DATE LINES
Chepesiuk, Ron & Mellish, Xander & Friedrich, Dick & Burkholder, Steve
DATE LINES The Angel of Death Row JACKSON, GEORGIA During the past three years, the Reverend Murphy Davis has mourned the death of several friends. All were death-row inmates executed in Georgia's...
...It offered, instead, to participate in rehearsals for other possible disasters such as the tsunamis (tidal waves) that periodically occur here, floods, or a nuclear accident at nearby Trojan Nuclear Plant or Hanford, the nuclear-waste dump upriver...
...For six years the couple served a church in Atlanta...
...While in graduate school at Emory University, Davis joined with a small group of church leaders in devising a strategy to deal with the ruling...
...I think the consumerism and militarism that permeate our society are the reason for the isolationism...
...The people who say the inmates on death row deserve to be electrocuted are usually people who call themselves Christians and consider themselves religious," Davis explains...
...Others disagree, and they were heard at a recent public hearing...
...Later, she changed her mind in favor of the seminary and in 1975 married Ed Lor-ing, another Presbyterian minister...
...County commissioners met in early February to discuss how to respond, and people from all over Clatsop appeared to denounce what one called "FEMA's folly...
...No drill occurred in Oregon or in neighboring Washington, where a similar mock attack, scheduled to begin on March 30, was nixed by Governor Booth Gardner...
...Then, in 1981, with the support of the Atlanta Presbytery, they and another couple bought an apartment building known as the Open Door Community...
...Meanwhile, a 100-kiloton bomb was to hit just off the coast...
...One of the commissioners suggested that the only response approaching reality would be for all citizens to fall wherever they were at the moment of detonation...
...I think it's totally unnecessary, totally un-American, and totally unconstitutional," said John R. Small, a military veteran and chairman of the Democratic Town Committee...
...In West Germany last summer, the hysteria concerned a so-called flood of immigrants—a flood which turned out, by year's end, to total about 100,000, or 0.16 per cent of the West German population...
...Last year's terrorist hysteria means that France now requires entry visas for all travelers who aren't citizens of the European Community— but not for the Swiss and, apparently, not for me...
...But D-Day came and went...
...They discovered that Atlanta's population includes about 4,000 homeless people for whom the city didn't have one place for round-the-clock care and hospitality...
...I mean, it was always bad, but it's gotten worse...
...No preparedness plans were written or filed, and no one is telling whether, or where, FEMA dropped its make-believe bombs...
...He thinks, and the town attorney agrees, that the proposed ordinance would survive a constitutional challenge...
...It operates in our foreign policy, in our neighborhoods, and in our families...
...I was in the Navy for many years," he said, "and I fought for freedom, and I hate to see freedom taken away from anybody whether I agree with them or not...
...Even the prisoners themselves were isolated and cut off...
...I got to know some of the death-row prisoners and their families," she recalls...
...Dick Friedrich (Dick Friedrich lives in Ocean Park, Washington, just up the coast from Clatsop County...
...During this time, Davis founded the Georgia branch of the Southern Prison Ministry, running it out of a closet-sized office in the front of the church while Loring pastored...
...But in the city of Groton—a separate jurisdiction, the site of the huge Electric Boat shipyard, and a target of demonstrations at submarine launch-ings—the mayor and police chief don't seem to feel the same need...
...But visas not only are required for citizens of Third World nations...
...Located on Ponce de Leon Street, the old structure houses Davis, her husband, their seven-year-old daughter, another married couple, and nineteen otherwise homeless Atlantans...
...The bind that the parents or wives were in, the kind of shunning in the community, especially by the church...
...I sat three seats behind him...
...I was very struck by the reality of their lives...
...FEMA is in charge of preparedness for natural disasters, and commission chair Bob Westerberg said that representatives of the agency had suggested funds for tornado or flood preparedness might be withheld from communities that did not play along with its war game...
...Terrorism, of course, is last year's issue...
...Says Chief Robert D. Laurie, "We have no intentions of enacting anything like that...
...The county "never got word one from FEMA" on these alternatives, says commissioner Roger Berg...
...The only thing we wanted was a little more advance warning...
...Even before the hearing, member Charles R. Kosloskey, a Navy veteran and an employee of Electric Boat, voted against formally considering the proposal...
...Last October, Great Britain, which had long welcomed visitors from anywhere in the Commonwealth, slapped on a visa requirement for people from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Ghana, and Nigeria...
