One week, it's Poland and electing solidarity in government in the next week. It's the changes in the Hungarian Communist party and the next week, it's East Germany. And then it's Bulgaria and on and on gouache knows of course overshadowing all of it. And one of the things that struck me when I was thinking about just the events following so fast on the heels of each other that it's sometimes hard to take all of it in and really understand what it might mean. Is that very clearly the peopleIn Hungary and East Germany and Poland and the Soviet Union are now in the process of making their own history, which is a very heady and a very I think consequential experience to be part of it is saying what should our country be like asking that in all sorts of ways from the most dramatic ones of the Parliamentary elections to the hardly notice ones at the conversations on the street corners and taking that seriously believing that they have a role in making that future.Now one of the interesting things that that strikes me is that I'm not sure that most of us feel an equivalent sense in America. We may read the news accounts of saying oh how wonderful it is and that it's always so condescending how wonderful it is, you know, they're trying to be like us now, but in fact, I think there are aspiring at least two something that's very different than the society that is handed down to us officially which is not a society of people being involved in shaping their future. But rather one of people acceding to what they're told to do primarily feeling that they cannot change things and so I'd like to talk tonight both about how that culture of passivity gets transmitted but also at least as importantly how we can begin to overcome it and how people around the country indeed are working to try and take control of our common Destiny in a manner that may not be so dramatic as the you know, the MarchIs that in in his Germany or in Poland or in the Soviet Union, but nonetheless I think can be equally consequential. Now I started some of these Explorations while started them a long time ago, but I sort of focus them a lot a number of years ago when I went to a place called Hanford Washington, which was a facility that made Atomic weapons materials. It had ultimately made the plutonium after making it for the very first atomic bomb ever exploded in the New Mexico desert and then making it for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki and eventually went on to make the plutonium for about a quarter of the world's Atomic weapons of the 50,000 Warheads now in existence And what was so interesting to me is that by and large? This was an ordinary community in their own understandings of themselves. That is they did not consider themselves making history, even though in fact the history that they were involved in had the potential literally to extinguish human life on Earth. They simply saw themselves as doing a job and they were a few things that were a little bit odd or aberrant about the community. That is they had a mushroom cloud as their symbol of the high school football teams. And so you would indeed play with the bomb play football in the bomber bowl and you would have a mushroom cloud on your helmet and your team would be called the Richland bombers and when you graduated from the school, you would have a gold leaf commencement program with a letter r for Richland and a Gold Leaf mushroom cloud behind it. That was a little odd in most communities don't have that at a certain point. They one of the teachers tried to change it to something more pacific II don't know I suppose they even contact. plated the idea of its symbol of a nuclear reactor or something, but it lost in any case and they said that this was tradition and that they had to hang on to it. And one of the things that I would suggest is that part of what we are up against the society as a notion that says we've always done it this way. We have to continue we have no choice which is pretty well analogous to what people were fighting in some ways in the Eastern Bloc countries. That is the sort of Frozen ossified. State which simply does not allow itself to change. Here when I looked at Hanford the more I did the more it seemed that that it was very similar to than I'd say is I called it a nuclear culture. But what I really meant to say that we were all part of a nuclear culture. And so when we the people describe their work, they did not justify it in terms of the Grand Mission saving the world from the demon Soviets or something like that or they would they would maybe use this phrase if they were pushed but basically what they said is look I go into work everyday I punch a time clock. I make this materials, but what I'm doing really is I'm just working on some machines and somebody describe the task of going to the college's to recruit the young engineers and scientists and technicians and other times of workers. They were working for General Electric at the time. You know progress is our most important product and he says, you know, we talked a lot about many different things we talked about how we would get going there would be good pay and good benefits and good technical support good management all the resources you'd ever want to do the job. Right? This is you know, so funny. We never really talked about the plutonium and we just just our product like the light bulbs of the turbines with the product the other General Electric divisions who went recruiting with it wasn't the point at issue. And what's interesting is that I saw a culture of what I would call fragmentation emerged there. where The point at issue was anything but what they were actually doing and it's one that I think unfortunately is not unique to Hanford. It's reflected all over our country. And in fact even reflected in our academic environments. I know I had an interesting conversation earlier this year with a engineer at Texas A&M University. And I said Do you ever really talked about the fact that a majority of I think it's 2/3 now America's engineer's go in to work in the weapon sector. So no we never do we never have and so so interesting is hearing an engineer's what do they do? Essentially. They designed the world that the rest of us are going to live in together with Architects. They designed the machines the bridges the roads the Technical Systems very important job and yet those people who are working to become engineers never in the course of their education had the chance to say, what is it that is wise to build and what is not wise to build critical thing and yet it's simply absent had the same conversation in Missouri with the teacher person who's studying to be a teacher again, three or four years. They've never really talked about these kinds of issues what is important to teach the talked about how to teach And what I see often happens is sort of the fragmented the technical swallows up the kind of question of moral choices swallows up the question of fundamental purpose. I know I had a very interesting conversation in Dartmouth a very prestigious school. If anything, I'm certainly and I talked a long