Spirit in Action
Kathy Kelly - Voices for Creative Nonviolence Walk Chicago to the Twin Cities
Kathy is currently co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Noviolence, is active with the Catholic Worker movement and since becoming a pacifist has refused payment of all federal income tax for 25 years. She went to prison for one year for planting corn on nuclear missile silo sites and has a Masters in Religious Education from Chicago Theological Seminary.
- Broadcast on:
- 24 Aug 2008
- Audio Format:
- other
[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 our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmeak. 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 ♪ Welcome again to Spirit in Action, a program of Northern Spirit Radio. We're going to join some folks on the road today walking from Chicago up to the Twin Cities, Minnesota, to greet the upcoming Republican National Convention. In particular, we'll be talking with Kathy Kelly, a truly inspiring worker for peace and justice. Kathy is director of a group Voices for Creative Nonviolence, based in Chicago, who organized this walk. If you want to look them up on the web, that's vcnv.org. Voices for Creative Nonviolence, vcnv.org. Or you can find that link on my NorthernSpiritRadio.org website. While you're on our site, please leave a comment as we'd really like to get to know you and receive your feedback. Feel free to comment on anything, but perhaps today's interview with Kathy Kelly will be foremost on your mind. Kathy was central in a precursor to Voices for Creative Nonviolence, called Voices in the Wilderness, which worked against the economic sanctions previously imposed on Iraq. She's been a war tax refuser for decades, spent a year in prison for her peace witness against nuclear missiles, and has a masters in religious education from Chicago Theological Seminary. We're going to go to the phone now to Winona, Minnesota, to join Kathy Kelly of Voices for Creative Nonviolence. With beauty before and behind you, with beauty above and below you, with beauty around and within you. [Music] Kathy, thanks for joining me for Spirit in Action. Thank you, Mark. Where on your walk are you right now? Well, we're in Winona, Minnesota. It was nice to cross the state line today, although we'll actually cross back into Wisconsin and kind of weave our way back and forth across the Mississippi and go up towards St. Paul on the Wisconsin side. I'm assuming you took this walk just because it's summer and it's more pleasant to walk here in the summer than it would be in the winter. Is that why you're doing this? I couldn't imagine more favorable hospitality or prettier area through which to walk, but we felt way back in January when we weren't thinking so much about seasons. We were thinking a lot about elections and about the connection that exists in terms of conventions between Chicago and St. Paul. During the height of the Vietnam War, Chicago was a very notorious convention site and it erupted. We don't want to recreate 68, but we do feel that Chicago kind of hovers in people's memories for a convention held during a time of war. In St. Paul, the Republicans will hold their convention. So we think we can say that both the Democrats and the Republicans ought to be held accountable for the war against Iraq, such a long-standing war. It traces back well over decades, especially in 1991 when the United States launched the first desert storm bombardment. But even before that, the United States was so supportive of Saddam Hussein that they helped usher in his dictatorship and really more it in place. So we look at the Republicans saying that national security is their issue, and yet we recognize that there's tremendous insecurity in the United States and in Iraq, even though pots and pots of money are being spent and much of that money goes in the pockets of very wealthy military corporation elites. And so we're happy to undertake this walk as a way to be in touch with average ordinary people. Try to hear from them in public forums and speak to them about some of our own experiences. Our walkers include a former U.S. soldier who was in Iraq as an artillery man for 14 months and has since joined Iraq's against war. And I myself was in Iraq all through the shock and door bombing during the beginning months of the occupation, but with the peace team. And there are several people who've worked with people who've fled from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. So we have a very interesting crew of core walkers and people join us from time to time. And I can really only say perky and positive things about doing a project like this right now, and we're about 3/4 of the way through. Are you being greeted by throngs like when Gandhi did a salt march to the sea? Are there, you know, thousands of people pouring on, or how many walkers are there? What's the atmosphere like as you walk along? Well, it's much more casual in terms of greetings. You know, we would look forward to the day when a kind of ashram on the road would be greeted by throngs of people and people willing to take enormous risks as happened in Gandhi's salt march. But I would say that throngs of people drive past us, and we quite often are given not only a thumbs up, but sometimes people lean out the window and they have their hands clasped and they scream, "Go, yes, we're with you." Not always, but it's not unfamiliar to us at all to get a very strong vocal support or a strong honk on the road. And when we come to public places, we've found that 60 to 100 is typical for an evening forum in very small towns. And interestingly, we've been on the front page of almost every newspaper of each small town we've walked through so that many people know us even if they can't read our signs. I'm not disappointed in reception or in outreach. I do know, though, Mark, that all of us have to use our imagination to try to understand better ways to galvanize the U.S. public to do more than honk or more than give a thumbs up and to work very, very hard to let their elected representatives know what their beliefs are with regard to this war. And I think that the overwhelming majority of the population does want to see this war end. The group that you're with, I think you're executive director for, is Voices for Creative Nonviolence. Why? Right now, I don't think I'd ever call myself an executive director, but I'm certainly part of Voices for Creative Nonviolence. Well, what is Voices for Creative