...FEMA responded with a threat to withhold emergency-planning funds it controls, meaning a possible loss of $1 million to the state...
...The Reverend Davis has strong views about why the richest nation on Earth allows hundreds of thousands to live on the streets and puts hundreds to death strapped to electric chairs...
...Most were seeking asylum, a right guaranteed to the politically persecuted under the German constitution...
...Terrorist fear means that police in West Berlin board subway trains as they come over the border, dragging off anyone who looks vaguely Arab for an identity check...
...they are almost impossible to get...
...One summer, Davis enrolled in courses at the University of Denver and got a chance to visit the Colorado State Penitentiary, where she met a group of chicano inmates...
...The Belgians punched his name and passport number into a hand-held computer...
...Chief Falvey continues to maintain he needs some kind of parade ordinance and will consider reframing one with the help of the town attorney...
...When Murphy began her weekly visits, it rekindled a flame of social activism in her life...
...The city, its citizens, and whatever preparations they might have spent their money on, would be vaporized...
...Steve Burkholder (Steve Burkholder, who wrote "The Pentagon in the Ivory Tower" in the June 1981 issue of The Progressive, is a staff writer for The Hartford Cour-ant...
...When they were young, most of them were abused, shunned, and unloved...
...Her concern has earned Murphy the sobriquet "Angel of Death Row...
...Murphy Davis is a Presbyterian minister who has been making weekly visits for the past decade to death-row prisoners at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Center in Jackson, fifty miles from Atlanta...
...FEMA wanted to mount a make-believe nuclear attack from March 3 to March 5 on selected communities in Oregon—and on towns in Washington, Idaho, and Alaska on other dates...
...Travelers who do get them are often required to leave behind deposits of up to $2,500, buy special health insurance,'and show their return tickets...
...So they started a small shelter...
...Society gave up on them a long time ago...
...A mock twenty-kiloton aerial bomb was to be dropped on the bridge linking Astoria with the state of Washington...
...Parade ordinance or no parade ordinance...
...We have lost our capacity to feeb-for other people...
...The Board of Commissioners wrote a letter to Oregon Governor Neil Goldschmidt calling the FEMA proposal "an affront to [the] quality of life" in the county...
...The communities would have been required to show how ready they are to cope with the "emergency" of having an atomic bomb or two dropped on them...
...It was enough to turn some council members around, and the ordinance's future is doubtful...
...Davis isn't bothered by the unpopularity of her compassionate views toward convicted murderers...
...A small, blond American, I had three illegal cartons of cigarettes in my backpack and none of the proper papers for entering France, but I sailed through every border post with a wave and a smile...
...Under the proposed ordinance, those planning a parade, march, ceremony, or "procession of any kind" involving ten or more people would have to notify the police chief no later than fifteen days before the event and apply for a permit—except that picnics of up to fifty people are exempt...
...It was never like this before the terrorist fear," said Cisse, repacking his toilet kit for the fourth time in an afternoon...
...A permit would be denied if the chief found a possible threat to the public safety or other problem—for example, noise "so great as to unreasonably disturb" people living or working nearby...
...The "emergency" would be "unsurvivable so the exercise is useless and a waste of tax dollars," the board noted...
...I decided to go to law school and then find a job that would allow me to work with prisoners...
...This is supposed to be the United States of America...
...Denials could be appealed, and there would be provisions for late applications...
...No Foreigners Needed Here WEST BERLIN Traveling by train from here to Paris, Abdoulaye Cisse, an economics student from Burkina Faso, was searched or interrogated eight times...
...And the council was assured, it could not stop the peace activists...
...Everyday racial discrimination is now the lot of the continent's nonwhite residents...
...The French ripped the gift wrapping off a pastel sketch of his niece and asked other passengers how much they thought it was worth...
...County Blocks Bomb Exercise ASTORIA, OREGON The Bomb was a bomb in Astoria—at least the make-believe one the Federal Government wanted to inflict on this seaside town, seat of Clatsop County, population 32,000...
...I believe the problem has a lot to do with isolationism," she says...
...This time Africans lose, since up to 15 per cent of the populations of some African countries are reported to have been exposed to the AIDS virus...
...Voters declared their county a nuclear-free zone in 1983, by a margin of more than 60 per cent, and it seems the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) decided to test their resolve...
...Read the Gospel and you will see God had a particular fancy for outcasts...
...Ron Chepesiuk (Ron Chepesiuk is a free-lance writer in Rock Hill, South Carolina...
