Friends,
I am a strong believer in supporting your local newspaper. However, it was a challenge to subscribe to The Baltimore Sun after it was purchased by two right-wing business people, David Smith and Armstrong Williams. Nevertheless, I did subscribe, and after the takeover Janice and I have managed to get a few of our letters published.
On March 23, Janice and I accepted an invitation from The Sun to attend a dinner and conversation at a restaurant in Perry Hall, MD. I jumped at the chance to offer my critique of the paper, and my main concerns were the awful right-wing op-eds and the Fox News focus on crime hear and far. At the dinner, Smith said, “Write an op-ed.” The editor-publisher gave me his card as we departed that evening. I did submit a proposed op-ed, but it was not published. Below is what I submitted. Kagiso, Max
Making of a peace activist
My journey began during the Vietnam War. As an engineer with the Pennsylvania Electric Company, I had a deferment. I vividly remember hearing the news that there were four dead at Kent State University, and that event was immortalized in the haunting "Ohio" by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. I engaged in leafletting, signing petitions and attending protests. Sadly, two friends from my neighborhood in Erie, PA were killed. One had a scholarship to go to law school at Notre Dame University, but instead through ROTC went to that war-torn country as a Second Lieutenant.
After I received a Master’s degree in Business Administration, I joined the Peace Corps in September 1977 and became a volunteer helping set up small businesses in Botswana, a front-line state in the struggle to end apartheid in South Africa. Our group landed in Johannesburg, a week after Steve Biko was assassinated, and the military had control of the airport in a State of Emergency. The following day we flew to Gaborone, Botswana where I lived until 1981.
This region of the world was consistently in the international headlines. For example, in 1979, while Jimmy Carter was president, a U.S. satellite detected a double flash of light caused by a joint South Africa-Israel ocean-surface test of a nuclear device. This was the apartheid bomb.
A friend and I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania and took the Chinese-built train back to Lusaka, Zambia. We hitchhiked back to Botswana. I recall traveling in the back of a track with refugees fleeing a civil war in Angola and sharing my food and drink with them. I was reading John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and years later saw John Ford’s classic film of the novel. In a bravura performance, Henry Fonda plays Tom Joad who tells Ma goodbye: “Then I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark. I’ll be everywhere — wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there.” That is my mantra.
After I returned to the USA, I joined the burgeoning Nuclear Freeze movement, attended the June 12, 1982 No Nukes rally in New York City and helped get a referendum on the ballot in Erie in support of a Nuclear Freeze. In November 1982, sixty percent of Erie voters supported a Nuclear Freeze. By then I was doing a human rights internship in New York City with the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility. One of the issues we worked on was challenging corporations profiting from apartheid. I was in Boston when the State of Massachusetts passed its South African divestment legislation, the first state in the country to do so.
I arrived in Baltimore in May of 1983 to work for Nuclear Free America. Baltimore became a Nuclear Free Zone in 1992. I became a member of the Baltimore Anti-Apartheid Coalition. We were able to get divestment legislation passed in the City Council and at the State level.
In 1989 I was part of an American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee human rights delegation to Israel/occupied Palestine. We met Israelis and Palestinians in our travels through the Holy Land including to Gaza and the West Bank.
I was employed with the American Friends Service Committee, the Quaker social justice organization, from 1990 until 2008. AFSC during those years was the office for Baltimore’s peace with justice movement. Each U.S. war from Panama through Iraq was protested.
The
Congressional Budget Office estimates the nuclear arsenal will cost a total of $946 billion
over the 2025–2034 period, or an average of about $95 billion a year.
These are weapons which cannot be used. It terrifies me that the
president has sole authority to launch a nuclear weapon.
Enough
with the doom and gloom. Though it may be an impossible task, considering the
current state of affairs, I sense We the People will
seize the moment and rise up and rescue the constitution from being shredded.
Max Obuszewski is with the
Baltimore Nonviolence Center, and can be reached at mobuszewski2001 at Comcast
dot net.
Donations can be
sent to Max Obuszewski, Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 431 Notre Dame Lane, Apt.
206, Baltimore, MD 21212. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at]
comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The
master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought
the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while
the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially
their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
