excited about my new book the book being published i've been working probably twenty seven years on this and it's actually that's a bigger lifetime that it takes to i'm going to share a few thoughts before i show some slides and basically what i'll be doing tonight is sharing some of the stories that are in this book and for the last sixty years i've had  the amazing opportunity to be a part of nonviolent movements and experimenting with the power on violence in this country and around the world and i feel that one of our problems today is people many people have given up hope that we can make any difference that we can really make change and my hope is that with this book and sharing these stories that people be inspired that we can make a difference brought the untold untold suffering and death to millions of people and to hundreds of millions more who have had to flee their homes as refugees and  costs trillions of dollars in in money down the rabbit hole of war which is not available for meeting human environment needs both in this country and around the world and yet we continue that addiction it's as if there is no alternative to war and violence as a way of resolving conflict and i believe that just as we ended slavery just as we've ended cannibalism as we ended women being second class citizens as we ended jim crow in the south of this country we can end war and maybe that's a radical thought but we have part of something called world beyond war building a global movement to end all war and if you're interested will be you can look at our website world beyond war dot org to learn a whole lot more the good news is that i think that people of the world are discovering the power of nonviolent action and nonviolent means to resist oppression dictatorship war and violence of all kinds in the last forty fifty years more than half the world's people live in countries where there have been major nonvolatile movements and many of those have been successful i commend to you in addition to my book a book called why civil resistance works america chenowith and maria stefan where they have studied three hundred twenty three violent and nonviolent movements over the last over the last hundred ten years and found the nonviolent movements to be more than twice as likely to be successful so for people that say if nothing else works try violence and war this should put an end to that discussion and in addition to being twice as like successful most of those movements have ended up in democracy and not in further civil war or more dictatorship so that's another book to put on your  i've had the i had the good fortune one to choose good parents but also to have in my life what i call spiritual giants people that  were walking their talk and were using their lives to really try to create a more peaceful and just world and experiment experiment with the power of nonviolence those include bard ruston martin luther king so i think will get on with the slides which will or which are photos that are in the book and basically illustrate some of the stories to go to howard university which was a black university in washington d c and i started there in the fall of one nine hundred fifty nine and in february of one nine hundred sixty soon after four students down in greensboro north carolina decided found their courage and decided to challenge segregation in the south and went to a lunch counter very much like  this were not served and were arrested and sent to jail well howard university which was almost totally black university we did a little research and found that in maryland virginia everything was they were good lunch counters restaurants motels drinking fountains toilets movie theaters playgrounds and we started going up to maryland to challenge some of the to go into the lunch counters to challenge the segregation laws there we usually went on saturday morning would be arrested they'd take us to jail and we'd spend the weekend singing singing freedom songs and on monday morning would get released and go back to classes the state of virginia had passed a law saying anybody that challenge that law in virginia could get six months in prison and five hundred dollars fines so for quite a while we kept going to maryland and finally in june of one thousand nine hundred sixty after our final exams nobody had challenge that law and we decided somebody has to so we went down to what was called the people strug store which is a chain in the washington area and sat down at this lunch counter to get something to eat that's me on the far right they they closed the lunch counter and would not serve us but the owner didn't want to the rest of the didn't want the bad publicity so we  sat there for two days waiting for something to eat and it was the most challenging two days of my life people came and spat at us people put let cigarettes down our backs people punched in the stomach so hard we would fall off the off the store and then they would kick us every time something like this would happen we would try to respond in a nonviolent loving way which was pretty challenging sometimes toward the end of the second day i was meditating on loving your enemies and i heard a guy come up from behind me and he says if you don't get out of the store in two seconds i'm going to stab this through your heart and his hand was a switchblade and by that time it was pretty close to my heart and i thought i've got two seconds  do i really believe in nonviolence or is there something else i should be doing here but we've had a lot of practice and i just looked him in the eyes and i said friend do what you believe is right but i'll still try to love you and it was quite amazing this face that was contorted with his jaw began to drop and his hand began to fall and he left the store so for a twenty year old this was kind of a maz experience we then did something even more difficult veteran in the front page of the papers and there were five hundred people gathered outside threatening violence including the american nazi party and we wrote a statement appealing to the religious and community leaders of arlington to use their influence to get the facilities open to everyone and then this is the difficult part we said if nothing changes within a week we'll be back and that was challenging well some from the media people caught us out alive and took us back to washington and we literally shot for six days whether we had the courage to go back and do this again on the sixth day we got a phone call that the religious and community leaders had met had talked with the business leaders and had gotten a commitment that the facilities would