Spirit in Action
Mediator & Prisoner for Peace
Joseph Maizlish voluntarily relinquished his deferment during the Vietnam War and spent 2 1/2 years in jail. His work now includes mediation and activities with Southern California War Tax Resistance. Family counseling, civil rights, antinuclear work are all part of his path.
Music Featured:
Have You Been to Jail for Justice? - Anne Feeney
Travelers - Andy & Terry Murray
- Broadcast on:
- 10 Oct 2010
- Audio Format:
- other
(acoustic guitar music) ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And my lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ - Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helps Me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ - Today for Spirit in Action, we'll be speaking with Joseph Maislish. Joe's peace work and history cover a lot of the activist map. Back in the late 1960s, he intentionally confronted the Vietnam War by relinquishing his deferment, which led to two and a half years in prison. With inspiration from the Jewish prophets, Joe's concerns included civil rights, peace, equality, and especially the way in which people need to work out problems, leading to his work as a mediator and marriage and family therapist. I found him through the Southern California War Tax Resistance Group and Joe Maislish joins us today from Los Angeles. Joe, I'm so pleased to speak to you today for Spirit in Action. - We're pleased to join you and your audience, Mark. Thank you. - I, of course, got to know you through Southern California War Tax Resistance and their granting, and I wanna say thanks to you and the others who've made possible a grant that helps Northern Spirit Radio do its work. How many years have you been doing this with Southern California War Tax Resistance, the granting process? - I think our first grant we gave out in 1980. However, I've been a vortex resistor earlier than that. That's when we got established in 1979 and gave our first grant of $99 to a battered women's shelter, actually, which we viewed as a kind of a anti-war action on our part and on part of the shelter. - In a week or two or three, I'm going to be presenting a program speaking with some of the grantees from this year, besides, of course, Northern Spirit Radio. Who were the grantees and how do you pick out who receives these funds from the Alternative Fund? - Some of the depositors, those who've choose to be more active in the vortex resistance and its associated vortex alternative fund here in the Los Angeles area meet usually about once a year and occasionally at other times for planning to publicize and educate people about vortex resistance. And we talk over the grant applications that we've received, we usually get about 10 or so, and we make our choices. Usually, we support every applicant, but with differing amounts, depending on the size of their project and what we would like to emphasize, make our grants of a few thousand dollars a year. That's interest that's become available from our investing refused vortexes in usually a community-oriented bank. This year, some of them were, well, you mentioned Northern Spirit Radio, also another group called News and Letters, which is a kind of political and economic education group. And not because we agree with everything in the newsletter, it's because we like the general idea of public education that's been one of our emphases over the years, but also direct service things. And then some political organizing too, nine to five as a working women's organization, favoring all kinds of workplace protections, and some peace activities to the Nevada Desert Experience, which conducts activities and education about nuclear dangers, nuclear weaponry, and some associated things that got very interested in the drones. That's an example of a few of them. I think that would give you an idea of the range of things. We've covered sometimes two international projects. One of our early donations was in 1980, really, I think, to some reconstruction in Lebanon, which had suffered a lot of destruction, mostly financed by the United States government. So it kind of cycles back the ideas to cycle back. Some earnings based on refused federal taxes and turn them into projects that help repair some of the damage done directly by the way taxes are spent, or indirectly by the lack of spending, lack of public spending. So this has been our approach over the years. And I think you don't necessarily take just the withheld taxes you're taking interest or return on investment. Are you also distributing some of the withheld taxes themselves? Our approach has not been to do that. There are about 20 or 30 such funds around the country, and they have their different approaches, some of them have mixed approaches, some just plain give away the refused tax monies. Our approach has been to bank the refused funds that are set in and allow the person we call them the depositor to get their money back. Oftentimes, they're collected upon by the internal revenue, and they may not be able to stand the complete loss of all the funds that they refused with some amount of penalties. So they get back, but only they can get back only up to the amount that they actually deposit it, because the interest they concede to the granting of the funds, and they also have to bear whatever interest and penalties the revenue system assesses against them. So our approach has been grant from the interest, or sometimes people have said that if they die with something in the account, we can distribute that as grants, or we can use that for our organizing support, or our organizing work, which is principally for giving out literature. That's our