THE LAST WORD
Berrigan, Philip
THE LAST WORD Philip Berrigan What Keeps Me Going BOB GALE On April 3, 1988-Easter Sunday-we enacted Isaiah's prophecy of swords into plowshares for the twenty-fifth time. Four of us—Sister...
...I have friends from Western Europe and Canada and Central America—from every corner of the globe—who will never turn their backs on the victims of our Government's acute psychopathology...
...I have a community of noble friends at Jonah House, most of them veterans of Plowshares actions—people utterly serious about achieving justice, peace, and a world safe for children...
...tion's deranged Maritime Strategy—the Navy's jealous slice of Counterforce (first-strike) policy...
...The theory is that this provides the insurance for a disarming first strike by the United States, protecting us from Soviet nuclear retaliation...
...They remind me that we must first stop the killing, and that everything hopeful and human depends on that...
...The Iowa and 190 other U.S...
...I have Dan Berrigan as my brother and Elizabeth McAlister as my wife—better human beings and resisters than I am...
...While waiting for the circumstances that will bring the Maritime Strategy into play, America's armadas practice war games in the proximity of Soviet coasts and bases, engaging in a juvenile, criminal game of nuclear chicken...
...Each year, these displays of "national security" result in scores of collisions, warnings, and even nuclear alerts...
...Well, I have the Word of God, a standard against which to measure my own pettiness and fraud...
...On May 19, we were convicted of trespassing...
...The Maritime Strategy requires the Navy, in times of international crisis, to engage and destroy its Soviet counterpart...
...warships deploy 37 per cent of the American nuclear arsenal under the Reagan AdministraPhilip Berrigan is with the Jonah House peace mission in Baltimore and the Plowshares resistance group...
...In particular, the Maritime Strategy is aimed at disabling the second-strike capability of the Russian submarine fleet...
...On July 26, a Federal magistrate sentenced him to six months' imprisonment on charges stemming from the action described in this article...
...Before we boarded it in Norfolk, it had returned from a tour of gunboat diplomacy in the Persian Gulf...
...They save me from selling out...
...Before that, it was in Central American waters...
...Within three or four minutes, young Marines carrying riot guns had us covered...
...Four of us—Sister Margaret McKenna, Andrew Lawrence, Greg Boertje, and I—slipped away from a tour of the battleship Iowa to disarm two Tomahawk cruise-missile launchers...
...The Navy, with the courts in its sea chest, has done its utmost to trivialize or suffocate what we have done, so that it can continue to hide its madness from the public...
...Our Navy, proud of the Iowa's nine six-teen-inch guns and its missile launchers capable of inflicting 440 Hiroshimas, calls the battleship "The Big Stick...
...I am writing this in a jail at Fredericksburg, Virginia, where we await sentencing...
...They remind me that these hellish weapons separate us from God and from one another...
...Such sober analysts as William Ar-kin and Admiral Eugene Carroll have concluded that nuclear war is more likely to break out at sea than in the Third World...
...People ask me how I keep going after twenty-five years of struggle against death-mongering, including more than five years spent behind bars...
...They save me from Faustian bargains, from taking the system's bribes...
...We put them out of commission, symbolically but really, too, with hammers, bolt-cutters, and blood...
...They remind me that we will survive on this planet as God's people, not as nuclear genocides or suicides...
Vol. 52 • October 1988 • No. 10