time with his student. about his choices and his values and what he wanted to be when he got out and What mattered a lot to him and what he hoped for in the world and The end he said we know I've never had a conversation like this my four years here City, you know, you haven't what kind of major are you? We said I'm a philosophy major I said, well, I thought that philosophy had a lot to do with these kinds of questions. I mean you seem to me that it's about those questions. If nothing else. Well, who are you studying and he said he was studying somebody who I don't really expect most of you to know God in Bertrand Russell who was in fact an eminent British philosopher, but also spent half his life speaking out on issues like War and Peace and it during Vietnam had an international war crimes tribunal was jailed a couple times for his stands in Britain on and on and on and yet he had read three or four books of written Bertrand Russell was the main person they're studying in one of the courses. He never knew that so mad. That was he said, well, you know, I just read Bertrand Russell on analytic philosophy. What I'm suggesting is that one way that our society has historically dealt with these issues is by separating off by simply splitting our experience into sufficiently small parts that we never really have the chance to Grapple with the whole and again, I think that that's dangerous. Now there's a lot of talk that's come up in the last six or seven years about the generation that you folks are part of being a sort of Calais greedy generation and yet I think what happens is it's not so much the people want material Goods as if they sort of settle for not feeling like they can do very much about anything of significant consequence and they separated I think oftentimes we're taught to separate off from our neighbors our friends from other communities that I'm thinking of a student at a Catholic College in Fairfield Connecticut, very affluent area. And this young man was the son of a stockbroker and came from quite a wealthy family in Long Island. And at one point they were talking about the nuclear arms race and he said well, you know, it doesn't matter to me if the world blows up. I'm going to a better place. I'm going to heaven inch I think it's absolutely terrible Theology and his friend said well, okay, you call yourself a Christian. What about all that? Love? Thy neighbor stuff in the Bible. Where does that fit in? They're talking about this town nearby Bridgeport, which is a very the center city was quite depressed and pretty bummed out and he said well, what about Bridgeport? What about the loved I never sent from the people from Bridgeport don't you have a responsibility to them and the person said back? Oh, yeah. Well though they aren't my neighbor's I live on Long Island. I know who my neighbors are these people aren't my neighbors and I think it's something that we're taught, you know, it's a sort of extreme example, but it's something that we really taught by our culture somebody won the classes today described a conversation with a friend here about just the differential use of resources of the United States and the rest of the world. And the friend said well, that's just always the way it's been it's the way it has to be. And again some of the resignation at that comes from a fear of losing what we have. Some of it comes from a sense that we better work hard just to maintain the place that our parents came up and achieved. I know in a communist country where we in fact real family income has been dropping steadily since 1973 people are nervous and they see the figures and they discover that a quarter of all preschool children now live in poverty. And I sort of feel like well, I better really work twice as hard to make sure that I'm not on the bad side of that divide. There is a way in which I think the crisis of our time can push us towards almost more fragmentation and more Retreat while we sort of shrug our shoulders sometimes and we say well the phrase they use it Hanford was the men who know best heard that a lot of times and what it means is that basically there's people whose job it is to take care of it and that that doesn't mean us so one man was a real director of reactor. We're talking one day. It happened to be the anniversary of her Oshima. And I said Do you ever worry do you ever have qualms and deserve a disturb you what you do and I was very surprised because he went on this long discussion and he said yes indeed it did disturb him that was going on with the arms race and he said that the more weapons we had the more risk of nuclear war not less. He said that he started talking about the neutron bomb. He says my God what a ghastly weapon. You know, how do we even imagine such a device? Let alone build it and deploy it what kind of Barbarians are we and I was getting rather confused by then. And I said does that mean you favor some reversal? Of course some disarmament and he says don't misunderstand me. I'm a patriot. I love this country. And if somebody who thinks we need a neutron bomb and knows more than you are. I tells me to build a neutron bomb. I'll build it the best I can. Now think for a second. What is he saying? He's saying that his experience Cuts one way his judgment Cuts one way and yet his sense of Duty Cuts. Another way. He has to trust the experts one of the things that I guess ironically worries me about the shifts in the Eastern Bloc is that they may make us complacent. I think indeed that the Soviet Union is embarking on a fundamentally different course from the Cold War. I mean, they have relinquished their Brezhnev Doctrine which allowed them to roll tanks into Czechoslovakia and Crush what they achieved in 1968. They relinquish that they have said these countries can go their own way. They have begun to dismantle weapons facilities. They begun to pull back troops from Central Europe recently. She ever not see said that he considered Afghanistan absolutely wrong from the start and I can never imagine a current American officials saying the same thing about Vietnam or certainly not when he was in power at the time. So that you know that is really a significant shift and you know, I look at what we do in response our weapons escalation continues Star Wars the MX missile the B-2 bomber tried into sobs I look at that and I call them but I call them the weapons that probably won't work as their planned as a they're mostly billion-dollar boondoggles. But if they do what a ghastly thought imagine you're in a sort of controversial situation of instability like the Cuban Missile Crisis, we're like the time that actually occurred during a to taunt during the Israeli Yom Kippur War when all of a sudden our forces ended up at full alert because we weren't sure what was going to happen in the region. And the Soviets decided that in fact the stealth bomber works and therefore it can fly in invisibly and therefore they have to prepare for something. They can't see on their radar. Is that going to make them more stable more restrained is having weapon systems like Star Wars that if they work in again, I don't think