approach. - Well, I've already spoken to a couple other members of your group, Joe. I needed to speak to you because you have such a long and really striking history of activism in different professions. Mostly, if people go out and search for Joseph Maeslish out on the internet right now, I think they'll mainly find you either connect with work act resistance or with mediation. When did you become a mediator? - You know, since mediation, which is basically good listening and a few comments for people in conducting a dispute, people who have a dispute, and a feeling of being in favor of some of the most basic objective that each party has. So you could see that a good friend might be a mediator also. But, formally speaking, I started studying this in 1989. I heard about it just a few years before. By chance, I was doing some non-violence education and action training for the great peace march that went across the country in 1986, and it started in the Los Angeles area. So I gave a couple of workshops for that, and one of my workshops, the start of one of my workshops was delayed because people were finishing a workshop on mediation, and that's the first time I remember hearing the word. But in various ways, I used some of the mediation, some of the things that turned out to be mediation skills. I used them a lot earlier in my life. So it's hard to place a beginning, but formally speaking, back then in '89, and that's quite a lot of mediators since then. - As I said, you've got quite a history of activism. You told me earlier that you have from the age of 15, a picture of Martin Luther King that you saved. So it must have struck you at a fairly early age, the civil rights work. Did you get involved in civil rights work right away to get started? Is that how you got catapulted into activism? - Again, I want to divide between when I started thinking about things, and when I started taking some actions that would be recognizable by somebody watching me. I would want to reference my education and how I was attracted to the social ideals and trying to think them through some study of the Hebrew prophets, whom I like quite a lot. And so those were some at the end preparation of the general of values that I was fortunate to have around me in my household when I was the youngster. However, as far as actions, yes, I would say around 1960, partly under the influence and inspiration of the early civil rights sit-in movement that started in that year, 1960. But also, as you say, the bus boycott of about three or four years before when I cut out that picture of Martin Luther King Jr. But as far as me participating as an active person, it would be back then, I was 18 years old, and I had already been in college, actually, which I started a little earlier than most. Did some fundraising support, made some donations, and so on to support the early student sit-in movement. And that was the beginning of it. Also, some voter registration worked in 1960. So those were some of the earliest things, at least the earliest that I can recall right now. - You mentioned to me earlier also that in 1960, your page at the Democratic National Convention and in that period, you were also subscribing to the Student Voice, which was a newsletter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. So I feel the '60s coming on in your own personal experience there. But there was one contrasting experience, it seems contrasting to me, and that was that you were enrolled in an ROTC training program between '59 and '61. How did those all fit together? And what was bubbling up in you at that time? - That's a nice question. It certainly can sound odd to people. It was not out of any personal enthusiasm that I enrolled in ROTC. It was a requirement of all people who weren't military veterans, females, or conscientious objectors, which I had no idea what that meant, to any extent that I thought of it, I thought it was restricted to a couple of religious sects. I was 16 years old when starting UCLA and I fit the requirement. So I figured that's the way I had to do it. Now a friend of mine purposely did not go to a University of California campus, although he had the choice for those first couple of years of his college schooling, because he wanted to stay away from that. So there were people who had more consciousness than I about it back then. So that was my enrollment, and I figured on the advice of somebody who was already a student that in the Air Force ROTC you wouldn't carry a rifle around. So I thought that'd be interesting, learn about slight things like that. Then however, the peace subjects did come up and you could have identified me as trouble back then not because I was, you know, any bad behavior in the class. I got all the highest grades and everything, but that just seemed to be a habit of mine. But I remember one day the instructor, whom I liked quite a bit, charming young man, wrote our national objectives on the Blackboard. And he had, number one is to possess sufficient destructive power to be able to, you know, harm or destroy any potential attacker. Number two was to have communicated to the other party, you know, have that known. And number three was let the other party know under what circumstances we always meaning, of course, the United States and its military would employ the destructive power. So they'd know what were the things that they couldn't do without suffering retaliation. And then number four was create an atmosphere for peace. And I looked over the list and I asked the lieutenant, 'cause something seemed wrong to me, not that I rejected the deterrence kind of thinking. I didn't, but I didn't think that as long