beyond sense,” Jim wrote in the first issue of the Ground Zero newspaper, “ the goal of the Trident campaign is not to stop the Trident submarine and missile system. Its purpose is to change ourselves — all of us — so that there will no longer be anyone left to run the submarine or fire the missile.” In September 1978 the Douglasses moved from British Columbia to their small home next to the railroad gate to the base, because they felt it was an act of violence to plan and execute actions and leave afterwards while local citizens remained economically, personally, and socially dependent on the U.S. Navy. Both have worked full time at Ground Zero since then. There are two major elements to the Trident campaign. The most visible has been the various acts of resistance against the Trident. This resistance has taken the form of crossing the fence into the base (for such purposes as planting a garden or having a picnic), cutting the fence, and this past summer, the Peace Blockade. Jim once walked to the very heart of the base, the Strategic Weapons Facility Pacific, where the nuclear warheads are stored, and prayed there until he was arrested and charged with trespassing, an offense for which he served two six-month sentences in 1980 and 1981. Both Shelley and Jim served time in 1976 and 1977 on other trespassing charges. But resistance is only half of the campaign and, in the Douglasses’ eyes, perhaps the less significant half. The Douglasses emphasize that the resistance is only to the system, to what they call “ the Holocaust machine,” and never to the people on the other side of the fence or on the submarine. “ There would be no Trident campaign,” Jim stresses, “ if it wasn’t for a person who has more responsibility for the missile system than any of those people on the submarine, or who work on the base. I’m talking about Robert Aldridge, who came to the conclusion that it was a first strike system and, together with Janet Aldridge and their children, resigned from that system. Every person in the submarine or on the base is right now like the Aldridges before they made that decision.” The other major element of the Trident campaign is a concerted effort at having a relationship, a dialogue, with the people on the other side of the fence, “who aren’t really separate from us,” Jim says, “ in terms of being dependent on and complicit with a military system.” In the Douglasses’ eyes, both these elements must go on simultaneously in all actions: the resistance to the machine and the respect, dialogue, and (they emphasize this word) love for the people. The central activity designed to facilitate dialogue is a four-year-old practice of distributing a weekly leaflet as the approximately 5,000 workers and base personnel stream onto the base. The leaflets they distribute are not didactic. “ In writing the leaflets we have felt that humor is often more to the point than righteousness, and openness to dialogue more helpful than lectures.” Leafletters have been arrested a number of times on charges ranging from “ obstructing traffic” to “ unauthorized entry of the base,” most of which have not stood up in court. When the new gate was built, connected to the new freeway through rural Kitsap County, it was recessed many yards onto federal land; cars entering at this gate now pass leafletting positions at 40 miles per hour. “ It would seem,” says Jim, who speaks in a quiet but gently deliberate voice, “ that the navy is worried there might be some power in what we are saying.” The fruits of the dialogue that Ground Zero seeks to facilitate can be seen in the decisions by a half a dozen or so base workers to resign, and in the visions that the Douglasses have of noncooperation with the Trident system on a mass scale. This noncooperation is thought to ultimately be the most powerful tool in the nonviolent resister’s workshop for change, and one that everyone can use. But the acts of resistance must be seen in a slightly different way. These actions are a last resort when other means of settling conflicts have broken down. “ You never know,” Jim says, “ and I don’t think we’re meant to know as human beings, what the effects of our actions are. What we can know is what we should in conscience choose. This necessarily involves both public and private, personal acts of conscience. The two go back and forth in the kind of world we live in.” For the Douglasses the private acts have included lengthy fasts, vigils, meditations, and their continuing attempt to live nonviolently in harmony with the world. It is the public acts which have attracted attention, the acts of civil disobedience such as the Peace Blockade in August, 1982. The idea of blocking the USS Ohio with a flotilla of small boats rose out of discussions at Ground Zero more than two years ago — a last resort as the first Trident submarine came to Bangor to be fitted with Trident I missiles and deployed. The plan of action was for the two larger boats, the Lizard of Woz, from Canada, and the Pacific Peacemaker, from Australia, to tow the smaller boats as close to the Ohio as possible. Then all the boats would spread out in a “ living symbolic plea” to stop the arms race and the development of the Trident. Before the Ohio was anywhere near the Blockaders, the Lizard and Peacemaker were confronted and boarded in legal waters by Coast Guard firing water cannons, and visibly armed with M-16s, hand guns, and machine guns. Thirty-one people were detained, fourteen were charged, including Jim Douglass; all charges were dropped. For the Douglasses the success of an action like the blockade is not judged in terms of whether the submarine was stopped or the Trident was decommissioned; in the short term they knew this probably would not happen. “ The absurdity [of trying to block a Trident submarine with rowboats] tempered any ambitions of success we might have had,” Jim wrote in the issue of Ground Zero published just after the Blockade. To the Douglasses the Blockade was not like a sports game in which one side won and the other lost. Rather, they judge it by the degree to which it was a nonviolent expression of inner truth; “ acting as if truth existed in spite of its futility,” Jim wrote. They view its effectiveness in terms of the power of that truth. “The government knew it had to keep our rowboats away from the Ohio, because in a way it couldn't overcome, our rowboats were more powerful than Trident. People who love life to the point of risking their lives for peace express a spiritual force whose ultimate power is unknown.” This willingness on the part of the blockaders to suffer possible imprisonment, injury, or death is central to the Douglasses’ notion of nonviolent action. At the basis of this is the perception that we live in a culture which freqently resorts to violence and coercive force as a solution to its problems. As the Douglasses see it, anybody who attempts to live a life by different rules than