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ABOUT
US
Pat:
My first introduction to APN was an article in the
Alameda
Journal . A picure of a woman carrying her baby in a
backpack holding up a sign that said NO IRAQ WAR left a lasting
impression on me. As a mother of a 17 year old son who goes to
Alameda High (my husband also teaches there ), and a nurse-practitioner
who has spent 36 years in health care, I have a deep
commitment to life, not only in my profession but also as a person of
Buddhist tradition.
After graduating from nursing
school in 1971 and spending years in the Colo. mountains, I spent
a year traveling by myself through Asia. One of my most memorable
experiences was a month spent in Afganistan traveling the back roads
from Herat to Mazar-e Sharif. The land resonated with history
and natural beauty. It is these images of people from
another culture, that have inspired me to work for peace.
It is APN
members like Mary R who is in her 70's and is Alameda's own Poet
Laureate and long time peace activist that motivate me to continue
the work of the many who have gone before us. Lastly, my
brother, who attended the Alameda Peace Vigil with me March
2, 2004 and died suddenly March 7, 2004, brings to mind the
opportuntity of honoring his memory by continuing to stand in
solidarity at APN's monthly vigils. The list is long and with
each unfolding of APN's work I know I have found a niche in my own
community. Please join us...
Julie:
I moved to
Alameda from Los Angeles in August of 2003. Once
I got settled, and got a job, I started to look for
ways to meet
compatible people and to use my extra time (I am only working part
time) for
the things in which I believe. At a
screening of the MoveOn movie “Uncovered”, I met a woman who told me
about
APN. I found it on the Internet and
contacted Nancy, and came to the next meeting. I am still here, and still trying
to end wars and violence, as I did for so many years during the Vietnam
era.
Fern:
I am a home owner on the West End of Alameda and a
teacher onAlameda
Point. I am a mother of a remarkable daughter who was raised in the
Alameda schools. I have been an active community member since I arrived
here in 1985. I have been an activist for PEACE for 42 years.
I had marched in the Mayor's 4th of July parade many times with
different community groups throughout the years, but two years ago
(after having been away for awhile) I returned home to Alameda in time
to see the parade. I went out hoping to find a group with whom I could
align myself and enjoy the day. There were many, but I was most moved
by a spirited group who were chanting "We're pushing for peace". They
were actually pushing a car that had broken down, but was intended as
their float. Their banner read PEACE IS PATRIOTIC which spoke to me. I
love what our country stands for in principle and am so opposed to our
practices, particularly the proclivity towards war.
Since that day, when I met wonderful people who were part of the
Alameda Peace Network, I feel that I have been working for PEACE on a
local level while thinking globally. I stand holding banners and the
PEACE Dove, which I helped make, at the monthly vigils; I helped
organize a day at Jack London Square where we carried shopping bags
"Women Don't Buy This War". I occasionally attend meetings and
gatherings with like minded people and try to spread our message to
others. I feel connected to our members and others through our website
and emails and find that this loosely organized network provdies a link
for me to be in action on making a difference, and has me feel not so
alone in my deep wish for PEACE.
Lianne:
My name is Lianne Shafer, aka Libby. I am a mother, musician and
teacher. I know we have to work for peace to make it manifest in our
lives. Peace, perhaps an abstract concept to some, needs to be, as a
desire, prayed for, as an idea, contemplated, as a study, investigated
and as a need, manifested. But how? Just as we create anything in our
world, through education and work. Our country has institutions which
teach how to make war. (Often under the disguise of defense, but since
the United States is the worlds' military power, we have no enemies
except the one's we've created) Therefore, more urgently than ever, we
need institutions that teach how to make peace. The concepts of what
makes up a peaceful society and how those ideas manifest have to be
systematically made conscious so we can create them. Only when we know
what to do can we do it. And now, like never before, we need to work to
make peace education available to all. That is why I joined the Alameda
Peace Network, because I want to help make peace. Thank You.
Joe:
Joseph Woodard was born in Appalachia at the end of World War II. His
mother carried him and his sister out of there when she escaped by
marrying a passing draftsman on his way to San Diego. Joe began
his social commentary in high school when his advisor defeated his
proposal for a campus political journal by explaining that editorials
would only upset everyone.
He began to wake up to broader repression when he started college in
San Diego. He immersed himself in economics reading Marx, Smith,
Ricardo, George, and Keynes. He studied social and personal
investigations, including Freud, Menninger, Baran and Sweezy, Marcuse,
and Paul Goodman; history including H. G. Wells, Will and Ariel Durant,
I.F. Stone, Kolko, Mumford, DuBois, Lundberg; and a host of political
and philosophical thought from Socrates to Spinoza to Albert Einstein
and Loren Eisley.