as you were in that deterrence posture, you'd be able to create an atmosphere for peace. It just didn't add up, you know, be so prepared under the right or we should say wrong conditions to use all that destructive power on some party somewhere in the world. That just didn't seem to be the spirit from which you could build peace. And so I asked him about what appeared to be this contradiction. He simply repeated the objectives and didn't see any difficulty at all. And I remember outside of class, I went through this again with him 'cause what was he not understanding about my doubts and what was, or was I not understanding about his comfort with this? I remember holding my bicycle and standing outside and he was, as I say, a very genial guy and quite willing to go over it again and help this puzzled student. But we did all of our different understandings there and I haven't got that straight yet in my mind about how a hostile posture ready to recreate destruction could allow enough room in our mind and spirit for the creativity and inventiveness and even some risk taking that would be required to improve a conflict atmosphere to use a more general term than to build peace. It impressed me quite a lot that incident impressed me quite a lot. And it's actually, as I look back, formed one of the bases of my interest in psychology and trauma and how it affects people's thinking and choices right through today, including some of my professional work. - Well, there's two different directions I wanna go at the same time, but let's start with the one that's maybe more fundamental for you. You mentioned that there was some influence of your home that prepared you to be an activist, that prepared you to be concerned about civil rights or maybe to think more objectively about war, as you just spoke of in your ROTC class. What kind of influences are you talking about from home? - Well, I'd say both my parents were activists in somewhat different ways. My father was acquainted due to his work history, but he'd become acquainted with a lot of people from various levels of political life in California. He was quite comfortable and he had some, let's say, long-term personal acquaintances with many figures. And he was fairly interested in the history of things, politics, I remember he read a lot about the New Deal, which he experienced as a young man and other books of history. And some participation in electoral politics, a little bit of that. Also in various community institutions, he was a supporter of some cultural institutions, educational institutions, particularly a Jewish educational university level, a small institution that he was involved with for a long time. So some of these things were his interests. And my mother, more from the point of view of somebody who had been a travel writer for a dozen years and had visited all kinds of places in the 1920s and 30s, done such things as been the only woman writing on a bus from Damascus to Baghdad in 1935 and writing articles about those things, reviewing books, interviewing many people, quite involved in current history, affairs, visiting Europe a couple of times in the 1930s, including Germany in 1938. And so these interests, I guess, seem to be a assumed background that a person would be interested in public affairs. - Of course, people can be interested in current affairs and be a conservative. I guess Sarah Palin is probably interested in current affairs, but you would hardly call her a progressive or a liberal, at least not in terms of the path that you followed. The Jewish family that you grew up in and religion that you practiced, you mentioned earlier the prophets as examples. Is that just a foundational step to how you got to where you are? Do you continue to practice? - I doubt that Palin is that interested in current affairs, actually, the current affairs she's interested in is probably her own career and ambition, but maybe there wouldn't be any big left in politics of all folks of that kind of interest. We're out of it, I don't know. Well, I would say the problem, why were the prophets attractive to me? Well, for something, some other reason. You know, there was some kind of affinity that spoke to me about that, some sort of humanistic principles. And perhaps it's just the way I was treated as a youngster or the way I, as a youngster, wished I were being treated. But some mix of those, I suppose. But enough of the favorable and supportive experience to give me the idea that, hey, all society ought to be like this. And no, I don't have the religious practice now. I just figure, in fact, one of the prophets quoted the Lord as saying, I'd prefer it if you forgot my name and ignored my ceremonies, but followed my way. And I thought that sounds pretty good. So that's what I'm trying to do now. I wouldn't ascribe any particular as to the religion itself, though, because most of the religions have about the range of potentials that humans do, ourselves, and humans that devise the religion from the destructive to the constructive, from the cooperative to the, well, it's a very narrow, narrowly conceived attitudes, whether it's Judaism or any other religion. But I guess I use the pieces of it that appeal to whatever I already had in me and found that supportive. As an activist, I immediately started mixing and participating with people from all the religions. And I've found all of them represented in some of the activities that have meant the most to me over the years. Each of us is a traveler, and there's lots of free advice on how to make Earth's journey, and how to find paradise. We can search for ancient secrets, or ride on the fashions we're. But the Hebrew