11. Happy 40th

40 years ago, on May 21, 1969, a sunny morning in Silver Spring, Maryland, I walked into the open front door of the Jesup-Blair Draft Board, Local Board #53, and proceeded to deface draft files using black paint. My co-conspirators used our blood to the same end. During our act, journalists who had been alerted that something would be happening documented our act. We had planned to remain - as calmly as possible - on the scene until arrested, and not resist arrest: the archetypal method in non-violent civil disobedience.

We were interrupted shortly by Park Police, then Maryland State Police, and finally agents of FBI, who asked us to cut it out before handcuffing us and taking us to the local police station. State charges were brought, after which we were transported to Baltimore, where federal charges were brought - all told the charges amounted to 76 years in prison.

On bad advice I changed my plea on the charge of mutilating government records, from not guilty to nolo contendere, essentially granting the government victory by walkover, in the process garnering a 3-year sentence in federal prison. In the balance, 73 years worth of other charges were dropped. Seeing the error of my ways later that summer I asked to change the plea back to not guilty, was told by phone by the judge that this would be accepted in court, but in the actual courtroom scene the change of plea was not allowed, and I was sentenced to 3 years in federal prison, and remanded at once, supposedly with no recourse such as appeal.

After spending nearly a year of that time, I earned a furlough to my home in Washington, DC, but due to a death threat made shortly before the home-visit, a threat that appeared to be the real thing, I escaped prison - more accurately I did not return from the furlough. After several months underground in the US, then nearly a year in Canada, I was granted political asylum in Sweden in the summer of 1971.

40 years later, looking from an incredible distance in time and space, it is apparent that the issues for which we were prepared to offer years of our freedom, "simply" to make a point - and the whole point of civil disobedience is exactly that: to make a point, at nearly any personal cost - are as current as ever: an American military machine rages on in many places, against enemies real and imagined, but built - as it was during Vietnam - on the backs and the blood of the poor and the marginalized, ever crushing dreams and realities in its blind and relentless fury.

And so the War has been brought home - in the 60's many of us thought it necessary to bring the war home, that it would end only then. But the War was never in Iraq, or Afghanistan, nor even in Vietnam, though millions of graves protest - as Tim Buckley intimated in his No Man Can Find the War: the Real War is as ever inside our minds.

The tale has never been told better than by Tim:

Photographs of guns and flame
Scarlet skull and distant game
Bayonet and jungle grin
Nightmares dreamed by bleeding men
Lookouts tremble on the shore
But no man can find the war
Tape recorders echo scream
Orders fly like bullet stream
Drums and cannons laugh aloud
Whistles come from ashen shroud
Leaders damn the world and roar
But no man can find the war
Is the war across the sea?
Is the war behind the sky?
Have you each and all gone blind:
Is the war inside your mind?
Humans weep at human death
All the talkers lose their breath
Movies paint a chaos tale
Singers see and poets wail
All the world knows the score
But no man can find the war

May 21, 2009