This last Spring I was fortunate to speak to Berkeley NOW and at a conference at Claremont about being an activist. Usually there are one or two in the room who are going to know the terrible pain and the intoxicating bliss of being an activist. I suppose it is scientific; maybe something about attractors and the constant of change. I have lots of information about such a life; ethics, responsibilities and, more recently, I can tell you ~ it lasts a lifetime.
Sure, it was born of books and news; Gandhi, King, Fonda, Chavez. My first brush with activists was the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968 but my real love affair was 1982 when The Grassroots Group of Second Class Citizens chained themselves to block the Illinois Senate doors to demonstrate that women are in chains. 
Center right is Mary Lee Sargent. After the women spent several days chained on the third floor of the state capitol, security men cut their chains with bolt cutters, carried the women out and put them in the buildings' industrial dumpsters. At another point in the month leading up to the defeat of the ERA, these women sat in front of the Speaker's door, to protest the fact that he would not bring the vote to the floor lifting the requirement of a super majority for passage (which would have handily passed the ERA). 
At that time Mary Lee was a Professor of History and Women's Studies at Parkland College. The women sitting with her were teachers, a waitress, a motel maid, students and other life long activists. As I sat with the fasters, which was exactly the right place for me, I wanted to be with them ~ they were the ones who faced true danger, trial and jail. They were the ones who were practicing Civil Disobedience.
Mary Lee is standing here on the left.
In the afterward of my book, the Hungry Heart, I explain that the outcome of the event is really incidental to what is happening to the activists; the action is changing them forever. Every time an activist does what they were born to do, they grow exponentially. Their interior landscape unfurls and they know that they are home.
This week, some of the most wonderful people at UC Berkeley have been fasting to end the involvement of the UC systems with nukes ~ NO MORE NUKES IN OUR NAME HUNGER STRIKE. The world better beware; there are activists growing with every moment they sit and fast and wait. And most particularly I want them to know that this is not a passing fling with change; this is a lifetime of intoxication.
Last week Mary Lee and a few friends entered the office of Senator John Sununu, dropped hundreds of shoes representing the fallen in Iraq and refused to move. 
She is the gorgeous tall one with white hair. She is the one who is an ACTIVIST. She was shackled and spent the night in the local jail.
There are, in the course of a lifetime, people we wish we knew. You might hear of them, read about them, see them on TV but I am lucky beyond the wide blue sky as I am friends with my hero, Mary Lee.
I've come back again to read this beautiful, inspiring post.
Your prose reads like a melody of empowerment, Zoe.
It is wonderful, and I am grateful.
Posted by: Melissa | May 23, 2007 at 10:25 PM