Nonviolence and why that name, I mean, the Voices, Creative Nonviolence, what is the mix of those three things? Why that? The reason we named ourselves Voices for Creative Nonviolence was because we really wanted to remain dedicated to nonviolent direct action. We didn't want to walk away from cares and concerns of people in Iraq. We knew that the sanctions were lifted, and really it's one of our collective greatest disappointments in our adult lives. Those of us who worked on the Voices in the Wilderness Campaign, that we never succeeded in lifting those sanctions. The sanctions didn't end until after the U.S. occupation had begun, but we are also gravely concerned that the same conditions that prevailed when we visited Iraqi hospitals and small towns and poor neighborhoods are still operating in Iraq. There's a shortage of medicines, and people don't have ways to purify their water, and the numbers of doctors present in the country has gone way down because so many have fled, and education is substandard. There are just a whole list of problems that have to do with infrastructure and reconstruction, and you're in, you're out. It seems that even though the dictatorship is over, even though the United States is ostensibly being responsible or accountable as an occupying power, we don't see improvements in the lives of people who've meant us no harm. So we certainly believe that the need for a creative, non-violence remains strong, and we're happy to try to be voices on that behalf. I could also tell you that Voices in the Wilderness was found guilty in federal court for bringing medicines and medical relief supplies to Iraq, and we were fined $20,000, and then we refused to pay that very publicly. Once we paid it in Iraqi dinner only because we wanted to educate people about the, you know, how $17 worth of American money could purchase $20,000 Iraqi dinner under the economic sanctions. But the judge, when he imposed the fine on us, was told by us after he quoted the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, who said those who disobey an unjust law should do so openly and lovingly, and with a willingness to pay the penalty, and we said, well, okay, if you want to put us in jail, we'll go openly and lovingly, but we won't pay a dime of a fine that could be redirected, recycled, in a sense, into paying for more war. He seems to have left it at that. We haven't heard from the federal government again, but we did begin under the name Voices for Creative Non-Violence. With a mission that's slightly different now, we're vigorously opposed to economic warfare against Iraq, but also the military warfare. At the origin, you were Voices in the Wilderness. That was the group that was working against sanctions and trying to help the Iraqi people. Right, and then eventually, you know, the bombings of the no-fly zones were occurring, and we certainly opposed that, and then we geared up as best we could to oppose the shock and awe bombing. And we formed the Iraq Peace Team in a good number of people, remained in Iraq while through the bombing and into the time of occupation. So sometimes we just answer the phone voices and hope it encompasses both histories. You know what I think I want you to do, Cathy, is do it in chronological order, how you first got involved with things about Iraq. And your first-hand view, because a lot of people in the U.S. still have no idea about all the attacks in the non-fly zone, all of that that went around, how we were hurting the Iraqi people. Describe it from the ground level as you lived through your contact with Iraq. Well, Mark, I was certainly among the people who might have been able to distinguish Iraq from Iran on a map, but that was about the extent of what I knew. I think I could probably spell Baghdad, and my knowledge went no further. But in August of 1990, I read the New York Times carefully every day, and I could see right after Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait that there was something brewing for a very strong United States response, and they were already beginning to talk about a military response. And so even though the United States supported all kinds of dictatorships in Central and South America, and the United States had itself invaded Grenada in Panama, not so far in the recent past, it seemed clear that the United States was not going to tolerate Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. And so a number of us really started to brush up on our history and geography and economics, and it was increasingly clear that Iraq had a huge reserves of something the United States of course wants to control in terms of pricing and flow in its oil, and that even though the United States had helped install Saddam Hussein as a dictator and maintain him, they might be ready to more or less unload him. So there were some people in Europe who had conceived of the idea of a peace team that would be in Iraq on each border, one on the Kuwait side of the Kuwait-Iraq border, one on the Saudi side of the Saudi-Iraq border, and one on the Iraq side of the Iraq-Saudi border, kind of a triangle. And that sounded like a good idea to me. I'm in Hennessy once that you can't be a vegetarian between meals, and you can't be a pacifist between wars, and I agree with that. So I said I'd like to be part of that and heard nothing, and actually my nose was kind of out of jointed, "Well, maybe they don't want me." And then right before the last flight to Baghdad was possible, I learned that I was accepted, and so I quick went to Boston and joined others, and I flew into Baghdad in late December of 1990, and joined this peace team on the border. And we were there on the border all through January of 1991, the war broke out on January 16th. I'll always remember that night that planes started to fly overhead, and we all crawled out of our tents and kind of huddled underneath the stars, and the dogs in the area started to bark. And I honestly think those dogs never having heard such noises before barked themselves hoarse. I wonder if some of them didn't reach their demise, barking and barking. And then the planes just kept flying overhead, and we were embarrassingly safe in this peace team in 1991. We were actually playing ping pong in the desert and learning each other's languages. We were 78 people from 18 different countries, but we knew that if each of the planes that flew overhead every five minutes was unloading a payload of bombs that people in cities in Iraq must be