be open within ten days so this was the most important lesson of my life that when something terrible is happening you don't have to just curse the television set or the president or segregation or war we can really we have the power to help change history and that's what black students throughout the south were doing and i think those religious and community leaders could have could have met and used their influence to get the aid in facilities open twenty five fifty hundred years earlier but somehow would such something in their heart that encourage them to act this is what you call the university of the streets this was checkpoint charlie and on this side are the american tanks facing toward the east and then the other side of the soviet tanks facing in the west and i was studying as i say in both universities east and west berlin which is i as far as i know i may have been one of the few americans or anybody that actually did that and i would write to my bicycle through the checkpoint charlie each morning go to the universities berlin and when i would hear what i considered communist propaganda i would challenge that and they were they called me a capitalist warmonger and the afternoon i would come back to west berlin and when i heard western propaganda i would challenge that propaganda and they'd call me a communist conspirator so i learned fairly early on but that telling the truth or questioning authority questioning the official propaganda is not is not necessarily popular well this is the u s of the soviet union were were threatening nuclear war over berlin that year and for a number of years and it was it was very very scary i then heard that you could go camping the soviet union in the russian people at that time were our arch enemy these were the people that were ready to incinerate kill hundreds of millions of them if need be and they the same with us so i heard you could go camping in russia and i got a v w bug and five of five students went and these this is in one of the campground some of the russian people that were meeting and as you can tell they  they look like evil communists but if our governments won't make peace i think it's up to us the people to try to make peace one of my concerns for a long time has been nuclear weapons and spent a weekend in jail and later that summer i was leading a second group to the soviet union and decided that american bomb test against soviet nuclear bombs the americans had said when we were demonstrating in washington our bomb tests are just for peace peaceful purposes go to russia and so here we were russia and the russian people's response was very similar our bomb tests are just peaceful and why don't you go to the united states with the soviet police came and threaten us with twenty years in prison and after thinking about that for a second we said well thank you for warning us but if these if this nuclear arms race continues all of us may be dead and we've demonstrated united states and we're going to demonstrate here luckily they didn't arrest us but they actually kept me out of the country for twenty six years also that spring in sixty two six of us quakers had the opportunity to meet with president kennedy for about half an hour in the white house and here we're having a press conference out and from the white house from that came out and it was very impressive to us that the president actually was listening and he said to us among other things he says i've been reading the guns of august before the first world war and everyone armed to the teeth to try to keep us out of war and that's exactly what has got into war and it's scary the similarities between what was happening then and what's happening now in one nine hundred sixty two which  we found out that fall when we were a possible nuclear destruction over the cuban missile crisis where we also challenge him to to challenge the soviets to a peace race and and to take more leadership to lead us against away from the nuclear armageddon and he said he looked at us and he said  if you're serious about this you're going to have to build a much more powerful movement to help encourage me and support me to do to take the leadership you want me to take well we kind of had our marching orders and when his secretary came and said mr president your next secretary your next appointment here he said well tell them to wait on learning something from these quakers this is during the vietnam war i think  was about nine hundred sixty nine and some quakers were reading the names of the war dead each wednesday at noon on the capitol steps well we'd get through forty or fifty names and the police would arrest us for causing disturbing the war maybe we would call it that and after about three weeks i went to see congressman george brown who's standing here and said  congressman we've been arrested three weeks nel for trying to read the names of the war dead is there anything you can do to help us and he said yeah i think i'll join you and in addition i will write to every member of congress telling them that i'm joining you and invite them to join us so the next day we had three members of congress out there and when all of us were arrested the three congressmen had congressional immunity and kept reading the forty five thousand names the word that got national publicity and within a couple weeks life magazine had a whole  issue with the photo of every american there had been killed in the war where they were born where they went to school where they died at cetera and within a couple weeks people all over the country were reading the names of the war this is also during the bombing of vietnam the war in vietnam and two hundred fifty quakers had decided to have a quiet quiet meeting for worship and for the white house president nixon was the president and the police came and warned us all that we would be arrested if we didn't leave no one left and the two hundred fifty other quakers were all hold hauled off to jail jan  annoying our two young children were left there sitting on the sidewalk and this is the police chief threatening to that if we were arrested they our children were taken away and put in juvenile hall he says you know what happens to children juvenile hall and we said well of course we love our children but we also love the children of vietnam and  are going to continue this presence of from the white house until we stop bombing children in vietnam well he went on for a while longer for about half an hour he was trying to convince us to leave and after half an hour i said well if you arrest us we will walk in the police car well he says you're under arrest and we walked to