we are talking today with father john dear father john deere is an internationally known voice for peace and nonviolence he is a long time activist popular lecturer and movement organizer and author editor of thirty books including peace behind bars a peace making priest's journey from jail transfiguration a meditation on transforming ourselves and our world living peace a spirituality of action his autobiography a persistent piece one man's struggle for a nonviolent world and his latest book the nonviolent life and in two thousand and eight he was nominated for the nobel peace prize by archbishop desmond tutu father john deere thank you very much for spending time with us today thanks for having me mike so start out tell us what is was your motivation in writing your latest book the nonviolent life well i've been really passionate about nonviolence my whole life been thinking about it and trying to practice it and study it for thirty five years and really studying gandhi and king in organizing and you know it's gandhi right does nonviolence work can we you know use nonviolence to and oppression and war and disarm the planet what does it mean so i've talked to probably millions of people around the country in the world about nonviolence just like full time it's an interesting experience by the way because that means every day i've got people telling me why they want to kill you know what anyway so i've been thinking about this for a long time and i wrote this book which is the culmination of my life's work to try to put in a nutshell what nonviolence means so here's my thesis of the book and this is based on extensive work with gandhi and king that non violence requires three simultaneous attributes or attitudes first you've got to be nonviolent to yourself you know well yeah ok really really lessen the violence within you and be really peaceful toward yourself and to to make peace with yourself while you're doing that at the same time second you have to practice meticulous interpersonal nonviolence toward every human being on the planet and all creatures and all creation i mean right there that's a mouthful and while you're doing that at the third at the same time you also have to have one foot in the global grassroots movement of nonviolence which is sweeping the world they've been you know some eighty five revolutions in the last thirty years we now know two thirds of the human race are personally involved today in local grassroots nonviolent movements for justice and peace the world is moving just not hearing about united states now i wri it this way because i am a lot of a lot of experience around the country in the world in the movement and we're really good at one or two of those but very few people go like gandhi and dr king and do all three in other words there's a lot of church people i'm familiar with who are really nice and they're nice themselves and they're nice to their families and that's not nonviolence you also have to be part of the movement on the other hand there's a lot of us hardcore activists and we're committed they were really involved in the movement and how shall i put this nonviolently you know we're not really nice people and we're full of violence and where we're not good in our relationships god being king we're working this  that's why ultimately it's way beyond a tactic or strategy it's it's a way of life and it's a spirituality it's a spiritual path it's at the heart of every religion and it means really cultivating peace within us around us and being part of the new growing global peace movement is the best thing we can do with their lives i think is what it means to be a human being and that's what my new book is about it sounds like a pretty tall order for people to sign onto is there a specific one of those three that one starts where you just start with all three of them simultaneously i don't know but you know it's just that we've both failed teaching nonviolence and we've had these great people every school in the planet should educate every child in the methodology of nonviolence to be nonviolent to yourself and you one another's every parent should be nonviolent every church don't get me started should be a training school of nonviolen we totally failed at that but violence isn't working and war certainly isn't working in the trying some marine base here isn't working and it's not making anybody happier by the way it's not making us safer or secure and i think all activists all people of goodwill all people of faith and conscience just cut to the chase and say this violence doesn't work it's totally failed us we have a very poor leadership in the united states at every a project called campaign nonviolence where we're looking towards we're calling for hundreds of demonstrations around the country this fall under the banner of war poverty and environmental destruction but in terms of the book you know i just invite your listeners to reflect you know on the violence within him and the violence in their life and does it work and is it you know how can you become more and more nonviolent how can we be non ourselves and you know there's there's always a few people in our lives personally and then globally like the president or someone who really push our buttons in a strange way they become our teachers because they show how violent we are and that's not doesn't work i'm arguing so i invite us to reflect on our relationships and then if you're not involved in the movement somehow or other i always say everybody's got it get involved nobody can do everything but everybody can do something everybody can pick an issue donate a little time and be part of