in grave, grave danger, or not surviving at all. And then the Iraqi authorities on January 28th decided that there was a we, a small possibility that Iraqi military might come out in the direction where we were camped, that we might actually be in the way, which more or less are intent to interpose ourselves between the warring parties. But the Iraqis wanted out. The Kuwaitis had said no, we couldn't set up a camp, and the Saudis had said no to the idea of a camp. So there was just this one Gulf peace team on the Iraq side of the Iraq-Saudi border. And when the Iraqis decided they wanted out of there, we didn't have a whole lot of choice. You know, they might have been the choice to more or less die in the desert if we had stayed, because we didn't have an independent source of electricity or water or food. So we did our camp, you know, broke down the tents and packed up the pots and pans and put them all in four buses and we were taken to Baghdad. And Baghdad was under very severe bombardment at that point, and so was the road along which we traveled. And I can't tell you exactly why, but after we were in Baghdad for four days and after a bomb had hit the servants quarters of the hotel where we stayed, the morning after that happened, the Iraqis came to us again and they said, "We're sorry, but you cannot stay." And we were put on buses and we were taken to the border between Jordan and Iraq and Queen Nur sent a bus for us. And so we loaded on to the Jordanian bus and we went to Amman, Jordan, and we remained in the region for another six months, three months beyond the conclusion of the war. And our idea was to try to keep the road safe between Amman and Baghdad after we'd been evacuated out of Iraq. We did get permission to go back in carrying medical supplies. And so we did our best to gather medical supplies from all over the world, and it was really kind of amazing how quickly Japan, Italy, Germany, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Australia, all of these countries sent us medical relief supplies. So much so that we actually had a huge stockpile in the airport. That's one of the reasons we had to stay so long after the war had ended. But during the war, we did manage to send in two convoys of medical relief supplies. And then after the war, we went in as often as we could. I tell you all that in part because I want you to know that when I came back to the United States in August of 1991, there was maybe a little interest on the part of my own friends and family. There was one demonstration when people really called attention to the comment made by a young soldier from the United States that it was like shooting fish in a barrel, talking about their entrance into southern Iraqi cities. But then Iraq had gone off people's radar screen, and it went off my own as well. I, myself, didn't pay attention. The remainder of '91, '92, '93, '94, two statistics that were emerging that showed that because the economic sanctions had never been lifted, that these economic sanctions weren't just punishing. They were legally, brutally, murderously hitting the poorest of the poor, the elderly, the sick, people with chronic diseases who couldn't get their medicines, and most horribly children who committed no crime. Kids were dying of pneumonia in the winter and of starvation all year long and of waterborne diseases in the summer. United Nations agents were saying the United Nations, which was called upon to impose the economic sanctions, shouldn't be creating a situation where civilians are at such risk and children are dying. They wanted activists to try to campaign against these economic sanctions. Finally, in 1995, a group of us decided that we would form a campaign to try to lift the economic sanctions, and we called it voices in the wilderness, and we said, "Well, break the sanctions as often as we can as an act of civil disobedience." That's why we started to go to Iraq so often. I think I went 27 times between 1995 and 2003, and we organized 70 delegations. We didn't lift the sanctions, but many people came back from Iraq after going on those delegations, and they were never the same. They hit the ground running, and they work to educate their local church groups, their communities, their universities, their workplaces, and there was a very strong network of people who wanted to see that economic war against Iraq end in the United States and in the United Kingdom. Then, certainly, by 2002, we could see that another huge military war was coming, and so in advance of the shock and awe bombardment, we formed the Iraq Peace Team, and we negotiated with the Iraqi authorities to let us just stay in Baghdad and move among some of the poorest neighborhoods and go down to Basra on occasion, and just try to let people know we're working as hard as we can with many, many others to stop this war, but if it does come, we're not going to run away from you. And all the hospitality that you've extended to us, and we resolved to remain alongside people, and so this we did, and the shock and awe bombing was shocking, and it was awful. I'd been there during a previous Desert Fox bombing in 1998 for four days, and that also was terrible, but in the shock and awe bombardment in the hospitals, there were people who just happened to live near a military installation, and some came to the hospitals racing with survivors, and there was one boy I knew he was the only one in his whole family who had survived. At age 13, he'd lost both his arms. That's that next to a little girl whose body had just been torn apart. She was just having a picnic lunch with her family when all of a sudden a bomb hit. I knew a man who was so excited because he heard, "Well, the dictatorship is gone. I can put up a satellite dish." He was from a wealthier family, and he wanted to hear the news. Missile directly hit him, and he's now paralyzed her from the waist down. Since that time, through the occupation and into the present, we've tried our best to hear the stories of people fleeing from the violence in Iraq, and to stay in touch with families in Iraq that we know. And most of the families I know still say, "Don't come back over here. Not now, maybe later." And they're afraid that if we visit them, it might bring harm to them. So we try to stay in touch by other means. Wow, that's a major part of journey. I've got a lot of questions about stuff along the way. And some of this might seem oppositional. I'm not oppositional to the wonderful worker