they would do but if they do work have the capacity if we launch a strike to then come in and mop up whatever they have left and can throw back at us. Does that increase stability? I don't think it does. So in a lot of ways we're going on our course much as before. I see this in Central America, you know here Oscar Arias wins a Nobel Peace Prize the president of Costa Rica and this year. We're now pumping a half a million dollars into trying to unseat him in the election because he's not quite compliant enough. We're doing the same thing in Nicaragua. It's a little bit more increased to pressure and I see what goes on and I see. This nation's leaders. It's odd. It's a sort of fundamental variance from where I think the mobility of the population is the bulk of the population. I think is more than ready for peace has been for a good long time. The prime excuse the fear of the Soviet Union is rapidly Vanishing and yet read an article in the st. Louis Post-Dispatch just this weekend about the worry that some of McDonnell Douglas and Lockheed in the General Dynamics military contractors have that my God the cold war in the arms mace might actually end. There's some pretty powerful forces in our society. They continue to propel it forward and so we're in a sort of odd situation because again, the enemies are melting away before us and yet we are fully capable and seem continually Bend. I'm going on much as before. I'm continuing to wreak our Dominion in wherever it happens to be Nicaragua El Salvador the Middle East something has to give Now going back again to our choices. How do we respond doesn't have to be the arms race. How do you respond to any of the crisis we face? I think what happens often times is that we end up being resigned. I think of the student I know in Nebraska who was from a farm family third generation that meant, you know, his great-grandfather his grandfather and his father at all till the same land worked very hard to build it up a kind of generational trusted you pass on down and then what happens the farm crisis hits. And they barely escaped they sell off a lot of land and they sell off a lot of livestock. And he's trying to explain his students name is Darren. He's trying to explain to me why it is that He has no choice he says. You know, my dad's a good farmer. My dad worked very hard. It's not his fault. It's these corporations Dow Chemical and ConAgra land Cargill. They have too much power. They control the feed prices the supply prices the prices of land the tax bills the subsidies on and on and on. He said that's what drove my dad out of business. Now. What's interesting is that one can agree or not? I think that by and large is correct. But what was more interesting is what he said a few minutes later. Our next conversation we're talking some more about what he's going to do when he gets out of school and Raska and suddenly says, well, you know, I'm very excited. I've got a job interview for an internship with Dow Chemical. And I'm sort of thinking wait a moment what's going on here? What you didn't need to say that Dow Chemical helped drive his family out of business. And I asked him I says it's contradictory. He says well, I guess I could see how you might see it that way. And I said yes I do and he says you see my dad's way of life is a dead-end way of life. I would like to live as my dad has but it's just not possible anymore. The Family Farms are dead. Dow chemicals in agriculture I can stay in agriculture. I won't worry about going bankrupt every year Maybe I can make a difference from within. So I asked him how and all you can come up with the most is this notion that says well, maybe he won't be a sleazy salesman and tell people to spray their fields before they're ready. That's about the most you can come up with and that I say this not to fall to students a good person. But to say that a certain tragedy was going on a limit on his vision. He could not see a way I mean forget bringing a new world and more Humane world into being he could not see a way even to maintain that world that his family had grown up in and that seems sad. It seems a kind of resignation. I think it's something he's been taught by our culture. So what happens again? We have this Choice here are the notion of the men who know best on any issue whether it be the farm crisis, whether it be the environment in the ozone depletion, whether it be the arms race, we decide to trust them or not. My contention is that we should be very very hesitant to trust them because they're very insulated from the cost of their actions give you a couple examples. I suppose that some of you have probably been to Washington DC as I haven't seen that black Memorial during Vietnam war with 58,000 young men have their names on that long long slab and maybe you know, if you happen to read fit for five years ago, the Veterans Administration mentioned the 50,000 Veterans of that period had killed themselves are overdosed on drugs because of what they lived through or seen the figures are probably a hundred and fifty thousand now during that same War there were about two to four million Laotian Cambodian and Vietnamese who died and my guess is that if you built a memorial for them, it would stretch halfway across Virginia and yet I found out I had to call the US Senate historian to check this out that during the entire course of the war not a single congressman and not a single Senator lost his son. That is they were fundamentally not touched. I think three had ones who That was all. Those decisions that they made they did not bear the consequences of just the same thing as friend of mine works as a doctor and he spent two months down in Nicaragua in a little town called coon dega near the border. And as you may know as I hope, you know, Nicaragua has a long and unhappy history with United States. There's a phrase that the Mexicans used to use poor Mexico so far from God so near to the United States. It's been somewhat the same with Nicaragua. I think the first time we went in was in 1840s we've been in about a dozen times since and they had in this little town now Memorial from the last time which was our support of Samosa and it was a plane that we had given him to bomb his own people and that had been shot down in the Insurrection the brought the sandinistas into power and they just left it there to sort of Mark the history and he's working this little clinic and being a little nervous about it because the contras have a tendency to burn clinics and some Dutch health workers had been murdered. in the area fairly close by just a few weeks before he came in and he's working under very adverse consider conditions is used to work in a big well-equipped American Hospital, but here he has to write his prescriptions on newspapers because that's all the paper that's available that they could spare and when he gives that aspirin you can give it out three aspirin at a time and that's all he can give out because that's all they had to spare and then one day they what happens is that they bringing the remains of a family and he gets to watch a nine-year-old down his operating