the movement this is what it means to be human but the world is in such bad shape now i'm i'm assuming lots of your listeners here in seattle are involved but that's why i say let's go deep like gandhi and king and and radiate personally experience personally the peace we seek politically i'm not sure you know where you begin to do that it needs prayer and reflection and study ongoing meditation about your own life and the meaning of life we only have so much time left on earth everybody you know life is short and what's the best thing we can do with for peace how can our lives really help so the seeds of peace and radiate peace and actually be part of disarming seattle and country in the world these are the best things we're thinking about you know and doesn't listen to the v or the politicians this is the real stuff this is what our great teachers would be saying if they were alive today gandhi and king that's why when i go around talking about it mike so what do you propose for methodology is for people dealing with violence within them selves or towards themselves right now you know i had this sad long letter from a hardcore prisoner in california on friday and he was he wrote me that question because he read about me speaking in california he said my whole life i've been violent to myself well i was beat up as a kid i beat myself up and i joined the gang then i beat people up and he killed people now i'm beating people up in prison how do i stop and he goes i'm so unhappy it was so touching you know i'm tired of being violent and violent to myself well i think we're really i i say this and i sound so stupid and like fifth grade i realize it's the it's the simplest thing in the world and yet it's the hardest thing and i can say this with some authority because of the dalai lama he's now saying when he comes to the states you people are so sick you're so's the people are so stooped in violence it's like the air we breathe but it's so internalized in us now it's so beaten we've been all victims of violence you know in our families and our youth and then the vietnam war and racism it's just all we know and he's saying there's very low self esteem as a great self hatred among us and that makes sense and i think there's a connection a line between that and the tritone settling in bangor so i like what just look deeply with it don't beat yourself up you know like ok how my feeling what's going on i'm so mad at myself i shouldn't have done that thing yesterday and then you beat yourself up a second time because you did that you know you continuing this cycle of violence no i take a deep breath and move on to a second thought and go ok well i did that because of this and can being talking about really conscious living in awareness of what's going on inside is of the roots of war us and then you end up having to have some kind of a spiritual practice of silence and meditation and contemplation every day all the greatest peace makers in history insisted on there because when you begin to slow down all that junk comes up and you have to look at it and then you can let it go and keep letting go of your anger and your hurts and your wounds and your bitterness forgive everyone who ever hurt you and receive the gift of peace you know as a christian i would say from jesus who are you know could say from the god of peace but i think you know the buddha speak of just sitting in peace so and humanness and so it's it's a  life of inner peace but it requires constant attention it's a daily inner work if you're going to stand up and face war you have to be doing a lot more you know work to strengthen your inner peace seems to me the mouth every day for forty five years like mahatma gandhi read from the sermon on the mount every morning every evening for forty five years nobody reads a certain amount he's not even a christian so i started read the certain amount he says the greatest teaching of nonviolence in history i think he's right and you go when you read it matthew five six and seven it's all the teachings of jesus are blessed are the peacemakers offer no violent resistance who want to does evil there it is love your as compassionate has got there the six teachings that lead up to love your enemies you have heard it said but i say to you love your enemies the first one is it's so politically incorrect you have this is jesus blaming the nonviolent jesus you have heard it said thou shalt not kill i say don't even get angry when you feel that remember the people who have been hurt by you and go and be reconciled with them now what if jesus knew something about nonviolence i'm just proposing that i know that schedule is gandhi decided to take him seriously with that and experimented with and the week he was killed he said the greatest thing he ever did in his life was learn to conserve his anger instead of lashing out because it's from wounds your hurt especially if you're involved in the movie you can be heard every day and instead of acting on that with through violence you channel it into some positive action for the good and gandhi was saying and i write about this i call it the emotional life of nonviolence in the sermon on the mount jesus says avoid these two emotions they will not help you for the long haul of peacemaking anger and fear and we have a lot of angry activists and a lot of fearful people but there's two emotions there that jesus recommends that nobody in the united states has you know mean in the movement i'm just being dramatic but grief and joy and there that's it if you're an activist you care for the world i mean we killed one point five million iraqis the last twenty years these are