spirit that you've been doing, Kathy. You and the other workers for voices in the wilderness and voices for creative non-violence. But I do want to make sure that I ask the questions that your critics would like to ask you so that they can have a satisfactory answer. First of all, you point out the problems that existed with economic sanctions, and you also have problems with the military invasion. What was the solution? How could we influence the government there in a positive way? I guess people need to know what a positive option is if the options that we took were negative. Well, you know, we know in this country democracy is based on education. When we isolated Iraq so totally, when we said no trade, no incoming medical journals, education journals, professors, student exchanges, news programming, nothing, we really lopped off the major means that most people have to get education about what's happening in the world around them. Democracy is based on education, and also people are more predisposed to participate in a democracy when their basic needs are met. But by creating a situation of starvation and so much deprivation, most people, you know, all they could do to just get enough food on the floor so that they could keep their families alive. And people had no sense of anybody in the outside world that ever might want to help them. Nothing would encourage them to try to, for instance, engage in any kind of political activism or resistance to Saddam Hussein. So I've always felt that these sanctions strengthened Saddam Hussein's regime. And I think it's important to also mention that in spite of all that Saddam Hussein's regime had done in 1991, there were uprisings right after the first Gulf War in each of the southern cities in Amada, Basra, Najaf, Nasria. People rose up and they were ready to say, "We're claiming our lives back. We don't want to be dominated by a dictatorship." And the Iraqi Air Force and Saddam Hussein's generals quickly negotiated with the United States and said, "Hey, can we keep our attack helicopters?" And the United States said, "Yes." And those attack helicopters lifted off and mowed down people that had engaged in this kind of uprising and resistance. And they corralled many people with that superior air force. They could do it. And they put them in prison and many were tortured and many were executed and many more fled. So people knew that they couldn't count on support from the United States in the center and in the south of Iraq. Was there an alternative, assuredly? I mean, I think if the United States had said, "Look, we want to find a fair way. Tell us a fair price that you want to charge." For your precious, irreplaceable resource. And we want to pay that price. And if we can't afford it, we'll cut back on how much of your oil we consume. And we won't be in the business of trying to control and price how much of your oil other people consume. Well, then I think if there had been a continuing flow of resources and rising funding within Iraq, there would have been a healthier and a better educated society. And I think they would have reached the point where they might have been able to dislodge Saddam Hussein's regime. Maybe they would have gotten help from other Arab states. But I think that by isolating the Iraqi people as much as we did and by battering them down in every possible way, we demoralized several generations and we certainly said to every other country in the world, "If you don't subordinate yourselves to meet our national interests, we will eliminate you." And I think that that occasioned great anger and maybe even a desire on the part of other people in the world to take revenge against the United States. One of the things that a number of us know, and some people seem to still be ignorant of, was that Saddam Hussein, we did a fair amount of support of him, particularly when he was fighting with Iran, that we were supporting him by getting the materials to him so he could make his weapons of mass destruction. Obviously, we didn't consider him to be the great Satan of the Middle East at that time. But somehow, when he attacked Kuwait and later on, he's painted as a super evil dictator demon virtually. Was that your view of people's opinion of him on the ground? I mean, you're hanging around Iraq. I assume that means that he's allowing you to be there. Some people, I'm sure, considered you to be dupes of his propaganda for him. How bad was the situation from the inside? Well, there's no doubt that people within Iraq were terrified of the regime. They did not want to say anything political about anything, basically. And some people would describe to us a situation if they could do it very privately in which they felt like at least one person in the family had to be a bona fide member of the Ba'ath Party. One fellow said it was as though he was the old cow being sent out into the river to distract all the piranhas so that the rest of his family could survive. So even within the Ba'ath Party, there were people who had contempt for great scorn for the methods that the regime had used to create a reign of terror. So that was true. There's no way around that. And if we had gone into Iraq and said we call upon Iraqi people to rise up and oust this well entrenched intelligence system and to free yourselves from the oppression of the system, you know, it would have been a one-off. We would have been out of there, and maybe anybody that had ever greeted us would have been in big trouble. So, you know, you could say, well, then you were duped. You didn't speak in complete honesty. And when we came back to the United States, if our headline banner had been, you know, Saddam Hussein is an evil dictator, I also think that would have been the end of the campaign because why would they ever give us visas to go again? Some of the Iraqis told us – listen, you can say this much. It's being said. It's okay to tell everybody that people in Iraq are afraid to join into politics. It's acceptable to say that people in Iraq are experiencing great misery economically and that they would long for the situation to change and to have better lives for themselves and their children. You can talk about the 1991 uprising. So, it seemed to me that it was better to appreciate the nuances in this political situation and get in there and try to learn how much could be said, how much wiggle room there, in fact, was and work very, very hard to lift the economic sanctions because that punishment of children