the police car and instead of taking us jail he took us behind the police station in georgetown and released us and we we walked back to the white house but by that time the police were everywhere and we couldn't get anywhere near the white house this photo was went all across the country the two hundred fifty quakers got very very little publicity but somehow the family seemed to be very photogenic so people from all the countr that us this photo because you p r i and a p had set it out and it's now on our baby our children's baby books some people think that when you get married and have children you give up your and your beliefs and we could actually do something to stop war and madness and that some hell never we never had that problem this picture is paddies and even trail and small towns and villages but it's christmas time we started bombing the cities with millions of people and we had a worship service in west philadelphia were we were living and tried to feel the pain of the people that were living under those bombs what this meant to them to their to do to try to stop this insanity and we somehow found the courage to somehow put our bodies between these bombs and the people in vietnam and we found twenty six canoes and fifty two of us began attempting to nonviolently blockade the ship with which is called the u s s nitrile on the first day as we paddled out along the pier  toward the about of the ship a policeman and military policeman warned us over the megaphone you've got to get out of this area or you'll be charged with criminal conspiracy that's twenty years in prison we we tried to yell back thank you for warning us but if these bombs reach the destination that's even worse than twenty years in prison the ship as they were lifting anchor here were a number of the sailors giving us the v sign and then seven of the sailors jumped off of the ship into the ocean and began swimming toward or  blockade which was was a phenomenal experience for us something we didn't anticipate at all would call the new york times in the evening news so this was broadcast across the country these guys were put back they were picked up and put back on the bridge of the ship but they told us later that when their ship went through the panama canal all the other navy ships had heard about the u s s nitrile and the nonviolent resistance and gave them the fist of solidarity with those seven sailors so i'd like to think that our courage gave those seven sailors courage to do what they believed was right and those seven sailors gapers a whole lot of other americans in the war to stop the insanity of what they were having been ordered to do in killing burning villages that kind of and down the east coast and all of them down the west coast this is down in norfolk virginia as an aircraft carrier the u s s america and some of our small canoes in front of it and the  our boats intentionally frogmen came after us put us on to the navy boat face down in handcuffs with guns pointed at us while the u s s america steamed out of vietnam the next at livermore nuclear weapons labs which is about thirty five miles east of seven cisco the united states has been and is developing a whole new generation of nuclear bombs i think ten billion dollars is to be spent this year just on new nuclear weapons development so we have been involved in an ongoing campaign since the early eighty's people in the religious community and students and people from many different communities working for the conversion of the planet from nuclear weapons to alternative energy and positive contributions t brian wilson who is a vietnam vet who in vietnam part of his job was to go into villages after we'd bombed to look at how effective the bombin and he went into one of the villages one day and here all of that were the only people over there were women and children and old people all of them dead no weapons were found and there was this one woman whose whose eyebrows had been and eyelashes had been burned by naipaul so her eyes were looking white you know right at him and around her legs were her children wrapping their arms around their mother all of them dead and brian who had been brought up a very staunch and i communist birch society started wondering why and why nine thousand miles away from home and somebody else is burning in somebody else's village well that was kind of  conversion experience for him but here we were he'd gone to nicaragua and finding that we were doing the same thing again and that was just too much for him that he came back and we decided to to organize what we called nuremberg auctions where we were going to nonviolently try to block trucks and trains that were carrying bombs to kill people in central america and this is dorothy granada and me blocking one of the  taking them out to ships well in september twenty first of that year brian and a number of other veterans vietnam veterans made a statement in which they said starting september first will be fasting for forty days and we will be blocking the trains are carrying bombs to central america and the  navy has three choices you can stop shipping the bombs or you can arrest us take us to jail but we want you to know that the moment you release us will be back on the tracks or you can run over us and he also said our lives are not worth more than the people sent to america and their lives are not worth less than ours and i think that's a very radical way of looking at the world i think many of us think somehow our lives are more important than people in other parts of the world and it's all right for us to consume six times our share of the world's resources and it's also all right to bomb their country if we want their oil  or other resources well the navy unfortunately decided to run through run their train through us through our blockade and that's the train in the background after it's run through on through brian has been run over by the train losses two legs a hole in his head fifty bones broken but was still alive and on there trying to hold the blood in his head it was the worst day of my life  obviously i think what the navy was trying to do was to say no more of this nonsense from you guys instead of we had nine thousand people out there or the next saturday to commit to  continuing this action brian survived and actually i visited him in the hospital were every inch of his body was covered with bandages and no more legs  he dictated this most beautiful statement his love and his his commitment to nonviolence and his commitment to building a different kind of world where we could all be brothers and sisters was stronger than ever  i'll be back