sisters and brothers there's a billion people starving to death today corney the united nations twenty five wars we have grief we should take time to grieve and we should also cultivate joy which is different than happiness ghandi did all of that and so he's trying to figure out what is a nonviolent life i was mentioning i was just spent a month in south africa and had a great day with  archbishop tutu and i write about him in the book that guy's been eighty two he's been under death spent since he was thirteen and he's embarrassing he should almost not be allowed out in public because he's like a little kid he laughs all the time and he cries all the time we talk about this too he's not angry and he's changing the world and he was off to iran the day after i was with him on a says he's the most important prophet of justice and peace and live right now i think that's true i want to be like that i think gandhi was right saying that jesus was right but anger is not a good motive for the rest of our lives to work for peace and justice then we live our whole life as raging lunatics or terrified people no but you can grieve and you can rejoice and then we go forward working for peace and justice things like that i think those have actually been found healthy for you whereas anger causes numerous physical maladies you know so yeah i'm going to talk a lot about that too i mean it doesn't at the effects of it but so you were talking about your campaign on violence yeah and teachings around the country right is that something that's going to be addressed in those teachings yeah we'll see one of the things that we need right now in the states is we need to train people in the methodology of nonviolence and every if you if you're an activist and you've never done a nonviolence training you've got to go and spend some weekend with some experienced trainer i mean how do you so that we can stand up to the police and respond nonviolently or our family or the church or somebody you know and then we really have to train ourselves we have to practice gandhi was doing this in his community every day for forty years i'm just proposing take a weekend which is silly almost where you have to constantly be in training so there's lots of good groups doing it the group i work with benny which is been a dot org and or campaign nonviolence dot org does nonviolence change you could bring them in folks could bring them into seattle and we're doing study groups around my book the nonviolent life but we have called upon all the peace and justice groups of the country locally regionally and internationally to gear up  because everybody is so beat up and burnt out with using the congressional elections this fall given all horrors of the world starting on september twenty first which is international peace day to take to the streets ideally to go to your local congressional representatives office and what we're asking for people who work in really hard on this and it's going to take off in seattle too i hope is to pick the issues that you're passionate  about and don't wait for somebody else to organize it go and organize it yourself under war for example drones a lot of people going to protesting drugs poverty lot of people have just been two weeks in california working on immigration and prison and the executions and so forth and so on but global global hunger and poverty is getting much worse and then of course the environment and or the environment working with three fifty dot org and other groups that take to the streets and nonviolence ultimately ultimately has to be practiced in public in the streets in a spirit of peace saying no no no we don't want all this money for war we don't want these drones dropping bombs on people we don't want the nuclear weapons out to try and submarine base we want funding for schools and poor people in health care and meanwhile we want to clean up this environment things like that we need to change always happens from bottom up grassroots movement building and i'm just seen which my friends and i really organizing to try to reignite the movement and people can and can go to our website campaign nonviolence dot org to get involved talk about why it's important for people to take to the streets as opposed to just clicking on like on facebook it's a very serious question actually and i you know a lot of people say well you know the internet and facebook and twitter were the key of the arab spring and the occupy movement i so great i spent a serious time in cairo the year before the arab spring broke there and i spent a lot of time in the middle east i'm not so sure you know there is a lot of serious organizers like us who who just keep at it and then you never know how the movement is going to take off what the moment would be if you study movements and how change actually happens well i'm a name drop you mentioned another name cesar chavez the great famous organizer in california i spent an evening with him shortly before he died and we talked about this and i said to him you know if i ever asked what do we do what how do you work for peace and justice what should i say and he got very animated any started pounding his fist and he said you tell everyone for the rest of your life public action public action public action that was a great answer everybody has to stand up publicly and take some action for justice and peace you can't just write letters or give speeches or read books or like on facebook all of that good but we need a movement and the world is marching the in people united states need to start marching too because we're causing all this death and destruction around the planet