...Heck, if you don't care for your neighbor, you're not going to care for people who are evicted from their homes...
...Ten years ago, tourist visas were largely unknown here, and travelers from the wealthy nations still do not need them in most of Western Europe...
...You never really get used to it...
...The West Germans carefully took apart and examined his Soviet-made camera...
...Torpedoing Free Speech GROTON, CONNECTICUT Here in the "Submarine Capital of the World," a few miles up the Thames River from the Electric Boat Company shipyard where giant Trident and fast-attack submarines are built, peace activists turn out time and again at the base where several of the new subs and their crews make their home...
...Immigration law, long used to maintain a nation's color composition, remains the centerpiece of the new Jim Crow laws...
...The Connecticut Civil Liberties Union argued that several of the proposed ordinance's provisions are constitutionally invalid, and found enough objections to fill a five-page letter...
...Could he have meant "nonwhite...
...This is not supposed to be a police state...
...We shall continue to protest the research, development, manufacture, and glorification of nuclear weapons," said David D. Grainger, a member of the Coalition to Stop Trident...
...The experience really turned me inside out," says Davis...
...Under pressure from Astoria and other communities, Governor Goldschmidt pulled Oregon out of FEMA's scenario...
...The idea, says one of Germany's top politicians, is to limit the number of "conspicuous" refugees coming into Germany...
...But he recently told the Groton town council that he needs the new law so police can prepare for such contingencies as a confrontation between the disarmament activists and the Ku Klux Klan, which has staged counter-demonstrations at some antisubmarine events...
...It means that a fellow American offered me this advice for my arrival in Belgium: "Be careful not to get in a passport line with too many nonwhites in it...
...It was an incredible emotional experience," Davis confides...
...The ordinance is sponsored by Chief Thomas M. Falvey and supported by the town's mayor...
...Violations could be punished by a maximum of thirty days in jail and a $500 fine...
...A monstrous joke" is what Mayor Janet Stevenson of nearby Hammond called FEMA's plan in a letter to the commissioners...
...The immigration guys give them hell, and it takes forever...
...What FEMA ignored, however, was the issue local people focused on: If such bombs were to drop, there would be no emergency, no one to have it for, and no place to have it in...
...Noting that seven of the ten target counties had declared themselves nuclear-free zones, she wondered whether their singling out for the mock attack might not be a form of punishment...
...Lebanese and Sri Lankan Tamils get sent back, since they're judged to be fleeing a civil war, not personal persecution...
...For Third World refugees who are permitted to stay, jobs and assistance are severely restricted...
...It drains every part of you...
...The real tragedy of death row is that the inmates have been on some kind of death row all of their lives," Davis adds...
...Other citizens worried that FEMA was engaged in what they referred to as blackmail...
...1987's mass fear is AIDS...
...Falvey is a veteran of many protests, generally peaceful ones, in which demonstrators met with police beforehand to work out plans and ground rules...
...Applications from Eastern Bloc emigrants are routinely accepted...
...Born in Greenville, North Carolina, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, the thirty-eight-year-old preacher spent a year helping the poor in Brazil before participating in antiwar protests at Mary Baldwin College in Virginia...
...It was just that we would know what to look for...
...Protests at the base and, more recently, at the new Nautilus Memorial and Submarine Force Library and Museum led the police chief of the town of Groton to call, last November, for an ordinance regulating such public gatherings...
...Already, all African students arriving in East Germany must pass HIV tests, and some British embassies in Africa are urging London to erect similar barriers...
...The real reason for the ordinance itself is not so much we've had any trouble with particular groups...
...Xander Mellish (Xander Mellish is a free-lance writer in West Berlin...
...Look at some of the followers He chose: Moses and Paul—murderers—and Mary Magdalene—a hooker...
...FEMA wanted Clatsop County to answer questions about its handling of such problems as emergency communications, radiological defense, fallout shelters, food distribution, and medical services...
...Davis describes her work as a calling which began in the summer of 1976, when the Georgia Supreme Court upheld the state's death-penalty statute...
...The intent," says Falvey, "is to guarantee First and Fourth Amendment rights...
...All were death-row inmates executed in Georgia's electric chair...
...But FEMA didn't seem to be interested...
...I say to them: How dare you profess the faith of Jesus Christ, when it clearly says there is no way to declare a person beyond hope...
Vol. 51 • May 1987 • No. 5