was certainly an unavailable truth. You could not hold the children accountable for their government. Maybe you could say, well, the adults accommodated or the adults had a responsibility to take bigger risks and rise up, but you can't expect that of six-year-olds. So, that was our responsibility to try to lift the economic sanctions and to listen as best we could, as sharply as we could, and look for every possible opening to create more space for negotiation and diplomacy. And the United Nations' humanitarian coordinators were certainly looking to do that as well, but two of them in succession quit their jobs, saying they couldn't any longer enforce the economic sanctions because these were murderers and they were brutally punishing children and other innocent people. And then they joined us. Literally, Dennis Halliday sat on a milk crate, fasting out in front of the U.S. mission to the UN, calling for an end to the economic sanctions. And he and Hans von Spoenik, his colleague who had also quit the Assistant Secretary-General-level job, they would crisscross the country and Europe campaigning with us to end the economic sanctions. Was the desire to get rid of all of the economic sanctions? Obviously, there was a desire to not provide material, war materials to the Saddam Hussein government. I mean, that seemed desirable. Was it that we just went all overboard and said, okay, now you can't have anything to repair your water treatment plants and all of that, or was it just economic sanctions? Just aren't workable. Well, you know, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990, August 6, Hiroshima Day, 1990. The United Nations imposed the most comprehensive economic sanctions ever imposed in modern history. It was like a stranglehold. I mean, if you could imagine your area of the United States never being able to import spare parts, medical supplies, medicines, food, water purification materials, and then, you know, just let it go on for a year or two, and when things break down, that's it. They're broken. Forget it. Well, you could imagine the deterioration after six, seven, eight, nine years of these economic sanctions. The country was in a shambles, and when the United States arrived, the military itself was kind of flabbergasted. They were bald. They couldn't believe that people had even been able to survive under these conditions. So I think it was punitive, and I really think it was designed, in part, to give a message to every other country in the world. You go up against the United States and look what you'll be doing to your children. You think twice before you defy the United States. If you ask the question, well, will you kill children under age five? The answer was, you bet. In 1999, in August of 1999, Carol Bellamy, who is at the time the head of UNICEF, called a press conference, and she had the charts and the statistics, and she said, I want to show the world why it is that the United Nations calculates that these economic sanctions have directly contributed toward the deaths of 500,000 children under age five. And it's a very macabre way of looking at things, but what they did was establish the baseline for the numbers of children under age five who had died in the eighties, and that was 40,000. And you could have expected that because Iraq was improving its infrastructure, that there would have been a lessening of that number, but instead it went from 40,000 to 90,000 per year of children under age five dying. Now, Mark, I also want to mention that in 2005, the number of children under age five who died in Iraq was 122,000. That's under the U.S. occupation. But if we go back to that August 1999 press conference, what I think ought to be said over and over and over again is that after she completed the press conference, and she showed how they calculated that 500,000 children under age five had been killed by the economic sanctions, the coverage from the U.S. media amounted to two sentences in the Washington Post. There was no television coverage, no mainstream radio coverage. Later the New York Times a week and a half later, I think, might have put in a paragraph. You could do a Lexus Nexus search for August 25, 1999 to see who cared about Carol Bellamy's press conference, and you'd find almost nothing. Meanwhile, think about Bill Clinton having consensual sex as an adult with another adult Monica Lewinsky, miles of verbage, miles. But what was the major scandal of Bill Clinton's administration? Surely it had to be that on his watch, hundreds of thousands of children were punished to death. Now when a child is limp with nausea and facing asphyxiation, and that's how children die when they die of hunger. Or when a child's little juices are running out of his or her body and a mother is holding this helpless child and imploring you, please can't you do something. And when people in the United States don't even get a chance to turn their head because nobody will even tell them, there's something wrong with our democracy. But other people in other parts of the world knew they knew what was going on and they were appalled and frightened. Can the United States really be a country in which the US ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright, could publicly say on a popular news media show, 60 minutes, that when asked, is it an acceptable price to pay? Leslie Stahl to her credit in 1996 had asked Madeleine Albright after she talked about statistics of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children dying, and she also used the 500,000 statistics. And Madeleine Albright said, "Yes, Leslie, it's a difficult choice to make, and I'm a humanitarian person, but the price, we think the price is worth it." Now, again, no media coverage of that line, no op-eds, no New York Times questioning what Madeleine Albright said. Instead, she was appointed later to the highest position a woman in this country has ever held. Now, what does the rest of the world think? What do people in other countries who might be suffering these kinds of sanctions themselves think? I think a lot of people thought, "Look, you know, Iraq doesn't have any weapons of mass destruction, we better get ourselves some, because look what this country will do, and witness it on." I mean, I don't know if they have weapons of mass destruction or not, but I can well imagine that other countries in the region, they know that Israel has 200 to 400 thermonuclear weapons, and the US and Israel just don't even acknowledge