and it's destroying our own selves too and many of us have to be full time committed in this and seattle is such an important place you've you know you've been such the leaders for the country especially under the the w t o protest years ago well that needs to continue and this is we're just offering here's a way that people can get involved this fall campaign on violence i'm just a big believer in organizing demonstrations because i see they have to be meticulously nonviolent but that's how the change happens it's a very strange thing and i've been studying a lot you know whether it's jesus on the cross to gandhi there's something about publicly sp's seeking the truth without violence and yet being willing to take on violence to suffer in love with others while we still insist on the truth of our common unity and justice and peace then when you move into that thing people getting arrested or people giving their lives for justice and peace it taps into the human heart that's way beyond facebook and this is what the organizing for but then nonviolence can become contagious you know when you can look at this this is certainly the story of martin luther king and the civil rights movement those moments and that's what we need to happen now when this is just experimenting with truth and love anyway things like that so how do you support a nonviolent movement in a situation let's say it's not that bad here in the u s currently but let's say like in el salvador when arena was had the death squads and at the time when the spent about five months there under the tutelage of the six jesuits who are later assassinated they were my friends very powerful thing to have known great martyrs they put us all to shame i mean those guys were getting fifteen death threats a week in the seven years before i met them in one thousand nine hundred five their house has been bombed twenty one times the university match in seattle university being bombed repeatedly because they're trying to get rid of the tried summary and basic banker it was a simple as that and the government would be bombing seattle university it's so hard i think about it all the time because we have nothing like that well they sent me out to a refugee camp in the middle of the jungle where the us was bombing the bombs were falling around the thousand people they had all lost all their loved ones they ran up the back doors the death squads room through the front door and killed everybody the theory was when the death squads came into the camp i would go out and greet them and they wouldn't be killed because the white gringo was there i was twenty two and talk about working through your nonviolence you know they were all kids the death squads with machine guns and they come up ready to kill and i go hi you know the goofier you are the better i figured i'm just a dumb american hi can i help you you need anything and they'd like walk away because you get work with the goofball like that the creativity  humor of nonviolence learned a lot and then came very involved in the struggle here in the u s organizing many demonstrations getting arrested a lot going to jail we went on a twenty one day fast several jesuit priest and several salvadoran refugee women scuse me and we built a movement i think is one of the strongest in the country in the last forty years and we cut military aid tell salvador and the war end so i've seen it work but you just have to get involved since you have it's a very personal question right so if any issue i'm lived in northern ireland spent a lot of time in palestine i'm willing to afghanistan last year  you maybe i can do that because i know how to do that but not everybody has to do that but everybody has to get involved with the movement building that's the key thing and it's just me local peace and justice groups here in seattle so important get together with friends forget what's going on bring in speakers take to the streets organize politically and say no to this culture of war and violence so part of that though is affected because of your white privilege and connection to the us what about  like the peasants there who were facing those same death squads very why not take up arms you know i mean you know i had that conversation with a thousand people and the jesuits who are my friends and they used all laugh at me because i was talking then as a kid the way i'm talking to you the same minute i nothing is changed if they were alive they'd be rolling their eyes but they never heard it before you know romero was just beginning he didn't really use the word nonviolence and the situation was so evil but we funded all the killings in the death squad government couldn't have done anything without the money from the united states to sing with the occupation the palestinian everything cop totally with you help us we don't want to kill anybody and we don't want to be killed they were sick of death that's my experience around the whole world and all the war zones i've been in i've been a lot everybody is for  america tell you stories you wouldn't believe so no that's not the issue but i do remember the jesuits who were killed telling me i wanted to stay there and live there for the rest of my life and they said no you need to go back to the united states and work to and all the warmaking and the military spending the funding of all the wars around the world which are killing us and it was korea your job is going to be harder they're just going to kill us they're going to ignore you but you've got to keep at it and keep talking about it and keep building a movement and that's why i'm here with you today mike so do you have an idea