there at the tracks as soon as i can get all this hospital well we had nine thousand people there the next saturday and then we blocked every train for three years and sometimes they would have to rest two bus loads of us before the train could go through and worried about what we did went through central america and for the for the peasants and the local people  was meaningful that there are americans that are willing to risk their lives to stop the insanity of the killing that was happening in their families their communities this is my mom and dad bruce and ray heard so is the year i was allowed to go back to the soviet union after twenty six years of exile so this week and there vent a right wing very reactionary communist could talk it's gorbachev who had all their nuclear weapons the air force and declared a total curfew and but in spite of that about ten thousand russian citizens i went to the white house which  soldiers in the tanks turn the tables around face out their force came and also had orders to bomb the white house when they saw all these people they refused to bomb after three days and three nights of which you may remember there was a very apartheid kind of system there ninety percent of the people were quote kosovar albanian and about seven percent were serbian and the ninety percent of the people of all been fired from their jobs could not speak albanian they could not go to the university they were afraid to go to hospitals because some of the move been poisoned but the people were responding nonviolently to that  i decide i want to go to find out more without fully almost everybody in that society that i met women students professors former political prisoners political party people said is that explosion waiting to happen we need to engage in more active nonviolent resistance but we need to have international people to come in the company us david can you find those people and i said what i will try and so i traveled around europe around the united states and wrote articles and spoke on radio and television saying kosovo is an explosion waiting to happen they need they wan but we're too busy so when when it did explode and there was i think cleansing president clinton on television and said there's i think clinton happening cos of all we have two choices we can look the other way and do nothing or we can go in and start bombing and many of us that had had known the situation in kosovo realized it was that the lol to which was supporting death and destruction and without the hatred that intensified on all sides so that to me was a very moral wakeup call we need a global peace force of hundreds of actually thousands of nonviolent peace makers and peace keepers that can go in to support nonviolent movements and civilian populations that are endangered by war so the nonviolent peace this is mel duncan and me who together with many others conflict been invited by local peacemakers and human rights workers and this is in sri lanka but we now have about two hundred people in mindanao in the philippines in south sudan in burma us started our shock and awe campaign in a military campaign in iraq we were able to shut down the financial district for three days when this war started and on the on march nineteenth anniversary of the japanese occupation and then when the americans came in after the second world war they resisted the building a separate and i call mistaken south korea they wanted a unified korea is part of our a pivot to asia is is build it together with the korean navy is building a massive new military base as part of surrounding china  bases and the people of this community have been resisting none while it blocking trucks and cement trucks for seven years of and bulldozers and here you see some of the folks there of there are nonviolent movements in many parts of the world saying no to military madness and occupation and military bases that are this is enemies these women don't look like enemies but we're very happy to as almost all the people of iran were very happy to meet americans who want to reach out and get to know each others as human beings being in places like iran i mean our government considers them the enemy but when when we try to put ourself ourselves in the other person's shoes of iran has not invaded another country for two hundred years the united states overthrew their democratically elected government in the fifty three we shot down a civilian civilian airliner several years ago never apologized we have surrounded their country with north korea bases and our bombing in iraq and afghanistan and have military ships off the coast but we're considering them a threats of massive destruction this is gaza also a lot of delegation to israel palestine and the most i think hopeful thing that's going on in the whole conflict right now is that palestinians in the west bank are non while the challenge in the wall that is separating them from the from the field and  week after week every forty at noon after the their worship for the mosque on on friday noon they would they are marching to the wall to demand that  arrow and we're many many people especially young people thousands of people throughout this country decided to wake up and say we really want a government of and for the people all the people not just the wealthy and the corporations this is another action of the peace navy that's a south african ship during the apartheid era and in addition to the peace navy we had we had a picket line and out in front where the workers were going to unload the ship  longshoreman refused to cross picket lines in all those places more recently as you i'm sure you know israel has ships the same thing as half and this is to me one of the symbols of hope at fort dietrich maryland and for in frederick maryland there was a biological warfare plant this is back in one nine hundred fifty nine and at this spot at this biological began a silent vigil at the entrance to space and my mother the third from the right in the white dress was a school teacher and went down and her summer vacations to be a part of this vigil the the base had ordered its all the workers not to take a leaf was not to look at these people to look straight ahead and go into work each morning well ten years later my folks moved to salem oregon and my mom was in a bookstore one day and a guy came up to her and said were you in that vigil at fort dietrich ten years ago and she says yes and he said well i want you know it's because of you and the other people there that that i resign my job so we never know you know if we do a small witness hold a candle holder sign write a letter to congress that