prophets, simple words, will live past all of them. Keep your eye on freedom, put your hand to charity. Be strong enough to be gentle on the road. To the justice of the way, love tender each day. Keep your feet walking humbly with your car. [MUSIC PLAYING] Keep your eye on freedom. Hold your hand to charity. Be strong enough to be gentle on the road. To justice of the way, love tender each day. Keep your feet walking humbly with your car. Shall we build a crystal temple, sacrifice, and fattest cake? Sermonize for God and country. Sort the wheat out from the chair. Know the pleasure of the Lord comes not in trying just to please. And dreadful pawns and the comic arms won't set our minds at ease. But keep your eye on freedom. Hold your hand to charity. Be strong enough to be gentle on the road. To justice of the way, love tender each day. Keep your feet walking humbly with your car. Keep your eye on freedom. Hold your hand to charity. Be strong enough to be gentle on the road. To justice of the way, love tender each day. Keep your feet walking humbly with your car. Keep your feet walking humbly with your car. Keep your feet walking humbly with your car. Andy and Terry Murray's song "Travelers," apropos of the inspiration Joseph Maeslish got from his Jewish upbringing and the Jewish prophets in particular. Let's go on, Joe, about how your life and activism unfolded. In the 60s you became increasingly active and at a certain point you had a student deferment so you couldn't be drafted into the war in Vietnam. But you deliberately changed your status. Tell me about that and what the outcome of that was. I was a deferred student and grateful for that but as the war itself and the movement against the war or the movements against the war since they weren't always united, advanced, I started thinking more and more about my personal status as related to the war as being both a source for support for the war and a source for opposition to it. What I'm saying is that I believe we are all inevitably parts of both the problem and the solution. I think it's kind of a hassle to say, "Well, quit being part of the problem and be part of the solution," to just change the proportions in your life. I figured along with others who formed the draft resistance that we needed a personal component to change our personal relations as well as to continue with the demonstrations and agitation about the war and these issues as about the other issues and that my status as a deferred graduate student at that time was not making as strong a statement and an action as I might be able to do and not making the contribution that I might to the peace side of things were I to relinquish my deferment and just refuse any orders from the system come what may. In a way, I was inspired by thinking of things like the bus boycott, the various sit-ins and the actions, which had proven to me beyond doubt that the civic power of action, clear action, non-violent action and occasional non-cooperation, including sometimes illegal non-cooperation, were pretty important forces in all social change so I thought of it as a kind of civil rights and equality action as well as an anti-war action and as well as a way that a non-soldier could support the increasing number of soldiers who were refusing orders, figured what's my parallel action to that so I resigned from the system as prosecutor in my criminal case, put it, defend and in effect, resigned from selective service he said and I was quite gratified to see that he understood it and that was in 1967. I'd seen the demonstrations also and participated in many of them and I could see that there was a certain stridency if that's a word I can use, developing, I was all for non-violent militants, but if that's I had the feeling that if people were avoiding the personal question and betting everything on the mass actions that wasn't going to get it and it might actually just plain increase social chaos and not really help the cause of peace if there wasn't enough balance there. I had the advantage of a few others thinking this through and writing and talking about it, such people, such as David Harris, people of Stanford and Palo Alto and then I'd done some reading and history of the Refusers from previous wars so that helped me along the way too. And so did this go easily? What happened when you refused this government just said fine, we don't want Joseph May's list. He wouldn't be a good soldier any help? No, no they didn't, they sent me another draft card after I had sent mine to them and it was marked delinquent because I disobeyed the rules. If I turned that one into, by the way, they ordered me to show up for examination and induction and I figured that I would show up outside their building but not go in, others of us went in or didn't show up at all, went in and refused, various kinds of things people were doing. Some people were preparing various kinds of legal defenses such as they were improperly denied a deferment or improperly denied conscientious objector status. I didn't try either of those after all I had relinquished my deferment in the first place. So I showed up outside the place one other of my Los Angeles resistance partners was also ordered for induction that day. We stood outside with our supporters and we saw young people who were going into the building probably off to the wars of course. My father was there with me, he started to cry actually seeing the families separating and he just kept saying, "What is this really for?" Expressingly general and of unclarity in the populace about what this world was for. So that was my experience on that day, shortly afterward I and my other resistance