how to pull people who were formerly activists back in to let's call it that the activists fault for is when i got involved twenty five thirty years ago with central american issues a lot of those people who were key leaders in that movement then are off raising families and don't appear to be involved anymore and it seems really important to me to get them back involved if we're really going to succeed well i don't know about the word succeed but other than that i  question i'm quite serious actually about that succeed is not a word i ever use your mother teresa said it sounds goofy but we called to be faithful successful and the the outcome in this is really spiritual talk but it's also movement  really out of our hands however what we need are committed people we need people to really be involved for the long haul in the struggle for justice and peace and i mean that's the the sixty's that people got really involved in fighting the vietnam war totally burned out that's why i wrote this book the way i did about your inner work as well as the public work and your relationships it's all one this is a holistic view of peace and nonviolence we gandhi was very clear about not to mention jesus and buddha about modeling the new world we want to see in our hearts and our personal lives and so forth very hard  was very involved in central america too and you see people as very interesting often ask why and i think it's because we were just geographically close to central america and what reagan was saying like why isn't everybody equally involved in afghanistan right now  or iraq but i've been to both places but i invite people to get involved especially people who know well because  the world isn't really serious shape i mean there's twenty five wars happening three to four billion people in subhuman conditions fifteen to twenty thousand nuclear weapons catastrophic catastrophic climate change bearing down upon us and all the other forms of violence and it's not going to change we don't have any leadership you know the united states is not going to lead the way to nonviolence change only happens from grassroots bottom up movement building and so we all need to be involved and as i said i was just with archbishop tutu and you know he said some so powerful so beautiful to see as again he had been under constant death threat as whole life risked his life over and over kept speaking out against apartheid now he's been speaking out against every injustice in the world and he's laughing and carrying on but it really serious at the same time where the first things he said to me when we met in cape town a few weeks ago was we can never give up the struggle for justice and peace until the day we die we have to be about this and there's almost as i was saying why he said because our sisters and brothers around the planet are suffering and dying i mean if you care if you love the human race and if you love creation you have to get involved so i appeal to everybody and you're better nature to care and to be a person of love and compassion for all suffering people on the planet and for creation and turn off the t v and stop reading the bad news and start going to meetings and start organizing and start helping to take to the streets to rebuild the movement this is what we need in this is how change comes it's in that ordinary day to day stuff you know the story of my friend also was howard zinn the great writer people's history of the united states and he was in santa fe shortly before he died and we had lunch and he said incredible thing i spent my whole life study the movements for social change now this is serious coming from  the labor movement from thirty's the civil rights with the entire vietnam war movement and he says i finally realized that all of them have one thing in common from the beginning the middle right to the very end all the movements in our own history were hopeless hopeless hopeless i said that's really courage it and he gives it then there was this breakthrough of hope and i asked myself why and he said i realized they had one other thing in common they were all made up of ordinary people who kept at it doing water two three things every day for their struggle for justice and peace even though they knew they were never going to live to see the outcome they were giving their lives for you do it anyway because it's the right thing to do is the best thing you do with your life and then the change is inevitable it's going to happen this is how this movement building of violence and a lways always always works gandhi said it's just rarely tried where experts in violence i found that very very helpful that's why i say you know you don't have to do everything but i encourage everybody to  back involved and to pick one issue and to do their part you know to help continuing the movement to grow and you know i think we're headed for bad days you know this country's going to collapse economically cannot sustain itself like this we have all these nuclear weapons we're going to use them unless we the people say no and we're killing people all over the planet and that's why we  have to keep this movement building and seattle is a really really really important place in this country and i know i travel full time and it's tempting to sit back you know and go well i did my part and life is good in like like seattle and i can just check out on the internet no you got it you got to give you a little bit you know and it's going to be inconvenient and risky and and go to meetings and do the legwork and that kind of thing that's what we need more and more people to be doing things like that you're based out