A Mini-Memoir of Resistance - 2 of 7

#NanoPoblano2024 - Day 18

3. I accidentally become an activist: Being a dork, I want to be a groupie for this guy, but I don’t have the nerve to quit college and join the woman who actually follows the band around the country.

Instead, after the 1979 Three Mile Island accident, I go to the No Nukes rally in Washington DC – my first big demonstration – because I want to see him. It’s seven years past 12^th grade, when I’d written to the War Resisters League to get all that draft info. Now for the first time I meet real war resisters. The banner over their table says so. I sign their mailing list, buy their merch. Jackson’s on stage telling everyone to go home and get involved. Again I am breathless.

4. I find community: I join the local SEA Alliance, organize buses to the September NYC No Nukes rally, serve as a peacekeeper, and get to go to that fantastic three-night series of concerts at Madison Square Garden* https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081242/ 

A few months later, I go through nonviolent civil disobedience training and take part in my first action, a blockade at the headquarters of the utility company that owns Three Mile Island. Terrified, I follow the rules and go limp as four cops drag me away. I’m too scared to do what the experienced leaders do: refuse to cooperate and go to jail. I pay $25 to go home. (Maybe. Or I might be mixing that fine up with a later arrest.)

(That’s me in the bottom left photo, turned away from the camera, next to the guy in sunglasses.)

I meet more boyfriends. Start a local War Resisters League chapter. My first date with my future husband is graffitiing Rutgers with a pizza box containing a spray paint can and a stencil that says, “Resist the Draft.” It’s fun, as are all the other little “stealth” and in-the-open actions:

• walking into a lecture hall where a frat is showing Debbie Does Dallas and gently pouring several bottles of bleach down the floor so people would have to leave, then running like hell (it was the era before Internet porn and the time of a lot of feminist pushback against porn)

• climbing up to hang banners from train trestles and billboards

• staging die-ins at military recruiting events on campus

• etc.  (Who can remember anymore?)

In 1981 I get fired from my first job after college – teaching English to adults in a business school – because I’m tired of the stupid grammar workbooks and decide to teach them proofreading via antinuclear leaflets and that long, unpunctuated passage in Johnny Got His Gun. Before that, I persuade the school’s owner to let me create a library. He gives me an empty storage room and $200 ($800 now). I go to a fabulous used bookstore in a tiny NJ town and fill the new library with everything I like, including Living My Life by Emma Goldman and every other leftist book I can find.

5. My future husband and I decide to shape our lives around activism: We live as cheaply as possible so we don’t have to waste much time on jobs. I teach writing workshops. He works part-time fixing bicycles and has left-over bar mitzvah money. The bike shop owner gives us space for the War Resisters League chapter to become a peace center. We get a printing press donated and set up Plowshares Press, a “movement” print shop supporting leftist causes. We talk the nonprofit in charge of poet/dead soldier Joyce Kilmer’s birthplace into letting us live as caretakers in the two-room apartment upstairs, paying only $50 for rent. (An old man and two dogs live in a van in the parking lot. We’ll cross paths again in five years, become friends, then I’ll publish his eulogy in eight. https://wordsforabetterworld.org/nanopoblano-day-28/) I decide to have a kid and tell the future husband he has dibs on being the father but he must decide soon because three others have offered. (I’ve gone from being a dork to being an idiot.)

* I published a piece about this on Day 8 of National Blog Posting Month (November) - Things We Believed Were Possible.

Rest of series:

#1 - https://janetjonesbann.substack.com/p/notes-on-resistance-1-of-7

#3 - https://janetjonesbann.substack.com/p/a-mini-memoir-of-resistance-3-of

#4 - https://janetjonesbann.substack.com/p/a-mini-memoir-of-resistance-4-of

#5 - https://janetjonesbann.substack.com/p/a-mini-memoir-of-resistance-5-of

#6 - https://janetjonesbann.substack.com/p/a-mini-memoir-of-resistance-6-of

#7 - https://janetjonesbann.substack.com/p/a-mini-memoir-of-resistance-7-of