Not everything came from books, not then. He learned about civil
rights efforts. He met a teacher who became his lifelong friend.
A circle of students, under the inspiration of that teacher, created
the International Student Journal working with Vietnamese students
caught up in the civil war rising in their country. (Incidently,
that group stayed together many years, moving ultimately to Berkeley.
They actively educated against the Vietnam war and university
collaboration.) Joe joined the storm of debate surrounding the Cuban
missle crisis. He was stirred, like everyone around him, by the
assassinations of President Kennedy, Malcom X, Martin Luther King, and
later the president's brother, Bobbie. He followed the promise of
reform promoted by the Kennedy legacy and joined the Peace Corps.
He almost worked in Tehran as an English teacher for oil engineers
until a meeting with the Iranian police convinced him otherwise.
He volunteered in a rural Job Corps in Estacada, Oregon as a counselor
for impoverished teenager boys from the rural South and
SouthWest. The world filled with social ferment, far-flung
movements from the Situationist strikes in France to the emerging
student and worker led revolutionary efforts bubbling up in Chile.
Just as Joe graduated from UCLA with a degree in Organic Chemistry, he
was drafted into the army at the height of the Vietnam War. He
resisted and won Conscientious Objector status from his San Diego draft
board, one of two draftees that year who were granted such a deferment
from that board. During the first year of his alternative
service, he became a subject for human experiments conducted by U.C.
Berkeley. From his temporary home in the secret apartment on the
top of Morgan Hall where the Department of Nutrition force-fed
so-called volunteers liquid cocktails and radioactive tracers, he sat
front row through the entire Third World Liberation strike. Luckily, he
was able to alter his alternative service job and and became a lab
technician at UCSF during his second year of service. After taking part
in the organization of the original People's Park and subsequent
protests, he co-founded the Student Research Facility
(SRF) in Berkeley. SRF researched, wrote, and published protest
pamphlets for more than 50 organizations actively resisting injustice
at home and abroad. Later, he co- founded the Center for the
Study of Health Maintenance Practices in Berkeley, one of the first
centers devoted to techniques for staying health not based on fee for
service. The Center could be organized in neighborhoods and
factories by ordinary people. For five years he contributed
research, writing, and photography to pamphlets, posters, and books
about social issues.
By the mid-70's, social justice movements were harshly repressed.
CointelPro action by the Federal government forced many underground,
quieted others, and murdered a few, like Fred Hampton of the Black
Panther Party. Joe faced a personal dilemma, wondering what he
was good for. As alliances disintegrated, he found himself alone.
For the following fifteen years that he now remembers with a sense of
shame, he withdrew from a civic life, married hastily, and went after
money. He worked as an organic chemist, a commercial
photographer, computer developer, and then as a writer. He lived
and worked for most of the 1980s in Rome, Italy. There he began
to rediscover a sense of himself since he had to learn to speak all
over again in Italian, German, and English english. The crisis
that pressed him into looking for money to buy his way to a better life
led him to a life that failed. His marriage fractured. His
health collapsed. He lost work. He began to review what was
really important to himself and other people.
Returning to the United States, he met his life partner, a level headed
woman and a lifetime union member. Together, they chose to buy a
house in Alameda they could look forward to as home and as part of an
developing activist community.
By the mid-90s, Joe decided he could best return to a life that made
sense for him as social activist and writer. He earned a Masters
in Writing from USF and now pays the mortgage as a technical
writer. He covers social protests as a photojournalist, posting
his material on his own web site and offering to everyone who can use
it as source material.
He co-founded the Estuary Park Action Committe in Alameda, seeking to
bring to life a vital park the City had promised for ten years. He is
currently working with the Alameda Peace Network to build a media
group. He hopes to contribute to education about the nature of
the social contract, possible alternatives, and to organize antiwar
activities. He believes that kind of civic life, cooperatively
practiced, will help lead to ways of resisting war and better ways of
building and thinking about the business of living.
Joe's most prized possession is the Victorian he owns together with his
life partner, Dorothy. She's the better half of Joe. They
know they have joined destinies in working for a fundamental change in
the social contract, one that will make it possible for people to offer
others the most important thing, themselves.
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Personal account
Travelers couched together in close quarters on trains or planes
exchange life stories they may never reveal to anyone close to
them. Wives and husbands can remain ignorant of personal
revelations their spouses hang like movie posters for the amusement or
seduction of strangers. I've often wondered if I talk about
myself as I did on my latest trip. My job required me to spend a
week with an company engineer who met me in London.