of new mexico at the moment how did you choose that spot i saw a long sad story i'm trying to make you laugh but i was living in new york city with daniel berrigan and jesuit community and i had been the director of the fellowship or reconciliation which is the largest interfaith peace group in the world very active in seattle to you know that's why i've been out here a lot and i just stepped down as the rector director and september eleventh happened and i became the coordinator for the red cross of all the chaplains working with the families and working at ground zero and i was really powerful meanwhile we were organizing demonstrations in times square against the bombing of afghanistan now for me this was a holistic christian response love your neighbor and love your enemies show compassion at home and abroad there was a lot of publicity even about mean new york times and elsewhere and i got called in and church officials kicked me out a new york yeah this is good i'm fulfilling my job description mike because jesus got killed so i just figure if you're not in trouble then you're not following jesus if you're in trouble so i moved to new mexico the poorest state in the country did you know that like yeah number one in poverty number one in military spending number one in nuclear weapons we think there's some two thousand to three thousand nuclear weapons at the albuquerque airport more than any other place on the planet maybe a city in the very north of russia number one drunk driving number one in suicide number one in what domestic violence number one in alcoholism i was just reading yesterday that the area well in northern mexico is more violence in poverty than any place in the country hands down they just we just got to number one in child hunger again we surpassed mississippi after katrina but let's alamos the mountain up in the north the birthplace of the atomic bomb there are more millionaires in ph d s than any other place on the planet and business is booming obama is trying to rebuild it obama has done more for nuclear weapons than anybody since ronald reagan in one thousand nine hundred three all my friends have studied the fine print in the money we know this and by the way they're dumping radioactive waste off the mountain down on top of the pueblos indigenous people the land is poison i where i live which is in view of los alamos i can't drink the water from the well i can't my i have a cat she drinks water she will die because it has stuff in it so i went there deliberately you know and i thought this is what gandhi would do the poorest place in nuclear weapons and i was pastor of fort five churches there we've been organizing excuse me and you'll peaceful vigils at los alamos we're going to have another one coming up this august to commemorate hershel what do you do how do you engage in nonviolence in such a place and and i was there they had been we think only two or three demonstrations in los alamos ever who cares about los alamos and yet business is booming they are continuing to build new nuclear weapons their bombs trying to build this new state of the our petunia factory so evil anyway our little church group got out the bible i mean this would be like a great sitcom if it words this is serious and we were like the marx brothers or seinfeld trying to take nuclear weapons you know that's the peace movement in mind but we have to small medium and large five hundred bags of ashes i mean how do you do this so we did it and we gathered we had a prayer we walked like that hot and dr king silently took over the entire town and synchronized their watches five hundred people and right at the moment a beautiful saturday afternoon on the sixtieth anniversary of roshan we poured ashes all over the streets of los alamos we put on the sackcloth three thousand year old form of protest and we sat down for thirty minutes of strict silence as i instructed everybody we're trying to do this and  war nuclear weapons and beg the god of peace for the gift of disarmament and the thirty minutes we came back to the pond with actually building it you know the you know the fat boy you know the  actual bomb from barrage from this actual place and i've been to a thousand demonstrations the only one of my whole life every single person came back crying we were all  overwhelmed because we didn't go in pointing their fingers this isn't doing any good or yelling or screaming we actually need these people they're the only ones who know how to dismantle the dart but we're taking responsibility too and gandhi talked about the importance of a symbol ashes hiroshima anyway everybody was very powerfully moved and we've been doing that every year since then and it was big news and i've gotten in a lot of trouble lots of trouble because of all those good people twenty thousand people most of them are christians and they spend their lives building nuclear weapons just serving death and we all have to stand up some way and say no to this and that's where that's why i went to new mexico and why i'm still involved there and that's just what i want to my what i personally have been doing for peace you know besides the national and international speaking and writing she say that you believe there's thousands warheads as albuquerque airport right in you can just flew there this morning it's very hard to see it it takes years of training and you would know and he wouldn't even know it you know how they did it because it's a desert just on the edge of albuquerque i've not sure of the number nobody really knows it could be one thousand two hundred or twenty five hundred or twenty eight hundred nuclear warheads