that can start ripples going for view on what will even know about and this is my final flight i guess it will show back where i show the american the soviet tanks i went back after the wall that had been torn down by the people on both sides and instead of the the the history of nonviolent struggle around the world and i thought that this was quite a beautiful transformation from threatening nuclear war to  nonviolent resistance all the world well i will end by just saying well this is a drone base which also as you props know this is the the new way of fighting wars no americans will die men here in nevada or new york state or whatever can you know play with their computers and drop bombs on people no this side of the world jan and i have joined others who are been demonstrating every month for the last three years at the viel air force base in in california which is one of the places that these drones are offered in  happening or in this country around the world and he's worked in many conflict areas and mediated between conflicts it's that or he is saying the american empire will be over by tw that the peoples of world are not going to put up with continued american economic military political domination and so the only real question is are we going to have one war after another after another kind of fighting to keep our power or privilege or domination of other countries or we're going to join the world's people and say we want to live in a world where we really share the world's resources and book and i would love to open up to questions and comments and discussion well i think one is maybe trying to reframe i mean as as i'm sure you know eighty to ninety percent of the people who are dying in wars or civilians many many of those very high percentage are children i think that most people would argue or would say it would believe it we don't want to kill anybody's children it's not worth killing somebody else's children for any ideology you know any political belief any religious belief and yet that's exactly what we're doing that that fact is hidden from  us that's that's one thing i think a second and the military industrial complex in this country has been very smart in and parceling out the military contracts to make stuff you know these weapons of war to every congressional district district united states so every congressional district you know their people say we want our jobs you know so mr congressman get are proposing economic conversion commissions and i think many of you probably know that the same amount of money spent on missiles from nuclear weapons all weapons of destruction if used building schools you know more teachers passing per classroom infrastructure rebuilding bridges that are falling alternative energy technologies that center would provide many more jobs so it's not it's not a question of jobs or no jobs it's what kind of jobs and  i think the third thing that i would say is i think empathy or trying to put ourselves in the other person's shoes is very important and if i don't think that there are many people would say i'm going to keep his job even if i know the people in some other country are going to get killed who have nothing to do with with with my security  you know people trying to bring up their families and want the same things as i do i mean i believe enough in the goodness of human nature i don't think people like the idea of killing other people and that's the reason part of the reason that soldiers coming back from iraq afghanistan and vietnam are having such a hard time and they become alcoholic and they kill themselves and they are in and up in mental institutions and prisons  because they've had too i mean they were brought up that you know we we we get along with people and then you learn you got to kill people and you get a medal if you kill you know a whole lot of people and then you come back home and you're supposed to forget that and and that transition is very very hard so and i guess the final thing i would say is military security has not been working i mean september eleventh two thousand one her endless thing happened you know terrorists hijacked planes and  three or four thousand people died but it response we have we have been at war with afghanistan for thirteen years with iraq for that for eleven years and i would guess that we have a thousand times as many terrorists now as we did when we started and if we keep continuing our present policies will have a thousand times as many as we have now five years from now and so that's a dead end street and my own feeling is we need to try something different and that is instead of being at war with the muslim world especially that we  i'm one of the things that irks the most is our military bases in their countries and our occupation of their countries and are supporting israel hundred percent against a fellow syrians and if instead we said we're withdrawing our troops were dismantling our military bases we're going to put the hundreds of billions of dollars we've been spending war into medical clinics his corpse people educational institutions we could become the most loved nation in the world and i think be a whole lot safer other questions comments and feel free to disagree with anything  well if not i want to thank everybody for coming and if you haven't already gotten a book i hope you'll buy a book and if you're older like i am think about your children and grandchildren that christmas is going to be coming before too long and i think it's especially important that younger people feel some hope for something that we can do to help create a more peaceful just world for our children and grandchildren yes  john lewis i'm sure there are i don't have them in my head  but john lewis who as you may remember is now a member of congress and was a part of the nashville sit ins i was a part of the freedom rides and was for that when the bus buses were burned and people were beaten up here and other national students said we're going to we're going to we've written our wills and we're going to go down continue at the freedom ride he was brutally novel and scald march and there's the first one march one is out but there's going to be two more and they kind of share the story of the whole of his experience in the civil rights movement from a very very courageous guy and i think that is certainly that's something that's available for young people i think defines what age you're talking about but this video or the d v d i shared is certainly also very appropriate for high schools and and and our son as well thanks everyone for coming and i'll be happy to sign some books if you like me to