We'd co-authored a training guide entirely by e-mail, he in Melbourne
and I in Walnut Creek. We had to teach computer administrators
how our company's software worked. The effort required us to
concentrate on a software system that's only just coming to life and is
full of problems. For relief after class, we shared a beer and
talked frankly, as travelers will.
We face a mutual problem, common in software startup companies,
deciding whether we'll risk health and the love of those close to us by
working day and night, or turn to more important things every day after
five o'clock. What we are and the circumstances we face can lead
us to our own answers. But, in order to talk, we had to tell each
other what we're about. We had to put it down in plain
language. Honesty was vital. It always is, of course, but
too much is at stake now for me to shrink from a frank appraisal.
Neither of us wanted to waste the week avoiding the answers. I
have far fewer days ahead than behind. He has a new family to
raise. For both of us, time is precious.
We sized up our company's chances and what possible outcomes might mean
for us. To us; who are we? I summarized myself, thinking
out loud. I was relieved I didn't have to pretend or impress.
I've had enough of that behavior and, in talking frankly, I've long
since abandoned my ascent through the corporate food chain. Now
I'm a writer, whereever I am, whoever I work for; a plain spoken one, I
hope.
I made good use of the week. It was important to talk because it
really mattered. It was safe to talk because it didn't matter. I
hoped by putting my most earnest foot forward, I could look to see if I
really am standing on my own two feet. It's a sort of sanity
check I perform frequently, a ten thousand mile emotional
checkup. Chasing money, I'd lost sight of myself. I was
different before I stared the chase, but for a long time I wasn't sure
about that.
When we talked, I unwound. I could enjoy the voyager's insurance
policy against harm from intimate confession. For at least one
week I could say anything. It mattered to me and probably not to
him. Anyway, he can do me no harm, like any fellow traveler who
disappears at the end of a journey. He and I will most likely
never see each other again. We live eight thousand miles apart, a
deep ocean and different destinies in between.
He's a pleasant person and knowledgable about himself and life in ways
I envied. At his age I was more impulsive, less thoughtful, more
than a little crazy. In our week together we talked about
ourselves, cataloging hopes and ambitions. As best I know how, I
painted myself truthfully. After the week ended we returned home
in opposite directions, I flying westward over Greenland, Canada and
down to San Francisco; he across India to Singapore, then onto
Australia.
What had I learned in assessing myself out loud?
I confirmed my belief that even if I sacrifice myself to my job,
nothing I do will really make any difference in the company's
destiny. After all, what we make and what that product does
matters far less than how much money can be made quickly with whatever
we create. And I don't control the creation of that kind of
value. Anyone who's worked a dot-com job knows how wacky and pointless
it can be chasing a pot of gold at the end of an IPO. Anyway, if the
company goes bust, I still have enough skills and energy that I can
probably get some kind of work, even in these hard times. I can
choose my poison.
At my co-worker's age I'd been eager, ambitious, full of myself, and
newly devoted to the idea that I could put everything right in my life
by scoring enough money. If I couldn't alter the world and make
it right, I could buy a personal existence, maybe more, that would be
the right way, the best way, if only I could make enough money. I
could buy my way out. I'd never done that before. In spite of the
fact that I thought I'd spent most of my young adult life and a part of
the middle campaigning for justice and knowledge, I'd done it as the
kind of person I thought I should be.
The need to cover up myself was based on fear of rage hidden from
myself, rage born in the breast of a small boy angered by callous
treatment heaped on him during improverished, terrifying years in the
heart of a poor region still reeling from the legacy of the Civil
War. Plucking that rage out took many years and, until I did that
I imagined no one could accept me. I papered over myself. But
that's phony and a phony can't be a revolutionary with endurance. It's
too hard to keep faking it. While I'd played a role in campaigns
that extended from the end of the Fifties through the exciting
aspirations of the Sixties and early Seventies, the rewards weren't
personal. By the end of the Seventies, it was as though I never
existed. I tried to solve my utter loneliness by reinventing my
invented self. I never counted on what I'd genuinely grown into
and stopped pursuing what was most vital to me, justice and knowledge.
I married a woman I barely knew and launched myself into the new realm
of computers. I did make money after I decided to go after it, a
million dollars more or less, then wasted it all, living as if the
windfall would continue forever. I tried to get by like a
bigshot, a showoff, by acting self-righteous, by hiding myself from
public view and replacing that person with someone else. I know
the seductions of money and power and the shallow life that can
result. Money rewards the pursuit of money, not any other human
quality. Any rewards I achieved by pursuing money were for the
someone I wasn't. That wasn't anyone there, so neither was I.