partner and the other 10 or so people who had refused that day were indicted by the Department of Justice and the grand jury system and ordered to show up for arraignment and eventually trial. It was kind of odd thing happened instead of there being about six or seven months until we were indicted. We were indicted two weeks after our refusal, two or three weeks after our refusal or are not showing up because my resistance associate was the son of a noted actor who was interviewed on television I think at night of our refusal to show up inside and he was a decorated World War II person and he said that this was the proudest day of his life that his son was refusing. So I think this meant to the government that they should take action quickly and show that they were on the ball but of course it would be unfair to prosecute only that young person that the son of this noted fellow. So they indicted all of us from that day and that was their idea of fairness about things. So we were prosecuted sooner than we would have been otherwise. I was convicted as pretty simple, you know, straightforward trial and sentence to the usual sentence for our district, federal district at that time which was three years of imprisonment actually I was in for two and a half because there's some statutory reduction of time. What was that experience like for you? Did you regret or was this a valuable effort in terms of the part of the peace effort? The value for me mainly was in my action and the actions of those who were supporting me or doing their own actions and I wanted to distinguish between who did what, you know, we declined to cooperate and then what the government did was prosecute us and imprison a lot of us so you know I can't say what they did was helpful. We tried to respond well, people stuck together, they kept track of each other, tended each other's trials if they could or visited in prisons depending on where we were imprisoned. So our actions, we just tried to keep expressing the kind of communitarian spirit that was behind our peacemaking attitude anyway and our anti-war attitude but it was helpful, this was something that illustrated for me again what I had learned in observing and participating in a indirect way but observing the sit-in movements and movement for voter registration in Mississippi which I interviewed many participants in for some radio programs as a matter of a fact made back in 1964 and '65 so I got to meet quite a lot of people and hear many, many stories and I observed for myself as a most direct participant in my war refusal the effects and the challenges that come along with direct personal non-cooperation. How was it for me though, it was a long time but also there were a lot of incidents that continued to illustrate the importance of personal action and of group support. There were occasional activities in the prisons too that some of them got me in moderate amounts of trouble with the authorities there but mostly I was a kind of quiet prisoner. It certainly gave me a look up close with that part of the injustices in society certainly before as a history student, as an activist, a civil rights participant and supporter. I knew plenty about the inequalities but to see them day by day to learn some of the different sentences, for example, that people got for activities that just seemed to be a very strange way of thinking, for example, somebody who participated in an eight million dollar window, he had a two year sentence and somebody who'd been participant in four million dollars when he had a four year sentence and then somebody who actually I had known on the streets who had done a $6,000 unarmed robbery of a national bank, he wound up with a 13 year sentence, need I say, he was an African American. So when you see this and you see the effect on people's lives, it's just phenomenal. I also observed a lot of heroin use as a prisoner which sounds odd to people but that was another series of stories in one of the prisons particularly and I say prisons plural because due to various events I was transferred around a good deal and I was actually for periods short or long in half of the federal prisons that existed at the time. I maintain now an interest in this and in prison and in criminal justice systems, you know, and maybe it'd be good for your audience to know that there are about nine times as many prisoners now in the United States at almost all levels between federal, state, local between seven and nine times as many prisoners now as there were in let's say 1970 somewhere during my term of imprisonment. There aren't nine times as many people in the country and only about double I think and this is something I really want people to think about and look into. When people ask me about my time of imprisonment, I always kind of drift over to what's going on now because that's what I'd like people to focus on and to become interested in. I'll come back to more about that in a moment Joe, I want to remind our listeners you're tuned in to spirit in action and I'm your host. My name is Mark Helpsmeet and this is a Northern spirit radio production. Our website is NorthernSpiritRadio.org, find all of our programs there, links to our guests and leave us comments. We need your help and input to move spirit forward through our program. We're speaking today to Joseph Mayslish, he's over in California, he's part of the Southern California war tax resistance group. He's been a war tax resistors since 1966 and he went to prison, we were just talking about that and I need to ask you some more about that Joseph because it seems to me you speak rather dispassionately about it. I think most people when