that. They know that the United States weapons system is extraordinarily built up so that there's no question of anybody posing a challenge to the United States militarily, and so I think they start to think, "Well, maybe our only option is to have people think we might have a nuclear weapon, and we just might be crazy enough to use." We're talking with Kathy Kelly, she's director of Voices for Creative Nonviolence, and right now she's, I guess, maybe two thirds of the way or so, walking from Chicago to the Twin Cities. I'm Mark Helps meet, and this program is called Spirit in Action, that's what Kathy Kelly is. This is part of my Northern Spirit Radio programs, and you can find them on my website, northernspiritradio.org, and you'll find links to important connections there, including Kathy Kelly's Voices for Creative Nonviolence, and other groups she's worked with. Kathy, let's go back to talk a little bit more about this walk that you're doing, about how much are you walking per day. Well, today we did 14 miles, and that's average, sometimes it's a little longer, and sometimes it's shorter, and we've had some breakdays in between. But generally, if we get going at seven o'clock in the morning, then we'll have probably by, again, walk nine miles and take a little break, and finish it off, and we often have the afternoon free to meet with people, or to do some writing, or, in my case, study a little Arabic. So it's been a good pace. And when do you project that you're going to arrive in the Twin Cities? What's your due date there? August 30th, and then we'd like on September 1st to be part of a rather huge nonviolent rally that's being held. You know, we deeply hope that in the political process, people all throughout the United States will start to air their beliefs on what the most important priorities are. Right now, we think it's very important to let these presidential candidates become very aware of what the U.S. public wants to see in terms of change. And that the present claim that the Republican Party owns national security as an issue is very, very unacceptable. I mean, I think if you think about what really makes you secure on an average day, you want to know that the water coming out of your tap isn't poisoned, and you want to be able to feed your children so they won't be hungry and desperate. You want to get a roof over the head of your family and have an income so that you can provide for people and make sure the children get a decent education. And if they're sick, they get some medical help right away. Well, those are important needs, and that's what gives people a lot of security in life. So it's silly to think that whether you're thinking about Iraqis or people in the United States, to think that our security is all wrapped up in having 122,000 armed security contractors over in Iraq working for companies like Blackwater and DYNCOR and Triple Canopy, or to think that it will be more secure because the United States was able to launch a five-fold increase in aerial bombardments of Iraqi villages and towns, or to think we're more secure in general dynamics and the lion tech and Raytheon, as these kinds of companies manufacturing bunker buster bombs now in the party of Raytheon are being able to run to the bank with their stock market portfolios. That doesn't make us more secure. It makes the CEOs and the very, very wealthy military industrial eat more secure, but it threatens the security of everybody else. Obviously, Kathy, you have a tremendous amount of passion and care and concern for these people over there. Now, obviously, you've lived among them now. Something motivated you to go over there, and what this program's spirit and action is about is about the roots and fruits of spirit. It's clear to me that your compassion is a fruit. What about the roots? Where does this care and concern for people around the world, for the poor, for those who are starving? Where does that come from in your life? You know, it's difficult for me to pull one or two threads out of my childhood, but I think that, you know, I grew up in an area where most of the professionals we ever saw were nuns. Religious Catholic nuns walking in long black habits and white-head dresses and black veils over those. I was pretty enamored with the nuns. I never met mean ones. These were a young and vivacious group of women. I don't know that anybody ever articulated it to me, but it was pretty obvious that they never showed any interest in accumulating stuff or wealth. Nuns didn't do that, and they all lived in common, and they shared everything, and they didn't earn any salaries, and they worked hard, and they helped educate us, but they didn't ask for much in return, and they seemed quite happy, by and large. So that did impress me as a youngster, and we had the idea that nuns and priests and brothers in their religious life in other countries were helping people much worse off than we were and in other parts of the United States and poor communities. I think that did make a pretty big impression on me. I liked knowing about the life of Jesus and the things that kind of seemed to cohere, except that there wasn't very much expectation that anybody was ever really supposed to follow any of this unless you happened to join one of these religious orders. So that made an impression on me. When I was older, I should confess, really. I went through to Vietnam more, like Brigadoon in the mist. I was the one who had been standing off to the side looking at the few activists I knew on my old university's campus and thinking, well, maybe they just don't have anything better to do. I think I deserved a year in prison when I finally got one. But what happened, I think, was that I started to meet some people who not only wanted to share their resources, but felt a very deep commitment to take risks on behalf of ending the various wars in which the United States was committed, particularly putting an end to the nuclear weaponry and other kinds of weaponry to which it almost seems like the United States was addicted. So I got to know Carl Meyer, and he's been a tremendous influence in my life. We were married for 13 years and we're not married now, but every time I take a step in my life, I'm always on the phone or visiting, asking him, what does he think? And he certainly has affected me in, I think, very positive ways. Carl had been himself in prison during the Vietnam War for two years. His dad was in Congress, so it was a bit of a notorious