The Sun rejected Max's op-ed

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. 

 I soon found out that there was a Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory which engaged in weapons of mass destruction research. In 1984 I became involved in an organization that commemorated the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For decades, we brought Hibakusha, those who experienced the atomic bombs, to speak in Baltimore.  One of them was Setsuko Thurlow who accepted the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. In August, we will again commemorate the atomic bombings.

 Baltimore’s Jonah House was founded to protest nuclear weapons. I eventually met founders Phil Berrigan and Elizabeth McAlister, and this lead to many protests in Baltimore, Washington and elsewhere around the country. Phil’s last Plowshares protest was against depleted uranium..

 A group of us, organized by the Jonah House and the Viva House Catholic Worker, demonstrated each week for fifteen years against the death penalty about a block or so from the building which housed Maryland’s execution chamber.   On May 2, 2013, Gov. Martin O’Malley signed the legislation repealing Maryland’s death penalty. The ACLU said it all at the time: “The death penalty in Maryland was broken - costly, biased and risked executing the innocent.”

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.

 Much of my work today is focused on the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 which threatens our flawed democracy by emulating authoritarian tactics seen in Hungary, Turkey and India. I never could have imagined that the threat of fascism would be an issue in this country.  Sadly, it is real.

 Project 2025 also fosters wealth inequality. The Institute for Policy Studies did an analysis of Forbes Real Time Billionaire data, and this was the conclusion. As of January 1, 2026, the collective net worth of America’s top 12 billionaires now surpasses $2.7 trillion. Their combined wealth has more than quadrupled, up from $608 billion on March 18, 2020.

 According to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, the National Debt is at $39 trillion.  In 1981, it was less than a trillion dollars.  This is a result of an outrageous military budget, the cost of the nuclear arsenal, tax cuts for the oligarchs and interest on the national debt.

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