table and an eleven-year-old lose a leg and survived only because a priest nearby has the same blood type and they can do an emergency transfusion and he had seen a few children died before when he dumped a beer after work, but This was immediate and these were children whose deaths were caused by the actions of his own country of our country. It really shook him up really shook me up when I heard the story not I'm idea. I knew that things like that were going on but somehow to hear directly from a friend of yours. I realized that the people who make the decisions to Doom the lives of those children or who will make the decisions and have been to funnel more Aid to El Salvador on and on and on they're not really touched. They live in a world that's very very insulated by virtue of their power. And so I think that one of the things that we are required to have in this time are a couple of different imaginations, when is a sort of moral imagination that reaches out beyond the boundaries of where we happen to live or reside that can say, yes, these people are my neighbors as well. It is not just the people next door. Another of course is Imagine is the imagination that looks into the future on issues like the environment and says, what kind of world are we creating for our grandchildren? You know, is it acceptable to run off a three trillion dollar debt in seven years time as this happened, you know dead of fifteen thousand dollars for every man woman and child in the United States. What does that mean? You know 50,000 for a family of three just about I think that the choices we have have to do with whether or not we take these kinds of ultimate issues on because they eventually do affect us and it's hard because I think we're frustrated often times and we're worried and we don't feel we can make a difference and we're very leery of those who try to so I remember a student at Dartmouth we talked about people acting and he said they were just Marchers with their March or face on there just in it for a cause or student at University of Washington. Who said well, I don't really trust these people who speak out on issues like apartheid or Central America the arms race because you know, they're just in it for a fad. They're just jumping on the bandwagon and then she was talking a little while later and she said, you know, nobody pays them any attention. They really aren't very many of them. And I said, you know one or the other may be true. Maybe there's a lot of them and you mistrust him for that and maybe there's very few and mistrust him for that but it seems to me that they lose either way that there's nothing that people who act can do to really satisfy your demand for them to be the sort of perfect image of how you want them to proceed. I came up with a notion. In fact called a perfect standard. We talked about a little bit earlier today and that is a sense that says for somebody to act and for us to really trust them they have to be so articulate and so absolutely certain in their Vision that they could go on Nightline, you know, the moment's notice and debate CAD Koppel and whatever issue they happen to be you know involved in. None of us can do that or very few. And so when we start placing that as a burden on other people and saying we must trust them unless they live it up to that standard. It's very dangerous. It's dangerous when you place it on ourselves as well. I cannot speak unless I know this I cannot speak entirely unless I am entirely certain I heard that today, you know somebody who said I really believe that women have the right to abortion, but I don't think that I would ever do it myself so I can't speak out on that and it seems that at the point that We do not allow ourselves to stake the full complexity of our Visions to state if we do have reservations about a cause fine Express them. But don't hide back on the sense that unless we achieve this absolutely perfect State of Mind where everything is known and everything is certain and every consequence of our action is absolutely guaranteed before we were started. All that ever does is leave us perilous and paralyzed. What else holds us back? I think we're very often insulated from a sense of History. I asked people about events like our overthrow of Chile in 1973. Very relevant relevant to Nicaragua relevant to all of Central America relevant to the policies. We still pursue it was where Henry Kissinger said, I don't understand why we have to stand by and let a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people. Interesting notion he defined what communism was it was something we didn't like and they use that to justify pumping millions of dollars to prevent Salvador Allende who in fact was a socialist not a communist coming from power to Power by Democratic means and they want lot to couple elections happen in the end. They lost each time and then finally one and we engineered a coup to overthrow him now, I would ask in a classroom. I asked him classroom today and I think five people out of 40 knew it I've asked us some school whether you know, it's one out of 50 when out of 60 highly relevant to the kinds of choices were facing and yet it's simply not something that they bring up in the media. I don't know about you but I have never seen any major media story comparing the situation in Nicaragua with the situation in Chile and yet as a shadow that hangs over them constantly, so that's part of it. But I think even perhaps more troubling is a knowledge we lack about how people have changed this country itself. Do we know about the labor movement do we know about the Abolitionist Movement? Do we know about the Civil Rights Movement? Do we know about The Agrarian populist movements and these may be moving some of them that occurred, you know in our own States in our own cities in our own history of the places where from and yet. We don't know them the only Movement we think we know anything about is the Vietnam War movement and then usually that to seems to be used as a club to to keep people silent. I find that I get three responses one is to say this is the time that people ran wild in the streets and were indulging and didn't do any good or this was a time that they were all very Noble but they all sold out their beliefs the sort of Big Chill Theory or wasn't that a wonderful time and wouldn't it be nice if we could live in that and I wish I were there instead of here. None of which seem to particularly Empower anybody to act if I see that time which happens to be the time that I'm part of what I see it as a time where after a very very lengthy difficult process finally a very diverse range of American citizens spearheaded. Are the campuses did in fact turn the policy around to their government? And that's the Salient accomplishment and opened up to debate in a way that has not been entirely for closed since but that's a lesson that's much more complex than the sort of melodrama version we get so it's harder to understand and yet I think we ought to have access to understanding it. You know, finally I guess when faces which when we think about the choices were faced