case at the time. And he had been a war tax refusor since probably 1970, I think. And he had an approach toward peacemaking, which made it seem more practical and plausible. He helped a generation of us in the uptown, the poorest area of Chicago called uptown in that neighborhood realize ways to be happy about our lives, but also to develop priorities that were in accord with what we really believed. And so I guess I wanted to live my life in a way that would line up with the belief that the poor should be our highest priority, and that nonviolent change is possible, and that living more simply is desirable and that we don't have to let inconvenience interfere with our expression of our deepest held belief, even if that means going to prison on behalf of those beliefs. So I became a war tax refusor, and eventually was arrested in nonviolent protest of United States intervention in Central America, and then planted corn on nuclear missile silo sites, which introduced me to a year in maximum security prison for criminal trust passed by military installations. For planting corn. Yeah, and over the course of those actions, I think I certainly was able to overcome my own fears. You know, I think that whatever courage is, I feel sure it has a lot to do with being able to overcome your fear. Everybody feels fear. That's normal. But you can catch courage from others and from your own prior experience and start to overcome some of those fears and not be steered by your fears or much less somebody else's fears, and kind of take a grip and say, well, you know, even if the consequence might be extremely inconvenient in my life, or even if I might suffer physical harm, or even if I might lose my life, the chance to live in accord with deeply held belief and organized those around that I am the principal of Mahandas Gandhi, do no harm to others is a very great opportunity. And then if you have fine friends along the way with whom to act, I mean, who could ask for more? Well, obviously, I think there's some American corporations that do ask for more, I think, ask for some material benefit on top of that. You have a master's in religious education from Chicago Theological Seminary. You've gone down the religious track at least some degree. Did you want to be a nun? Was that part of your aspiration at one point or where were you heading? Anything else? But I never did join. I guess the effect of Vatican II on religious women's orders was such that women started to move out of the convents and stopped wearing the religious habit and started driving cars and started, you know, living in apartments and having lives that seemed to me at the time when I might have joined to be lives that were abiding with much more normal U.S. consumption patterns, and I thought, "Well, Jesus Catholic Worker Movement, it seems to involve people in a little more risk-taking. People didn't have health insurance and they didn't have any backup of financial security." And in a way, people moving into that lifestyle are, I think, a bit more identified with, a bit more aligned with, people who are impoverished by our system. And when you try to align yourself in that direction, you just understand more. You get a better education. Same thing about going to prison. You never, if you're a person who's taken an action on purpose, more or less, can understand the grief and the stigma and the separation that often afflicts people who are in prison and facing as men do in the minimum security prison next door to where I was last locked up facing a median of 27 years in prison, median length of sentence, 27 years. But if you yourself are a prisoner, you know, if you're peering through a window at those buses as they pull up and young men in chains or trying to negotiate their way off the buses with their leg chains and their shackles, and you know that when the door slams behind them, they're going to be there for decades. And you're looking at women who themselves are serving, you know, often between 8 and 15 years in a minimum security prison, you have a whole different kind of empathy when you're closer to it. And I think, you know, where you stand determines what you see. And I suppose that every once in a while there's things to juice up your empathy. Like, you just spent a little time in jail just the last couple days, right? Well, I sure did when I learned that the woman who was my cellmate was a woman who had a $4,000 fine, and she couldn't pay it. She was going to serve six months for contempt of court because she couldn't pay the spine. And the judge had been her babysitter when she was a youngster. I thought, "Oh, I don't have anything coming in this situation." But yeah, there's kind of a debtor's prison reality going on in the jails. So many are filled with people who are picked up for outstanding fines that they just can't pay, and they're held for, you know, these long six-month sentences, which is a standard contempt of court sentence. And another thing that happened, Mark, is that one of the women who was a jailer in one of the jails I was in, I was in two different jails over the course of last week, she was so motherly and kind of had a naturally affectionate way about her. But she said that the next night she was going to have herself some fun because she would go to Fort McCoy and they would give her an AK-47 and they would pay her, I think the going rate is $12 an hour in the nighttime to run around in the forest and pretend she was an insurgent. But if you can imagine, you know, people in their elderly years picking up AK-47, you know, not loaded, no doubt, pretending that they're going to try to kill American soldiers, so that American soldiers can pretend that they're going to kill them. It really corrals the imagination seriously into the idea that only threatened forests can make any difference in our world, and boy, I rebel against that. I think that this woman, her imagination, if tapped to understand the grandmothers and the mothers in Iraq who just want to see their children survive and don't want their children caught up as guards at checkpoints for the U.S. or, you know, participants in anyone else's militia, but the more and more weapons that we pour into the situation, that's really what the continued reality will be. Meanwhile, we could be thinking about ways to help other groups, not under the auspices of U.S. corporations anymore, but help other groups, you know, by cutting loose some considerable funding to rebuild that country