and there are these little like when they bring them you know the heart of the nuclear bomb that's a bad way to phrase it but the core pit of the nuclear bomb down from which is what is made up of the soldiers they bring that to drive that through santa fe and they say they still do covers its tracks you know it's everywhere death of this death as a methodology is just like so durable now that it's normal to have thousands of nuclear weapons at the albuquerque airport or might i suggest here in seattle you know like the end of the world is around here this is our humanity that's questions at stake here our spiritual lives you know that's why everybody has to stand up and the only way to do that is to be really centered in peace because it's so hard and it's so disturbing to see you can move into despair or numbness or give up being involved in the movement because there's so little hope though there is hope we have a power we're not powerless we can change things if we want to do we want to say let's do it you've said a couple times that the different actions you've taken have got new and big trouble who do they get you in big trouble from everybody i've banned from pretty much every military base in the united states i think that includes bangor you know i was there in the eighty's pretty sure i was arrested i can't even remember now i've been arrested but eighty and ninety times  so that it meant my first arrest at the pentagon to my last arrest was at creech air force base in nevada which is the headquarters of the drones and we were the first group to protest the drones but literally up and arrested all over the country you know in nonviolent peaceful civil disobedience and then you know studying gandhi said you try everything you can to work for peace and justice everything legal you speak you wri organize you preach you pray you fast you vigil we've done all of that i've been doing it in the face my thirty of the book and i'm still speaking but he says at some point you have to cross the line which legalizes mass three when we walked on to the scene where johnson air force base and goldsboro north carolina were the largest air force base in the country isn't one thousand nine hundred three they had the f fifteen e which carries nuclear bombs they were  the woods in the back it was a sign that said trespassers will be shot on sight and we kept walking and we walked through the woods and then we came on the air force base was like three seattle airports with tens of thousands of soldiers at four in the morning seventy five of these massive fighter bombers we walked up to one of each pulled out a hammer and i went up to the side and hammered once i'm a fighter bomber and for that act i faced twenty years in prison i did a year of almost a year well like ten months in jail and then a couple years under house arrest i can never vote again and i can't travel to several countries i'm highly monitored by the government changed since one thousand nine hundred three in terms of the surveillance and the monitoring and what's happening to the government and i meant and i'm talking about you talking about the effects that i feel i really feel that julian says the united states is moving into a global to tallaght hairiness i'm so this is he's trying to use language to talk about what's happened to our country as we've left democracy i mean that we have these tens of thousands of nuclear weapons for example can survey every human being on the planet they're monitoring all of us is no more privacy we're losing our civil liberties and so this is beyond empire global to tell a tarion is when i keep talking about getting involved in the moon because w like nazi germany in the one nine hundred twenty s or in the early thirty's right now we're going to wake up one day and some of us will be carted off to prison for life you know the leaders and and we lost all our liberties things can move fast if things happen you know and with count kind of stuff it climate change and the loss of fossil fuels you know things are going to change in this world we need movements i keep saying to resist and to and to you know defend our rights and the rights of our sisters and brothers around the world you know but as that action though i always joke i said to the judge you know when i hammered on the nuclear fight or bob or your daughter i said i'm trying to and then i said it in your heart i'm just trying to follow jesus who said love your enemies don't know com and i was joking that's the actual translation from the original greek and i didn't go over very well with the judge but you see my point but what if we actually did these great things and you know part of it since we had talked earlier about me knowing the six jesuits killed in el salvador he gave their lives i mean they were talking about it with me all the time it's a matter of time for they're go killed and i was scared to death being around them there's nothing to describe what these heroic people were like and then i came and did this action with philip barack and i thought wow maybe he can engage in that same kind of heroic faith is beyond courage it's not courage it's faith and giving your life i think letting the chips fall this is the way gandhi talk and how do what do we do with nuclear weapons somehow we have engage the law which legalizes them get into the courts and that's what ground zero has tried to do for decades here at bangor was so important we have to keep that movement go in and speaking out in civil disobedience peacefully prayerfully violently and say no and what will happen is one day will wake up and there will be no more nuclear weapons