with we come back to our personal situation. A lot of times our parents are paying a lot of money to go to send us to school here. What are we going to do about that? Is there a job out here waiting for us when we graduate what do we do about the sense that the economy is tight. And so that we're working more hours part-time on the side. We're taking on a greater burden of loans all of that in some ways functions that I think as a vice to squeeze people and yet again the kinds of choices were making as a nation make that all the whole much harder. I was looking a few minutes before I started talking at a list which breaks down by congressional districts the difference between the military money in the military money out and for a budget about two-thirds of now the average family in an Iowa district lost about two thousand dollars per family. So UW make you know that about 3,000 now, what would that mean for every single family to have $3,000? Help send their kids to school to help invest in the local communities and their economies To Build The Better roads and infrastructures all the things that could be done. And this is part of the toll. It's like spending 300 billion on defense an odd term isn't often used as such and 22 billion on education for all levels. Okay of The Twelve the federal support again. These are choices made in our name and they affect us they can strain the amount of space that we have to act and to choose and so one of the things that we have to do I think is to understand that yes indeed. It may be hard and yes indeed we would be scraping to get by and get through school and get out and find a job and carve out us would have modest private life and yet if we act what we do is we open up space for the future for all of us and if we don't act we close it off now, I don't think the picture is entirely Blake even here in this country. I think some very important things have happened in the last 10 years and they're worth taking account of because they hold the seeds I would hope Of a transformation equivalently powerful to the one that is now going on in Eastern Europe. The people who act aren't always the sort of stereotype one gets in the media. I think of this one woman. I suspect that some of you know of her given that this is a Lutheran School women with young Don Nelson was a very well-respected. She was that received a title of the national mother of the year and her brother had been a two-term governor of Minnesota. So maybe some of you are who are from they are fact know of him. Another one have been a congressman. She was a very very active Lutheran a woman had bitten six or seven books for Augsburg one of the church publishing houses. And when she was in 78 years old she decided to do a very interesting thing and that is to join in the blockade of a trident submarine off the coast of Washington State. The government was threatening 10-year jail sentences and her son was a Lutheran Minister out in Seattle actually good friend of mine tried to talk her out of it and he said something like this. You know, Mom you might be almost 90 years old by the time you get out of jail. I'm a lot younger I can do it. Let me do it. You don't have to and she said she wasn't going to be intimidated by our government and she sort of would make her own mind up. Thank you, and she said at one point that she considered the arms race obnoxious, which I think is a very interesting phrase. Think about it. What does it mean? It says it's simply a violation of the way things ought to be I don't think that Henry Kissinger would understand that phrase at all to him is just well, you know, it's reality. She says it's obnoxious. He said it's a violation of human law and international law and ecological law and God's law and every other kind of law that she can think of the Tells right from wrong. It is obnoxious and I think it's a very good way to approach some of these issues to say that we have to The make that clear moral statement we have to say it is simply wrong to have people homeless in our streets it is wrong for half the black children in this country to be living in poverty. It is wrong to accumulate a three trillion dollar debt and not even acknowledge it hardly. All of these things are liens on the future means in the present and the affecting destroy lives and that is where we have to begin and I think she recognized that in her phrase. So what happens then she goes out there in the water. Coast Guard is well. It looked a little bit. I don't know if you've seen the pictures of D-Day the invasion of Normandy during World War Two it looked a little bit like that to stop these 45 protesters in the little rowboat and motorboats the Coast Guard had helicopters and they had destroyers and they had Cutters and it was whole military operation that was rather ridiculous bit of Overkill, but that was the way it looked and everything's you know, barely managed to avoid crashing into each other. And one of the things they're doing is they're having these very high pressure hoses called water cannons. And they're hosing people down to dump him out of the little boats to prevent them from getting your the submarine and doing something very dangerous like giving bread to the sailors. So what happens this mother of the year in is our little boat that's being driven by her son and a young Coast guardmen begins to aim this water cannon at her boat and she turns and she does something rather unusual. And that is she shakes her finger at him like this. And if any of you have ever had a grandmother shake a finger at you or I see a few people who may be grandmother's here who may have done that to their grandchildren. That was how she did it, you know, very lovingly but you know saying look I know wrong from right and you just stepped out of line and she says young man in this very Prairie grandmother voice young man, please not in my America you wouldn't and I think it's a wonderful moment. I usually mention every talk I give and the reason is this first of all when he backed down when she did it was a sort of recognition of a strength of character that she had that he simply wasn't going to challenge that's important. I think if we can develop that Spirit of digging and dignity, we're all the stronger for it other thing that I like about it is when she said not in my America, please she was saying this indeed was her country. She had every right to challenge it to live up to what it ought to be to live up the policies that ought to follow. and so Rather than demon yourself any kind of an outsider. She was saying look I have every right to be here. That's important because one of the less Savory aspects of American History is that frequently those of us who do act do get branded as Outsiders and called names and be told you know, go back where you came from go back to Russia or wherever I think we have to understand that when we act it is in that to me that is patriotism. It is taking a stand for your country and trying to make it what it ought to be and anybody who thinks the contrary doesn't understand what it really means to be attached to a vision