018. Each story is uniquely tragic. The accumulated weight becomes unbearable. The numbers begin to blur and numb my senses. After all, thousands have died. And yet, what are families to do? We are hard driven, or better said, heart driven, to be together. What can we as witnesses and allies do? The landscape around our borderland communities is an expanding graveyard. There is no end in sight.

Community in Borderlands

The US-Mexico borderlands region has been characterized by government and mainstream media as dangerous terrain, overrun by criminals and otherwise non-desirables. Our face-to-face reality on the ground tells a markedly different story.

On Sept. 21, the city of Ajo, AZ celebrated the International Day of Peace with a lively parade and communal gathering in the town plaza. The holiday was established in 1981 by a unanimous decision of the United Nations “to commit to Peace above cultural differences and to contribute to building a culture of Peace.” The Sierra Club reported that Ajo was the only community in North America known to have a tri-national event. People from Mexico, the Tohono O’odham Nation, and the US came together.

The circle of local residents and visitors at the No More Deaths’ monthly memorial vigil in the plaza is widening. In song, silence, and story we commemorate the lives of those who perished while crossing the desert around Ajo. A community aid center is now opening here. This office will offer information to local residents on their legal rights and hands-on ways to respond to the humanitarian crisis we are witnessing. People in the borderlands are finding deeper ethical and practical traction to provide humanitarian relief in the face of formidable odds including federal government efforts to criminalise such aid.

As I write these lines, the first wave of US troops has just arrived in Ajo. We are told that hundreds more will follow. Ironically an invasion is coming from the north, not from the South as anti-immigrant rhetoric had predicted. Out-of-state bands of armed vigilantes too have escalated their anti-immigrant activity along the Arizona-Mexico border. We are under siege by men with guns. A Border Patrol spokesperson said at a recent community meeting that the arrival of the army will be “good for our local economy.” Haven’t we heard that line before?

While this escalated militarization is disruptive to our border communities, it is lethal for the thousands of people—the refugee caravan and others—who are currently walking north from Central America; men, women, children, entire families armed only with hope. I believe these refugees are the current generation of people that civil rights activist Anne Braden was thinking of when she wrote of “those who struggled for a different world … those who can envision a world that has never existed.”

What a ludicrous mismatch: An army and militia vs. asylum seekers. Fear faces off with hope. Is our national security at risk? What is really at risk?

Immigration has a human face, as does fear. No army can stop, nor wall protect us from our fears, anymore than we can derail the hope in the face of others who like many of our ancestors sought refuge on this hallowed land.

As Anne Braden wrote, “Perhaps no one living today will see a major change. But it will come.” I believe it already is.

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

Filed Under: Newsletter Archives, Quarterly Newsletter, Through the Prism of Nonviolence, Uncategorized

July 11, 2018 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Judicial Border Walls

Summer Quarterly 2018
Through the Prism of Nonviolence
By John Heid

The chambers of the Evo A. DeConcini US District Courthouse in Tucson Arizona have borne witness to innumerable immigration-related trials—for decades. Each day’s court docket is posted prominently on a large screen near the grand entrance, just beyond the metal detectors. Most of the case names are Latino/a. Those individuals slated for a separate so-called “Streamline Court,” which criminalizes, incarcerates, and then deports hundreds of people weekly, are not listed. This federal courthouse is a deportation mill.

The past month, however, courtroom visitors to DeConcini witnessed two different types of immigration related cases. These offer a wider lens into status of law, justice and conscience in the US-Mexico borderlands.

In October 2012, US Border Patrol agent Lonnie Swartz fired 10 bullets through the international border fence into the back of José Antonio Elena Rodríguez, a 16 year old, who was walking down a city street in Nogales, in the Mexican state of Sonora. On April 23 this year, Agent Swartz was found not guilty of 2nd degree murder.

Weeks later, Scott Warren, a humanitarian aid volunteer from Ajo, Arizona was in the same federal courthouse facing two counts of “harboring” and one of conspiracy to transport/harbor, all felonies, for providing food, water and clothing to two men who turned up in Ajo weary, hungry and cold after walking several days and nights in the desert. Mr. Warren is looking at 20 years in prison. His guests were deported.

One courthouse, two faces of justice. Murder gets a pass and compassion goes on trial. The juxtaposition of these cases lays bare the dissonance of law in the borderlands.

I attended one of Mr. Warren’s recent pre-trail hearings where he and his attorneys argued for dismissal of all charges based on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) of 1993. The act says the “Government shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability.”

Mr. Warren testified for nearly two hours, articulating his spiritual belief in the inherent worth of every human being and his responsibility to provide life-saving care to anyone in need. He also spoke of having recovered the bodies of 16 people who had died of dehydration/exposure over his six years of walking desert trails. He testified, “My duty of conscience drives me to show up, to be present to the suffering. Living and dead.”

Mr. Warren’s testimony included reflections on the “soul of the desert.” He holds sacred the Sonoran Desert even as it is being turned into a vast graveyard. And too he recognizes an inherent sacredness in the personal items people leave behind, or die with … hand sown tortilla cloths, rosaries, photographs, blankets, silverware, dolls…

Mr. Warren’s attorneys argued that under RFRA “…his conduct cannot legally constitute a crime because the government cannot prosecute any individual for exercising his/her sincerely held religious beliefs….” Even US Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently said, “[I]n the United States, the free exercise of religion is not a mere policy preference to be traded against other policy preferences.”

The cross-examination by the federal prosecutors exposed a wide, familiar crevasse in ideology: conscience vs. the law. After Mr. Warren’s moving spiritual testimony, the barrage of vapid “yes” or “no” questions from prosecutors rattled off the courtroom walls like ball bearings in a tin pan. Unable to refute Mr. Warren’s soul sharing, the prosecutors took aim with a “Why didn’t you just call 911?” form of rebuttal. Justice was reduced to the level of television game show banality.

Trials, for me, are a litmus test of the health or illness of society. This particular courthouse is rife with examples of the later.

Scott Warren’s testimony is a cry in the wilderness, a breath of fresh air in the belly of the proverbial beast. As his testimony echoed off the chamber walls I couldn’t help but ponder what else these walls have absorbed, sounds that a court recorder will never write, nor a transcript ever reveal: The chain gang shuffle of shackled men and women marched in and out of Streamline Court. The deafening silence when the jury foreperson announced that Agent Lonnie Swartz was “not guilty” of the murder of José Antonio Elena Rodríguez—not to mention the gasps and sobs that followed.

Walls hold stories in stone. What happens in court echoes off these walls, and across the country and the hemisphere. These are the unseen border walls. Here the fist of US immigration policy is hidden in a silk glove. What can bring down these walls and the ideologies that prop them up? When will the weight of injustice be too much for them to bear?

There is plenty more in store for the Evo. A. DeConcini Courthouse this year. Magistrate Judge Bernardo Velasco will rule on Scott Warren’s motion for dismissal in late June. Meanwhile, eight humanitarian aid workers, including Mr. Warren, await prosecution for the crime of placing water, food, and other life-saving supplies on public lands where high numbers of human remains have been recovered. What will the vaunted walls of DeConcini hear next?

—A long-time peace activist, John Heid works with the group No More Deaths in Ajo, Arizona

Filed Under: Direct Action, Newsletter Archives, Quarterly Newsletter, Through the Prism of Nonviolence

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