and take the money out of the overloaded military budget and give it toward groupings that really could do a lot to get money to the 2.2 million Iraqis right now. Who are displaced out of their homes and living in camps and tents and enduring under the terrible heat, poisoned water and just the malaise of being displaced from their cities. When is that going to get into the news? When are people like this woman, the guards that I know, going to really understand what we've done to people in Iraq? So just to be clear, Kathy, is it your sense that it would be okay for the U.S. military to pull out of Iraq that they wouldn't descend into chaos and just be a total destruction for everyone? Are we serving a positive or negative function being there? Well, I think we have to remember that while the United States is there and the United States is steadily passing out weapons and $300 a month to young Iraqis saying, okay, now we want you to be on our side. So first, the United States went to the group called the Awakening groups that have been fighting against the United States and we, more or less, bought them off. We said, look, we'll give you $300 a month and an AK-47 and we want you now to be on our side. So people in these Awakening groups probably checked with their leadership and the word was young, okay, take the weapon, take the money. Then the United States has recently, in May of this year of 2008, gone to young men in what's called the Alsadr city. And same thing, we'll give you weapons, we'll give you $300 a month, there's no other job out here, right? So now you're on our side, right? And no doubt these young men went to their local militia leaders and went to the mosques and said, okay, take the money. And so what's happening? That means that groups that are willing to aim those weapons, fire them, kill other people, get even more sophisticated weapons, maybe with their $300 a month, we're going to be steadily acquiring more and more massive weaponry. And that's what you need if you're going to launch a civil war. And it's already been shown in the past when General Patreence was up in Mosul, this is what he did, he told all kinds of young people and the local police chiefs, hey, come with the United States, we'll give you uniforms, weapons, ammunition, training. And right after he left, literally right after he left, you can read about this in the New York Review of Books in an article by Peter Galbraith. Those young people in the north, on month, turned their uniforms and their weapons over to insurgent groups and the police chief appointed by General Patreence also defected to an insurgent group. Now, you wouldn't expect that after that happened in 2005, the General Patreence would be coming home to heroes' welcomes and be appointed now to a much higher position. But this is the way the Bush Administration has worked at any generals who have questioned what the United States has done, whether it's General Taguba with his report on Abu Ghraib, he was sidelined and sent down a hallway through a desk that hardly anybody ever passes. Admiral Fallon was removed after he criticized the United States for buildup readiness for war against Iran. There have been generals and highly placed U.S. advisors who've said that the Bush Administration's approach is bullish, but they're not given much play in the media. And I think instead the idea is that we're all supposed to celebrate the surge as something that's been a great success, but I would say the jury is still out on that question. And if the United States leaves it off, I think that there will be bloodshed, but I think that will happen at any point, whether now or later. But I think that one way to get people to lay down the weapons to turn in the weapons is to say, if you put down your weapons now, turn them in now. This is what you can get. And then really lay out the blueprints and the plans for building clinics and hospitals and roads and water purification systems and all the many infrastructure needs that they have. And assuring people in Iraq that these won't be built under the auspices of United States control. Now, the United Nations is going back into Iraq, and the amount of money made available for UN programs is $2.2 billion stretched over several years. Well, that's just a tiny pittance of the United States budget with the United States now anticipating a $3 trillion price tag for this war if it continues into say 2011, 2012. Now, remember, that will cost every person in the United States every adult $10,000 or $40,000 for a family of four. And what are we purchasing? What are we getting for this? A post-comment of eventual civil war, discussed toward us, registered on the parts of numerous people all throughout the world because of our imperial menace that we've extended. And I think that, as I mentioned before, other countries better arm themselves with some kind of very potent and fearful weapon, otherwise the United States might invade them next. Afraid that's kind of a ominous note to end on, but yeah, I'm afraid it's far too true. So let me not sound an ominous note because we're living in the country that in a short history has seen the witness of the abolition movement, the women's suffragist movement, the union movement, the effort to end the Vietnam war, and then the very stunning civil rights movement undertaken by sharecroppers who walked door to door. I walked over land where the Ho-Chunk Indians, after being displaced 11 times, returned to reclaim land on five separate occasions. So there are plenty of good spirits hovering around us, and I believe that we can make a difference, but we must put one foot in front of the other and be willing to walk the talk. Well, you certainly are walking the walk as you're part of this Voices for Creative Nonviolence Walk from Chicago to Twin Cities. God bless you and your trip for all of you. Well, thank you so much, Mark. Thanks for your generous time. ♪♪ The music you just heard was by Sarah Thompson. It's called "Made the Gentle Rain" and it's all about walking and beauty. We've been talking with a great walker for beauty, Cathy Kelly of Voices for Creative Nonviolence. See their site, vcnv.org. The theme music for this program is "Turning of the World" performed by Sarah Thompson. This spirit in 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 know this world alone. ♪ ♪ With every voice, with every song, we will move this world alone. ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing. ♪