of the future and to try and create it. So I like it for that now. As I mentioned not everything happens in the most expected places. Or in the most dramatic ways some of it happens on the campuses. I think of a collagen Hendrix College in Arkansas. They did a study of the local dining hall system. Nothing. Very dramatic not like stepping in front of a submarine. All they do is ask some basic questions, and they said well, all right, where does our food come from? Well turned out the food came from Texas food came from California and some came from Florida came from everywhere except Arkansas. They trace them beef cattle all the way up from Texas to Chicago and then back down to Little Rock and back up to Northern, Arkansas. And they said supposing we shifted that and tied into the local Farm economy and just said our dining services going to have to basically rely on local farmers. Very interesting idea. And they did a study students. Did it carried it Forward looked at the different sources looked at the suppliers at the cost, you know different mechanisms of distribution and they've discovered that basically for roughly the same amount of money. They can end up having fresh food a little bit of a variance in the menu and support the local economy. Actually. I've heard that st. Olaf and Carlton are both doing the same thing now or just beginning an equivalent study and I would suggest that a school like this could do the same, you know, are we part of this region? How could we be part of this region? How could we tie into it? It's an important question again. The actions aren't always the most dramatic things that matter what they are is any kind of action that raises the question, who should we be as a community as an institution as a nation as a global people? Lot of ways to do it. I know interestingly enough wood Williams College. They wanted a program in nonviolent action. They wanted to look at the history of those times when citizens have challenged institutions of power often. Very brutal ones without Force of Arms. Some of the answers are actually quite interesting. I don't know if any of you know about the history of the Norwegian teachers, but during World War two after the Nazis conquered Norway. One of the things that occurred is that they told Norwegian teachers what they would teach in the schools and you know, they would have to go Heil Hitler every morning again teach about Superior and subhuman races and all the rest of that and the weeds Norwegian teachers for whatever reason refused and the Nazis took some of their leaders of the teachers union off to some camps and killed them and tortured some others and you know, they were very brutal. And for whatever reason the Norwegian teachers still refused and oddly enough the Nazis back down. Why did they back down? I think they made a judgment that it was impossible to teach Norwegian school children with German teachers and that if they simply kill all the teachers they what would they do? Now it may be that that situation was slightly different because I guess they classify the Norwegians as fellow Aryans. So maybe there were more loath to butcher them all but nonetheless you have this immensely brutal military force simply face down by the kind of moral courage of human individuals. Same thing as in Denmark with the Jews were going to be deported and they told her to wear yellow star and the king and queen of Denmark took the lead in pending the yellow star on enough Danes did so they couldn't tell who was Jewish and who wasn't and the Jews of Denmark's of lumps of survived in Bulgaria a country that we often. It's again gone to one of those tremendously radical changes with the new leadership coming in but with we used to think of them as part of the Eastern Bloc bogeymen being Jewish myself. I always had a little bit of a warm spot because one of the Catholic Bishops Said that he was going to lie down on the tracks taking Jews to the camps if they try to deport any Jews and the Jews the Bulgaria survived again examples of human courage. So anyway, the William students wanted to study this they wanted to see whether there were some ways that maybe those kinds of actions that have occurred again and again over history and I think you have to lump the things like solidarity in Poland is part of that as well. Whether perhaps they could be the core of a way to defend Nations without Force of Arms as well as to change them and the school simply didn't have a course and it wasn't ready to offer one. So what did they do? They decided they took about eight of them. I think they each took an independent study. They found teachers who were willing to give it to them and they all just happen to read the same books and they happened to meet together. And basically what they did is they ran their own course inside the structure of the university and one that wants that course had gone a quarter or semester been tried out. They developed some curriculums. They written a paper for the respective teacher. They then were able to institutionalize a little bit and you became a regular course and they tried out a couple others. So basically what they did is they discovered base an entire peace studies program inside the shell of the University entirely initiated by students. And of course, they work with sympathetic faculty along the way but they simply went ahead and did it because they felt that that was what they needed. I have some friends in Universe in Nebraska Lincoln who did something quite analogous in putting together course on the rural farm crisis. Same thing you go ahead you say what do we need to learn and begin asking yourself how to do it? Actually University of North Dakota is going through some interesting developments. They have a president there who's a highly decorated World War Two veteran who worked his way up through the ranks and a certain point after he left his military career. He simply decided that. You know war was not an answer to human problems and he's been pushing and helping develop their peace studies program, which is quite extensive and they're least throwing around the idea now of having a required minor for every single student. In that school in global and peace studies not saying that everybody would necessarily agree on all the outcomes of the issues but saying that look this is an integral part of what we're doing whether we're going to be doctors or business people are carpenters or teachers or whatever. We have to Grapple with these issues, you know, so that's an interesting current and it's interesting as well. You may or may not know the Iowa is the first state to Institute a k through 12 Global education requirement in the public schools. Some others are close to following as well. How did that happen? Well, I look at and I trace the roots back to a group of Educators actually in Massachusetts who were in a school and wanted to teach about these issues and didn't know how started meeting talking with each other and then they formed a group called Educators for social responsibility and it began spreading across the country and suddenly, you