if people continue to build this movement they'll just quietly be outlawed but it's this long haul quiet suffering of us involved now which history will know about this is how change happens these very interesting questions i don't know how i got into all that but thanks for listening right so how do you overcome your right maybe you don't have it but how do you come your fear in these situations and you know translate that for for the average person that's going to stick their neck out we had a local treasure here sister jackie hudson oh yeah i used to repeat the line that we need to learn take one step out of our comfort zone and she's great well a couple of things it's very important no i'm coming as a christian and i'm looking at this question of activism and movement building and working for justice and peace through the eyes of martin luther king mama gandhi and the berrigan star if he day and all these great people to understand jesus well the one thing you read so i recommend if mind is like gandhi and dr king what's the one thing he says more than anything else fifteen times do not be afraid so you have to start working out of that what i was a kid we were professing love these are deep questions you know maybe indifference could be the opposite of love but the scriptures speak of fear and so how do you do that practice practice practice you need friends you need to pray and do your inner work meditation what are you afraid of and i mean you take small steps you don't can't go right into the johnson air force base real salvador it's there's thousand small steps i mean i'm still making small steps and i'm not saying i'm not afraid i'm i'm saying i'm working out and that's good i don't want to spend my life in fear nor do i want to spend it in anger or hatred or bitterness or despair that's no good i'm watching archbishop tutu having a good time and he's changing the world that's what i want and i've seen that with daniel berrigan and you know forgive me for being a name dropper to joan baez dr king was the funniest person she ever knew you don't think of martin luther king as a funny guy but it makes sense to me with the great activists they're full of life and humor and they're not afraid could he ever look afraid well he dealt with it early on and he kept  had friends and support and he kept confronting his fears so you know so i do a lot of journaling and he used to especially on this question of fear what am i afr of i'm afraid of flying i'm afraid of public speaking i picked the rug career choice because i've given a million speeches but you know ok so i don't let it stop me i don't like to get arrested it's always scary i don't like go into jail last i was in jail in las vegas was really scary i mean you can if i told you what it was like you wouldn't believe it well there's really no way to describe what it's like i'm afraid of death and ultimately our fears death and  ok and live in faith and let god love me and did my work and receive the gift of peace and walk with my friends the bear against and others on to these bases you fear the lessons it goes down but you have to be doing these things and you follow that this is the spiritual question how deep do you want to go in love compassion and peace and nonviolence you could persecute you could arrest me you could kill me but we're all going to a do world of violence this is going to went out so for me it's really about a faith question and it's a spiritual practice these are beautiful ways this is just how i do it and i see that the great christian teachers i just let him retreat with buddhists joan halifax and santa fe they would put it different language but she work your relationships to all humanity and all creatures in creation and third being part of the movie at the same time you can't pick one of the us and we often think well anyway in addition to your latest book nonviolent life what other resources do you recommend people check out websites for the campaign on violence right thank you so campaign violence dot org  e n e dot org my website is john deere dot org j o h n d e a dot org and i really appreciate if people got my book the nonviolent life which is on amazon and my other books as well in general i always urge people to read gandhi and dr king and there's these thousands of books that have come out the last twenty years not violence how it works nonviolent victories throughout history especially the last century even when it was used against the nazis to all these revolutions up to what happened in liberia a few years ago i think the greatest peacemakers lemak of bowie he won the nobel prize a few years ago you know charles taylor killed two hundred thousand people and she just called all the women to sit down of the streets and say that's it we've had enough so he left let me this works if you could organize it it would be to study it people are used around the world study the movements done violence our little group has a great program called engage or you can buy the training manual you can use it for yourself you can have it group use it for a weekend or it's broken down into ten sessions like over semester i think it's the best thing on training yourself and others and up on it's but there's lots of great resources and you have to be doing your studying and you have to be teaching and organizing things like that and are those resources available through your website yeah and through patchy banning campaign of violence all right well with that we are fortunately out of time i want to thank you very much for spending time with us today thanks for having me mike all the best to you and everybody listening