they consider let's say the more strident forms of activism, they're afraid to move forward toward that because of the penalties that'll come down on their head. You don't seem to be terribly scarred by this experience you had, two and a half years in prison. Why not? Why are you not one of the angry, broken people? I was, let's not think that I wasn't afraid and concerned about this as I decided to be a resistor or as what seemed a likely imprisonment approached I surely was. You're talking to the me of 40 years later, I'm concerned about other things now, not so I wouldn't show the level of concern that I had back then and it's also true that when people look back at the past they may leave out in discussing at some of the discomfort or strong emotions, including fear that they had back at the time. Well I'm glad I don't give this impression of brokenness, perhaps because I had a chance to think about things in advance and make them more of a choice than people who didn't have access to the deferments for example. Still there were many difficult moments there being transferred around a lot, sometimes as a kind of involuntary thing, I sort of got arrested and while in a prison once picked up out of the edit for in the morning by guards with clubs and helmets, there were some pretty terrible times, but those as you pull through them they sort of take their place with all the stories that you've collected in your life. But no I wouldn't say I'm bitter about it, that I don't think I had that very much. I remember having some dreams near my release time in which I was in the dream, I was shouting at the authorities and saying all I wanted was just to get out of the places and things that I wasn't so aware of feeling while awake, but they came out in these dreams. And another factor that helped with that and it's something that I learned about later in study in my psychology studies. But what was important was the sense of support, not that all of society was supporting us refusors it wasn't, although the degree of support increased with passage of the years. But it was that there were people trying to be of help to each other, to me that's a very helpful thing and even minority as a community might be, knowing that there are people thinking about one, that they understand what you're trying to do, that's a very big help. You know it may be Mark occurs to me during this interview now, that is one of the places I started to learn what I now teach as a counselor helping people at workplaces where tragedies have occurred and part of my goals in visiting them is to reassure them about the value of mutual support in helping them recover from whatever trauma, let's say industrial accident or whatever has happened. So that kind of runs on through to today, so I wouldn't want to leave that out as an important factor in helping me seem as together as I may seem now. I think Joe that by your work and witness, you're one of the people Anne Finney would like to call a friend. So here's Anne Finney's song, "Have You Been To Jail For Justice?" ♪ Was it season sharpest? Maybe it was Dorothy Day ♪ ♪ Some will say Dr. King or Gandhi, set them on their way ♪ ♪ No matter who your mentors are, it's pretty plain to see ♪ ♪ If you've been to jail for justice, you're in good company ♪ ♪ Have you been to jail for justice? ♪ ♪ I want to shake your hand, sitting in and lying down ♪ ♪ Always to take a stand, have you sung a song of freedom? ♪ ♪ Or march that picket line? Have you been to jail for justice? ♪ ♪ Oh, you're a friend of mine ♪ ♪ You law abiding citizens listen to this song ♪ ♪ Laws were made by people and people can be wrong ♪ ♪ Once unions were against the law but slavery was fine ♪ ♪ Women were denied the vote and children worked the mind ♪ ♪ The more you study history, the less you can deny it ♪ ♪ A rotten law stays on the books 'til folks with guts defy it ♪ ♪ Have you been to jail for justice? ♪ ♪ I want to shake your hand, sitting in and lying down ♪ ♪ Always to take a stand, have you sung a song of freedom? ♪ ♪ Or march that picket line? Have you been to jail for justice? ♪ ♪ Oh, you're a friend of mine ♪ ♪ Now the law's supposed to serve us and so are the police ♪ ♪ When that system fails, it's up to us to speak our peace ♪ ♪ It takes eternal vigilance or justice to prevail ♪ ♪ So get courage from your convictions, let them haul you off to jail ♪ ♪ Have you been to jail for justice? ♪ ♪ I want to shake your hand, sitting in and lying down ♪ ♪ Always to take a stand, have you sung a song for freedom? ♪ ♪ Or march that picket line? Have you been to jail for justice? ♪ ♪ Will you go to jail for justice? Have you been to jail for justice? ♪ ♪ Oh, you're a friend of mine ♪ And Feeney, have you been to jail for justice? Anne will be my guest in the very near future, so you'll have a chance to get to know much more of her work and music. For the moment, we're talking to Joseph Maeslish, who did go to jail for justice, and has done so much more. Joe, would you make the same choice again? It sounds to me like early on, you were a great scholastic achiever, and I know that you worked for a number of years in auto repair, which is not what most people associate with the great scholars. On the other hand, I know eventually you did get involved, and you got a degree in marriage and family therapy. Would you have made the same choice again, and how did how things played out affect where you chose to work? It's a pretty challenging question, and I hope that all of your audience, each member of your audience is thinking that over for themselves, too, because whatever our course in life is, we think about what our choices have been. I