Survival: Because he has to

John Trudell is known by many, though perhaps we tend to be old politicos. He is a man I first heard 31 years ago at the Survival Gathering in the summer of 1980 in the Black Hills, Paha Sapa to his people, the Santee Sioux. We heard many speeches and much music over several days in July, none quite so powerful as his talk. He was in the zone, so to speak.

But there were more than 11,000 of us--ranchers, Native Americans, hippies--at the Survival Gathering. Just a couple hundred of us attended the Hempsted concert last evening. I suppose everyone else was at the Blues Fest, a great place to be, but I was so grateful for a chance to first hear Trudell and then to shake his hand and talk to him later as he mingled a bit before vanishing.

In Trudell's story, echoes of what we see now in China--brutality and threats so prompt and devastating that they are meant to silence dissidents--made an already complex man even more of a mystic enigma. The day after he led a protest on the steps of the FBI in Washington DC, including burning an American flag, arsonists torched the home of his in-laws, on the reservation in Nevada, where they, Trudell's wife Tina, and John Trudell's and Tina's three children were sleeping. All but Trudell's father-in-law burned to death. The children were Ricarda Star, 5, Sunshine Karma, 3, and Eli Changin Sun, 1.

I'm sure I've missed some of what Trudell has advocated, but I've never heard him advocate violence. His actions have been nonviolent, including his contempt of court convictions for refusing to leave the flawed kangaroo court trial of Leonard Peltier and including his participation and arrest in the campaign to stop the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant--one of those we now finally worry about as just as vulnerable as Fukushima ever was.

So my then-nine-year-old son and I heard Trudell the next year, in 1980, and his powerful talk about our responsibilities as humans in Creation has stayed with me ever since. He was so exasperated by the end of his talk he paused and simply said, "The problem is, we gotta straighten up."

We are still thinking about it, John.

Hi from a domestic terrorist

So, it turns out, the FBI's forever investigation of us, the Catholic Workers, is just ticketyboo with the Department of Justice and its Office of Inspector General, which just issued a report on the FBI's actions.

I rarely read government reports and laugh out loud, but this one bonked me square in the funnybone in a few places.

My friends at Jonah House are still being targeted and harassed by the FBI under the rubric of RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. Peace is a real racket, at least according to the FBI and DoJ.

We Catholic Workers are labeled domestic terrorists. Yes, we are pacifists. But throwing your blood on a nuclear bomb ratchets up your rep several notches with the Hooverville crew. Quite literally, they called throwing blood on a military facility an act of domestic terrorism, and the DoJ OIG agreed. Just think if the Catholic Worker hockey team ever played the FBI and our Canadian lads bodychecked an agent. They would probably go nuclear in response to international terrorism and the US DoJ would back'em up.

My favorite is that they are still calling us communists. That misses the old error by a whole millennium, for goshsakes. We laughed at those who called us that in the 70s and 80s, sneered at those who still did in the 90s, since the Cold War was reported to have wrapped up, and only the FBI and DoJ could be so mired in the past that they continue this bizarre goofiness.

There is also the weariness of such an ahistorical view that the FBI claims it doesn't investigate "lawful civil disobedience." Is this Freudian notice that our legal arguments have been now validated by the FBI? Or is this just inept linguistic comprehension? I suspect the latter. What is lawful law breaking? We think we know, but the FBI hasn't seemed inclined to agree with us.

My only personal regret is that the activities I have been involved in didn't rise to the level of generating investigation, at least not any worth mentioning. I will have to do better.