Peace-activist Berrigan
continues father Philip's mission
By Tim Blangger Of The Morning CallLast month, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved its symbolic Doomsday Clock forward two minutes, so its hands are positioned five minutes to midnight, representing the end of the world.
The editors cited a deteriorating global situation caused by concerns over nuclear weapons and climate change.
''When we were kids, we'd say we wanted to go to the movies. But he'd say, 'It's three minutes to midnight. You want to go the movies?' He was trying to dramatize the fact that the Doomsday Clock was ticking. But it made me think. Maybe I don't want to go to the movies.''
Berrigan, 33, says she is probably more aware of the Doomsday Clock than others of her generation. Her father, an early activist in both the civil rights and Vietnam War movements, ''wanted to point out how present the threat of nuclear weapons was and how concrete our sense of responsibility was.
''Everybody has a part to play and maybe that part for us, as kids, was just to know that this was a menace and a threat and there is such a thing as a Doomsday Clock. That sense of responsibility, that sense of awareness and consciousness was something my parents instilled in me and my brother and my sister.''
Berrigan continues her father's work and will speak on the U.S. war on terrorism and its prison camp at Guantanamo today at area colleges.
On Sunday, at a potluck dinner at the Lehigh Valley Friends Meetinghouse, Hanover Township, Northampton County, she spoke of the Bush administration nuclear policy.
Berrigan was born in the Jonah House, a west Baltimore community center for non-violent protest and resistance. Her childhood seemed normal, but eventually she learned that not all the other kids at school ''lived in a house with 12 other adults who protested and were always going to jail,'' she says. ''Different people were always walking us to school, and no one thought my dad was my dad. They always thought he was my grandfather.''
Once, when she returned to her second-grade class after taking part in a protest for homeless rights in Washington, D.C., Berrigan told her teacher about the experience, which included getting arrested.
''Mrs. Malone said she was proud of me, but said I shouldn't tell my classmates because they only knew people who got arrested for doing crimes, not for doing good. It was one of those 'oh, huh' moments for me. I had never thought being arrested was a bad thing or a traumatic thing,'' Berrigan says.
''It was always presented as what happened when you did something right that the powers that be weren't ready for yet.''
Berrigan is thankful her father didn't witness the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the four-year war that has followed.
''I'm not happy he died at all, but I am sort of relieved he isn't carrying this new round of weight on his shoulders,'' she says. ''He died in 2002 but he saw the buildup to war. The last time he spoke at a big peace demonstration in Washington, D.C., in April of 2002, he was talking about how the war on terrorism was being waged and he was mindful of the drumbeats that were already beginning for the war in Iraq. His message was 'don't get tired, don't give up.'
''After four years of war in Iraq, and more than 3,100 U.S. deaths and, who knows, between 30,000 and 40,000 Iraqi deaths, and a new drumbeat for conflict with Iran, we really need that message.''
A senior research associate for the World Policy Institute's Arms Trade Resource Center, based in New York City, Berrigan also took part in a 70-mile walk from Havana to the edge of the U.S. base at Guatanamo, Cuba, in December 2005.
Berrigan sees connections between the two issues. ''What is happening at Guantanamo, the impunity, the thoughtlessness and the inhumanity, that is writ large across Iraq. The prison policy there, the rounding up of people, what happened at Abu Ghraib, I see them as together, as parts of a whole,'' says Berrigan.
tim.blangger@mcall.com