I believed that the universe recognized my value and funneled fat
paychecks to me. My first computer startup landed me and my young
family in Rome, Italy. I captained a software development crew. I
sat at the right hand of the parent company's CEO and pronounced
judgements on technological potentials. I designed solutions and
set about building them. I was the quintessential geek-on-a-lead
for the head man. I was the favored son. I was the American
Dreamer. I was no longer alone and big checks dropped in my lap
twice a month. I drove a hot car. I lived in a condominium
most Italians could not afford. I flitted around on jets to
meetings where people waited for me. I could tell people what to
do.
In the process, I broke my marriage by alienating my wife, rubbed raw
any affection my sons may have felt for me, lived high, worked hard,
had an income twice my age and a girl friend half. I regularly
piloted my brand new Audi along European highways at 110 miles an
hour. I gleefully startled passengers by careening over Italian
cobblestones at suicidal speed. I was full of myself and
heedless. Instead of growing older and wiser, I was only growing older.
Near the end of it, I couldn't count friends higher than one, and then
only the man who had taught me what's important. I'd met him when
I was 17. He taught me economics, history, and psychology. He
steered me through a lot of radical action. He taught me real
writing and a sense of care. In putting up with me, he taught me
patience and kindness. When I cared about most about money, I
discovered no one cared about me except my teacher, and he didn't
approve of what I'd become.
With all the money I made, I didn't save a nickle. That didn't
help much when I needed a doctor. One day not long before my
company sent me back to the United States and then canned me, I found I
couldn't breathe. It was hot and I felt cold. I found
myself lying face down on my tiled balcony under a burning sun
wondering how I'd got there. Two years of regular visits to
psychoanalysts in Rome and Berkeley helped. My one friend, my
teacher and the man I regard as my father, saved me from a miserable
end after I announced by intention to do myself in. The imagined
path, the American myth, and my need to succeed at all costs had nearly
cost me more than money can buy. When it was all about money,
nothing had any value otherwise. What changed? My teacher
asked if I was going sit and wait for life to come to me -- or go live
it.
The only alternative I can imagine now is the choice of life, not
death. But I can't do that alone. If the capacity for
living isn't somewhere in me, of course, I can't invent or pretend to
it. I can't live by pretending liveliness. But neither is my
capacity for living really separate from others. I have
remembered that I only matter if we matter. That attitude isn't a
commodity I can acquire. As a capitalist-styled competitor I'd
discovered the guilty, solitary life of a hunter. I might have
survived by eating what I killed, but I can't kill for life, and I
can't have it by cutting someone else off from it. The best part
of struggle is exactly what I'd achieved as a younger man. I
found I'd been something when I'd put myself on the line for myself and
everyone around me. But I'd felt they wouldn't do that with me if
they knew me. Now I'm not afraid of people anymore. I
remember that I like them.
The spirit of community and the solidarity it promises is welling up
where I live. I can see that we, I mean my neighbors and the
citizens of this town, have a chance to live together and -- by
collaborating -- really live. That synthesis isn't won or
captured or conquered by force of arms or purchased. It's
different. If we invent that difference together, we will have
created the future, our future, the future our children will see.
If we don't collaborate, I believe that the alternative will be as
though we never existed. Why? We are not a form of life created
to survive by killing and monopolizing the universe, but to flourish by
threading through the music of evolution our applause.
Mary:
MARY RUDGE speaks internationally at universities, schools, cultural
centers, libraries, poetry groups, and Peace events on five continents
on teaching peace skills, and Poetry as a Healing Art, among other
topics. Some of her poetry has been translated into several languages,
published by Amnesty International and others
She was awarded Honorary Doctorates in Greece, Taiwan, New York, and
nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for her literary work, named Princess
of Poetry in Italy and crowned as an International Poet Laureate
in a ceremony at the City Hall Rotunda, San Francisco. She became
the City of Alameda, California's First Poet Laureate in 2002.
Newspapers have called her a global catalyst and one of the Bay Area's
most charismatic poets.
Mary Rudge is an editor of numerous anthologies including State of
Peace: The Women Speak, Peace Poems for Children, The Human Face of
Love, Flaunt Peace in the Face of War, For You World Peace Imagine, and
Farewell to Armaments. Jack London's Neighborhood, a Pleasure
Walker's guide to History and Inspiration in Alameda, Flower
Teas, poems and tea recipes (with Dr. Sonia Gaemi), and others..
Mary Rudge came to the Alameda Peace Education Network (as it was then
named) as a speaker on her research on children's cognizance of the
word "peace" to encourage lesson plans for teachers for teaching peace
skills, teacher training in the arts of alternatives to violence, and
the development of the peace skills of reconciliation,
arbitration, de-escalation of violence through word and acts. as
studies in schools from the early grades through continuing education
in all grade levels.
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