know, slowly building comes a mandate to deal with some of these issues in the classrooms. Again, the kinds of changes were talking about are complicated. They don't always come in automatically or easily. What they do come through. I think is the way of people saying what do we need to do? What do we need to ask and asking and taking that risk? I have a friend who's a Southern Baptist preacher in a very small South Carolina town and they never had any kind of activism there at all. And he started getting worried about his granddaughter didn't know what to do. So he calls up a guy who's a teacher a biologist a local community college and they get together and meet and bring in a few other people take a film from Physicians for social responsibility around to Ebenezer Baptist Church and First Baptist Church and the Rotary Club in the PTA and the Garden Club and suddenly there's a dialogue in that town that exist where none never never did before and it's hard because they remember there was a March of 60 people and they were all nervous. His march to raise money for the fries campaign and walking along on a beautiful sunshine day dogs and families and kids and could have been a Sunday school picnic, but they were so nervous. Remember there's one guy was a young Methodist preacher and he'd he'd voted in a straw poll of his high school in the 60s for George Wallace was a segregationist candidate for president. And then he voted for Ronald Reagan is first time he really could vote. And he thought it would make us strong and after a while. I began wondering exactly what kind of strength that talked about were there other choices. So he decides to go to this. Peace March and he's driving along but he's really worried. He feels like, you know, I don't want to be one of those activists as Marchers those people on TV. And he's thinking about the stuff and he's not paying very much attention and suddenly and I think was a Chevy Cuts in front of him and he jammed the brakes on on his pickup truck and he skids off the road and he's okay, but barely and he sort of Rattle and he's sitting there on the gravel thinking my God what's going on? And he decides that maybe you know, maybe this is just a warning from God that he ought to turn around right now and just go back home and never have anything to do with any of this crazy piece business and anything some more about it and he says, you know, how does he know for sure, maybe it's Satan the devil tempting him, you know to get off the path and you're trying to keep him from this peace March and he thinks about its employees having is just major theological debates in his head and finally decides that he can't figure it out until he goes there and he does and I was sort of watching him walking along with him and talking and he sort of hunching over and little bit timid a little nervous and gradually sort of straightens up and he looks around and he realizes that what he's doing is talking about and taking a stand for things he believes in but I think it's very very hard to cross those initial watersheds into acting into having a voice and it again there's a lot of ways we can act I know some people who after the Webster decision on abortion one of them worked in DC and there's a snatch and student group called SOS students organizing students. That's boycotting Domino's Pizza because the owner of domino is a very very heavy funder of operation rescue and has as well as being non-union and just a lot of issues around the safety of the people. They have driving the trucks and timeframes are under and taking a stand on it and it's interesting. They've done quite a lot of support there. It's other people not everyone agrees. So people debate the issue. I think that's healthy. And seems to me that a lot of what this is all these issues has to do with his can we take these largest questions bring them into our ordinary intimate environments? I remember at Stanford where I was at student during the Vietnam period one of the interesting things that occurred was that we were in a dorm of about a hundred people and we had a budget of $10 a piece for parties and whatnot. So thousand dollars and an RA suggest that we spend $50 give it to some outfit known as Medical Aid for Indochina, which was going to rebuild a hospital the US had bombed during North Vietnam. Interesting notion means humanitarian Aid it's direct its medical supplies as medical equipment. It is helping people's lives. It's also clearly a political statement challenging our government and it says we are not at war with these people and we consider them fellow human beings. And so a lot of people debated it not everyone jumped at it. Back and forth for two weeks people argue it out and I saw people are never before taking a stand speaking out giving voicing their opinions one way or another we finally did passed the measure and gave the $50, but I think it will so much more important is that this choice that people were forced to confront because it was their dollars. Brought them into the issues and some of them stayed I suggest that you could do a similar thing for I don't know Medical Aid for El Salvador or Nicaraguan hurricane relief or something else where it is indeed controversial where it indeed makes people think we're not everyone is going to agree and it seems to me that one of the things that so damaging about the notion of politics that we've been given and taught and we feel it's corrupt with feel a little poisonous and paint us if we touch we also feel that it's a sphere where everybody agrees and thinks the same thing. I'm not sure that's really true. I'm not sure that in fact, it seems to me that if we do disagree on an issue all the more reason to be able to learn how to talk it out on a common Forum instead of Simply hiding in and bearing it. So when I ask people to get involved, it's not necessarily with the expectation that everyone is going to come out believing the same thing little clones of Paul over something like that. It's more sense that says we have to take these issues on we have to address them because indeed they affect our common situation in our common future and when we do begin to address them a guest seems to me that societies change. I look at those areas which we take for granted of political activism and it's because they have a tradition. It's because people have acted time and time again somebody Missouri was saying, you know, I just been to Iowa and they said, you know, it's awfully hard here in southern Missouri to act. There's not much tradition. It's not like I owe where you came from. And in fact, I would does have significant traditions on and on of movements that have tried to gain more power for ordinary citizens. And that's a Heritage to build on it gives us more powered give this opportunity and one of the things that I think occurs in the process of social change is that we open more space up for future people. Let me give you an example. I don't know if any of you remember a few years ago when the Catholic Bishops made a fairly ethical statement on the arms race. It was the first time that that church had