hope we don't get lost too much in thinking about our past choices, and either regretting or applauding them, but that we put our most of our energies into our choices for today. As I look back, I say, well, there are a couple of things that I would adjust, and what I would have liked would have been to be a little more prompt in making some of the choices and changes. That would have been good, but there were reasons that I wasn't. I just had a slow-moving guy back then, maybe now, too. The odd to apply the term "conservative" to me, but you might, in this sense, so that would be the main regret of just having been slow and inefficient at some of these changes, but that's the way I was. There were a couple of specific things that would have been much better to do differently, and I understand why I didn't do them differently, but the general course of things and the main decisions, those feel quite good to me now, too. Well, I'm glad you're in that good path. You did switch from working in auto-repair to a psychology realm in the mid-80s. What led to that transfer of your work efforts? Has it borne the fruit that you wanted it to bear? Yes, yes. Well, let me go and say you've already asked or referred to my change from scholarship imprisonment and then mechanical to technical work. That switch was, I just kind of had it with institutional life, and I would prefer to be an employee in small business to being a some very big institution like college life, and a more active occupation, physically speaking. Certainly, it was as demanding as far as analytical skills. Let's not short the technical and repair world in that regard. I was 13 or 14 years in that, and it was very good to me. I learned an awful lot about people and myself, and realized that, hey, I'm getting more interested in the people than in the vehicles, which was never my first interest anyway, and all through all this time, I was being as active as I could in the piecework, anti-nuclear work, and so I decided to make the jump. I had put together enough money, so I could stop that and do some studies at a pretty fast pace in clinical psychology and get myself on the way to licensure as a marriage and family therapist. I did that, made that next big change, third career or whatever, if we're keeping track. Did I achieve some of the objectives? Yes, one of the objectives, by the way, was that I felt something incomplete about the understanding of most peace and social justice activism, that didn't have any way of understanding the forces that we were working in opposition to. And didn't have much understanding of the dynamics of our own groups, what it really took to have a strong group for example. I benefited a lot from modern feminism, which emphasized the interpersonal relations aspect of problems and of solutions. That helped me a lot in concluding that we needed to understand the interpersonal part of it. Why are people, to a large extent, favoring or not disapproving of really bad social relations or fair, the distorted war budget, things like that. By then, items were already working with others for a few years in the poor tax resistance as an example of the kind of activities I was doing. So I had hopes that through not only the study of psychology but doing some work in it, that I would learn a lot about this dimension of things. And indeed, I believe I did early on in my studies. I was intrigued with the question my professors supported me in pursuing it as a study paper about the question of what distinguishes between people who abuse as children do not become abusive of children when they are adults. That's the majority of abuse victims, by the way, what distinguishes them from those victims of abuse in childhood who do abuse later on in life. I actually found some answers to this. They're extremely useful for have a lot of implications for social and political action. So that was quite gratifying to find that, yes, my instinct told me right there was something useful to learn, to be learned there. Eventually, the work that you got involved with is this mediation work we've already spoken of. I assume you started out doing standard marriage and family therapy, et cetera. Some of that, and not as a mediator but as a counselor, but also some work, just a variety of things. Case work, work with youngsters, families with abuse histories or abuse problems, even help to train some interns in working with adolescents on probation. And at the same time, I was developing some work as a mediator, but usually a mediator for commercial court matters and employment problems. Employment problems. So is this justice work also in your point of view? It's related to it. For example, I worked for a few years as a staff member and then acting director of a community mediation agency. And there were all kinds of problems came to us. We worked pretty closely with a few police divisions and they would refer to us or send people to us that had problems within families, neighbor problems, all kinds of things like that. We also went out and offered our services. That was a great variety of subjects, usually not litigated matters. But I also worked as a contract worker for the Climate Opportunity Commission for many years, who, including now, occasionally mediate an employment discrimination matter or the postal service, which means that I don't make a judgment as a hearing officer. I just help people talk about things, see if there's a way that they can solve the problem or at least help them define the problems better. And so relates to my interest back from when I was a history student in industrial relations issues. I suppose in a general way, if workplace