those of the violent status quo must expect the violence sooner or later to be used against them. “ Success,” Gandhi once said, “ is the certain result of the extremest sort of suffering voluntarily undergone.” The teachings of Jesus Christ have also been very influential for the Douglasses, particularly the Sermon on the Mount (“ Love your enemies, do good to them that hate you, bless them that curse you. To him that smiteth thee on one cheek offer also the other; and from him that taketh away thy cloak withhold not thy coat also.” ). Of great importance for the Douglasses as well is the example of redemptive suffering on the cross. The willingness to take the suffering of the world on themselves is but one aspect of a broader and essential nonviolent discipline. “We don’t have much discipline in the peace movement,” Jim observes. “We scatter, and come together at odd times and scatter quickly again. If we want to believe in nonviolence as a way of life and come up with any real alternative we’ve got to learn a discipline which is different from the military but is actually more serious.” The need for discipline is founded on the observation that it is indeed a disciplined system that members of the peace community are up against. Here, the Douglasses are not only thinking of military discipline which prepares people to fight and in this nuclear age to be the kind of men that command Trident submarines or do any of the multitude of steps necessary to launch missiles. They are also thinking of the habits we have all learned as members of our culture: habits of racism and sexism, of focusing on the increase to personal wealth, unthinking selfish responses. If people in the peace movement are going to upset the rhythm of that system, the Douglasses argue, they can’t merely be out of sync with it. They have to have learned a new rhythm, new habits; these won’t come without seeking, won’t be ingrained without practice. It also includes the conscious attempt to live more simply, to scale back their lifestyle so as not to participate in the blind pursuit of happiness through materialism. And still, for the Douglasses the necessary discipline goes even deeper. To start with, it is a discipline of tenacity, of “ hanging in there, not quitting, staying with it.” It is a discipline accepted of oneself, not imposed from outside; one based on the dictates of individual conscience. “ But it can be a harsh discipline,” Shelley emphasizes. “ It’s a discipline of not going where General MacArthur sends you because he told you to. It’s trying to figure out for yourself where you’re going to grow the most, where you’re called to be, or whatever your words for it are. And then doing it, even though it won’t necessarily be pleasant.” “ As Americans, or as Westerners,” Jim adds, “ we have a tremendous emphasis on ego. We use a lot of different terms for that depending on what part of the culture we come from. But whether it means a pretty fat lifestyle or whether it means not being able to commit ourselves to any one thing for more than six months at a time, it ’s there.” So the nonviolent discipline entails learning a selflessness fundamentally different from the military's homogenous selflessness, but a deemphasis of one’s own individuality, all the same. “The key to proceeding,” Jim wrote in his most recent book, “ is to realize radically that it is not so much our lives which count, but rather whatever reality for change can enter the world through them.” “ Nonviolence is a steadfast love, in resistance, of the people behind whatever guns are pointed at us, no matter what they do. It is that force of unremitting love which can overcome anything.” To the Douglasses loving means affirming the good in the other person. This kind of love, as Shelley says, “ is more an act of the will than it is a feeling.” Jim gives as an example, A.J. Muste’s statement that “ If I can’t love Hitler I don’t know how to love.” “ This didn’t mean that he had to like what Hitler was doing, or even have much feeling for the person, Hitler. Loving Hitler meant seeing that the source of the evil was not Hitler, because he was just a person like anybody else. The source of the evil was cooperating with Hitler. In America today militarism isn’t Generals or Ronald Reagan. It is the cooperation of tens of millions of people. So affirming the good of others means both respect and noncooperation, withdrawing power from the system which destroys us all. The way I can love Ronald Reagan most deeply is not only by respecting him as a person, but by helping to take awav his power.” When the USS Ohio came to Bangor on August 12, 1982, it was greeted by a flotilla of small boats full of people determined to place themselves in its path. On October 1, when it slipped down Hood Canal equipped with its 24 Trident I missiles, it passed Termination Point, where a group from Ground Zero was keeping a vigil and fasting. The Navy, of course, had not said when the Ohio was going to leave Bangor. Those keeping the vigil had been fasting for fourteen days. For the Douglasses, fasting is a very deep form of prayer, and one of the deepest acts of conscience a resister can choose. “ Fasting may change our lives,” Jim says, “ in ways that are deeply related to change in the long run. Perhaps only one or two or three people will be affected by a fast outside of ourselves, but they may include Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen [the Seattle Archbishop who recently made headlines by withholding a portion of his federal income tax in protest against nuclear proliferation] or people who would not be moved by a dramatic action that might be much more public.” Shelley and Jim Douglass are far from asserting that what some might see as their obsessively deepening spirituality is a prerequisite for all peace activists, though they and the others at Ground Zero have chosen this as a defining characteristic of their community. “ Just because we’re doing something the way we do,” Shelley points out, “ doesn’t mean that if somebody else wants to work on the Trident Campaign and has a different way of doing it they can’t go ahead. I think i t ’s better to have small groups of people who work together and have somewhat of a common direction and common understandings, rather than to have a large group of people who don’t necessarily have that much in common somehow trying to do everything in a way that pleases everybody. It’s better to work out of the deepest thing you have and realize that not everyone is going to affirm the same thing. And that’s OK.” At its root, we must recall, nonviolence acknowledges the inevitability of differences between people. “ I don’t see how we can have too many things happening,” Shelley adds, “ as long as what’s happening is true. How can you have too much peace work?” ■ Simeon Dreyfuss is a Seattle writer Clinton St. Quarterly 29
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