really ever challenged it. They they had seen equivocated a bit. But at least the began to take it on in that effort of there is has borne a great many fruits in terms of further discussions on both Catholic campuses and Protestant campuses and in the secular community and I ask myself at one point. How did that decision to take on that issue come to be and I read a book about it. I talked to some people who were involved in it and it turned out as one might expect that there were 30 or 40 key individuals key Bishops who really spoke out repeatedly and convince the others to go along. Now I looked at a little further and I said what caused them turned out it was a smaller group maybe seven or eight Bishops who really inspired. The rest of those one of them was in Seattle guy named Raymond Hunt housing why I know somewhat we talked about it and he said, you know, what's interesting is I never used to think about these questions at all. I was a bishop in Montana. We're pretty isolated. We didn't really address these issues and then some people went over the fence and the Trident submarine base. One of the people went over the fence. In fact was John Nelson the son of the mother of the year and I began I went to visit them in jail and I started talking with him and suddenly my eyes were opened and they knew I had to take a stand and 1,000 eventually withheld half his federal income tax to protest the arms race and that was part of what caused that International stir and cause the other Bishops to pay notice. So it's interesting you trace it back from a pretty historic document that in fact did get the attention of Time Magazine and NBC and CBS and everything else. To the accent of some people going over the Trident base fence, but I decided to take a little bit further and I asked how some of them got involved in one of them pretty active Theologian describe being influenced by a missile designer of all people a guy used to build weapons for Lockheed in Sunnyvale, California. And he says he told me about the tried and what it meant and how he quit his job when he was asked to build it after building the Poseidon the Polaris. So I thought well, how does somebody like this missile designer change and it turns out he was influenced by his daughter a 15 year old who said dad. Is there anything else you can do are there any other choices and it seems to me that there is a direct link between that 15 year old girl and her decision and that ethical choice of the Catholic Bishops to begin taking on this issue. And I'm not saying that again automatically because they take it on. It's right or it's wrong but that their choice brought into the public dialogue and there is a chain of events from that 15 year old girl who never could have known that you were sparking anything other than a family discussion to her father to the people going over the fence the Trident space to people like Archbishop on 2002 the other activists Bishops into the final grappling with that religious body of some of these fundamental issues of our time and I don't think the results are always so dramatic, but it seems to me that that so much what must be about is saying, how do we raise these questions? How do we take to the are the dorms the issues that are of concern? How do we make our school a forum for addressing these issues? I know it Gustavus. They now have a they call an infusion program where they have freed the time of one faculty person have time to do nothing but work with every single Department in the school to try and figure out how to integrate Global issues. Not just sociology not just political science, but can you talk about the statistics of the arms race in the math class? Can you look at the politics of farming in genetic engineering in a biology class? Can you tie the curriculum into the real choices that we face? Now again, we may often feel powerless and we may feel overwhelmed. I think the way to proceed is step by step is joining with other human beings to joining with our classmates the people who already exists working on things like the piece Resource Center here and say what is it that I care about? Maybe I can't take every single issue on simultaneously, but I can work with others. Who do I can take a step? I can say let's change this particular classroom setting raise our voices a little bit more often on what we feel is important. I have a friend who's a Dean at a college outside of Philadelphia said, you know what I really want. I want some of these students to make my job difficult. I want them to raise some demands and then I'm going to have to say, okay look the students want this will have to deal with this and I think that we're an interesting situation because 20 years ago the momentum from change on the campuses did in fact come largely from the students and now it's diffused throughout that is to say that there are faculty who are concerned their administrators who are concerned and we I have a particular constraints in a particular fears that push us to hold back a little bit not to take the risk not to address the hard question, but I think that if we push each other and support each other in that effort, what we have is at least a chance to begin changing the world now I started with the events in Eastern Europe and I think maybe it's appropriate to end there because it is a tremendous sign of Hope of human achievement. And one of the most significant lessons to me at least is that those who work and strive and risk and try and create a vision of how their society could be more democratic sometimes change comes in unexpected ways. I remember a student University of Illinois Chicago Urban commuter campus who came fresh from Poland and he talked about a guy named Adam michnik who was one of their leading intellectuals who spoke at a rally and said, you know, it's probably by the time I finish speaking I'll be taking off in jailed and indeed mitnick was And mechanics is now sitting as a member of Congress. They're equipped with equivalent of Congress in the Polish Parliament. He's heading an opposition newspaper. Something has changed I think is meghna talked about it a lot. He wrote he said, you know, let us act as if we are free let us act as if the world that we want to being bring into being as if it is possible. And we may be jailed again working on a far more arduous difficult circumstances than we Face. We may be shunned. We may have repercussions. But this vision is worth it because it has to do with the future of our nation and I think we can take heart again in circumstances that I think have a great deal more latitude for choice. We're not going to be taking snatched away merely for speaking out against our government. We can take heart from that kind of courage and say that indeed we can change our society and that asking those hard questions about what makes a country more Humane more just more sustainable. That those are part of the purpose of our lives and then when we act and we begin to speak out, we begin to find out what it is to be a human being on this planet and why we're here and why our lives are worthwhile. Thanks.