atmospheres are improved, that's going to help everybody. And that's certainly related to justice issue, even if it's not completely changing the industrial order. By the way, during the course of my work, at workplaces as a crisis counselor, I have learned and I often tell the people I'm working with that the way people are relating to each other, including their management and employee relations, but the way people are treating each other every day forms the basis for how they'll be able to respond and handle a particular crisis that comes up. So I want to call that, in general, a kind of a revolutionary idea, a pretty simple idea, but hard for a workplace to make some changes and take advantage of that. But anyway, I put in my little word about that in a general way. I think that's appropriate for my role as a crisis person. Well, we're getting near the end of our hour, Joe. I think that there's so much we could probably talk for many hours. I'd like to just take an overview and then ask you a kind of concluding question. You got involved in political activism early before you're 18. Obviously, with the Democratic National Convention, you connected in some way with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, civil rights was inspirational to you. I understand for some portion of the year you lived in West Jerusalem, you saw things on the ground there. Your opposition to the war grew so that you eventually, I guess you'd say voluntarily, spending two and a half years in jail. You are involved in anti-nuclear movement during the late 70s, war tax resistance participation since '66 and working with the War Resisters League. You did auto repair. That must be a major peace effort. And then you got involved with a marriage family therapy, working on trauma and crisis work. So that's a whole range of things you've been involved in. Looking back from in your 70s now, is there any particular thing that you feel like? I really hit it well that this is amongst the most fruitful of work that I've done. What has been the most valuable to the world that you think that you've passed along? And I know that's a lot to distill down into one item. But do you have a sense from the perspective where you're sitting now, what looks most valuable? Well, let's see, from age 68, you know, I look back at that stuff. One of the big areas for developing and communicating that, expressing that spirit that I've been trying to talk about is in interpersonal relationships and family relationships. That may often be a very hard one for people too. I've found it occasionally, more than occasionally, an area of difficulty and an area of challenge. So part of what I'm pleased with, if I have an arc of progress that I've been developing, is my partnership, affectionate partnership of 18 years now, and some of my previous relationships also, and having maintained some of my friendships for 40-50 years has been a valuable part of life too, and an arena in which I've worked out some of my development and I hope I may say fairly high progress. I think the achievement for any of us is the spirit in which we encounter each step along the way. And I'd like to think that I've become a little clearer in understanding and in action to make them consistent with the values that I've been clarifying as I worked my way through this life so far. I remember Gandhi's autobiography called "My Experiments with Truth." Well, it is a nice idea that it's really, what are we becoming? Are we becoming more of parts of ourselves that we want to emphasize? That's I think what's gratifying to feel like I've made some moves in that direction. A lot left to do, of course. So there's a kind of developmental answer to your question, and rather than name any particular thing, I just hope that it's the spirit in which I've encountered them, and I does involve looking at things and recognizing my mixed nature and saying, "Oh, there was some mistakes. There was too much anger or inhibition or whatever it was." So there's my odd answer for your question. I hope that's got enough meaning in it. It seems to me that might be a very good answer for someone who has a degree in psychology and marriage and family therapy. A process answer makes a lot more sense rather than just this objective on June 30th I did this. I hope that your audience members will, you know, I tried to give it without a lot of jargon. I wanted to make that accessible because I and you and your audience members, it's part of our business of living and certainly this, well, let me say, the Northern spirit that not communicate through what we do. As a person who's 12 years younger than you, I think that the witness that you and others did in the 60s certainly helped propel me toward a more activist and more examined life. And so so many people who joined in together, the community effort that was the 60s certainly made a difference to me, but the continuing refinement in everything we do in our life is even more inspirational. So thank you, Joe, for serving as that witness in your life, doing the work that you're called to and for visiting with us today for spirit and action. I want to thank you for passing this along through the generations and through your communication project. That was Joseph Maeslish, today's spirit and action guest. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This spirit and action program is an effort of Northern spirit radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is spirit in action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along, with every voice, with every song, we will move this world along, and our lives will feel the echo of our healing.