Waging Peace Blog Page – Peaceworkers

David Hartsough interview on TheWorldIsMyCountry.comSeptember 2020

Web Editor — Tue, 22 Sep 2020 09:54:06 +0000

David Hartsough is a Co-Founder of World BEYOND War, a global movement to end war – making it as illegal to kill people outside countries as it is inside! He has been Waging Peace since meeting Martin Luther King at age 15 – from civil-rights sit-ins to blocking nuclear weapons plants at LIvermore Laboratory. He’s blocked trains carrying munitions to fuel Central American wars — enforcing international law as laid out at Nuremberg. He’s Waged Peace in some of the most dangerous and war-torn places on the planet — including the Philippines, Iran, Kosovo and even the Soviet Union. Arthur met him in the early 60’s when David, a fellow Quaker, led the San Francisco to Moscow peace march — to end the cold war before it ended all of us!

At a time when the US and the World are teetering on the bring of tyranny, ecocide and nuclear extinction, we’ll talk to David about how we can inspire the frustrated and angry to gain real power by renouncing violence and waging peace!

David recommended these books: “From Dictatorship to Democracy”, “Waging Nonviolent Struggle”, “Global Security System: An Alternative to War” Also the film “A Force More Powerful” and these websites: ChooseDemocracy.us, WorldBeyondWar.org, Nonviolentpeaceforce.org, ThePoorPeoplesCampaign.org and Divestfromwarmachine.org

David invites you to buy his book “Waging Peace: Global Adventures of a Lifelong Activist”! You can read free chapters in PDF format here.

David Hartsough talk: Waging Peace Around the WorldJanuary 13, 2020

Web Editor — Thu, 16 Jan 2020 11:43:47 +0000

David Hartsough knows how to get in the way! He has used his body to block Navy ships headed for Vietnam and trains loaded with munitions on their way to El Salvador and Nicaragua. He has crossed borders to meet “the enemy” in East Berlin, Castro’s Cuba, and present-day Iran. He has marched with mothers confronting a violent regime in Guatemala and stood with refugees threatened by death squads in the Philippines. In this talk, David explores the power of nonviolence as he has witnessed it unfolding around the world.

Remembering Gene Sharp (1928 – 2018)

Web Editor — Wed, 31 Jan 2018 22:21:15 +0000

Some thoughts about Gene Sharp from David Hartsough, Director of Peaceworkers January 31, 2018

What a mighty contribution Gene Sharp has made to humankind’s understanding of nonviolent struggle and the power of nonviolent action.

Through Gene’s work and writing people around the world have learned about the power and effectiveness of nonviolent struggle and have put that understanding into action and built powerful campaigns and movements to create positive change in their societies including building people power movements to overthrow many dictators and governments which were not listening to their people. We and all future generations are grateful for Gene’s life and all he has contributed. With deep appreciation for a LIFE WELL LIVED!!! Gene Sharp, PRESENTE!!

A couple memories of our work together.

Gene and I were in Moscow at the invitation of the Living Ring after the August attempted coup d’etat against Gorbachev in 1991. Boris Yeltsin and the others opposing the coup were hiding out in the Parliament building, while 10,000 people (the Living Ring) surrounded it for three days and nights nonviolently facing the tanks and soldiers who had order to attack. The Living Ring wanted training in how to nonviolently defeat future attempted coups against the government. Gene gave talks and we led workshops on nonviolent means to defeat further coup d’etats. It was a real privilege to work with Gene who selflessly shared the power of nonviolent struggle with people, groups and movements who wanted to use peaceful methods to challenge oppression and injustice.

In 1997 I took the several zerox copies of the manuscript of Gene’s book, From Dictatorship to Democracy to what was then Yugoslavia to give to students in the nonviolent movement in Kosovo. I left a copy with Women in Black in Belgrade. A copy of that manuscript got into the hands of OTPOR, the student movement in Belgrade. It was translated into Serbian and published there and became the handbook for the courageous nonviolent movement which brought down the dictatorship of Milosovich. Gene, needless to say, was very pleased.

In December 1991 Gene and I were in Moscow at the invitation of the Living Ring after the August attempted coup d’etat against Gorbachev. Boris Yeltsin and the others opposing the coup were hiding out in the Parliament building, while 10,000 people (the Living Ring) nonviolently surrounded it for three days and nights nonviolently facing the tanks and soldiers who had order to attack. The Living Ring wanted training in how to nonviolently defeat future attempted coups against the government. Gene gave talks and we led workshops on nonviolent means to defeat further coup d’etats. It was a real privilege to work with Gene who selflessly shared the power of nonviolent struggle with people, groups and movements who wanted to use peaceful methods to challenge oppression and injustice.

Brief obituary:

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/gene-sharp-advocate-nonviolent-resistance-dies-90-52710416

Talk Nation Radio: Waging Peace With David Hartsough

Web Editor — Wed, 24 Jun 2015 21:32:15 +0000

Interviewed by David Swanson, June, 2015.

WAGING PEACE: Reviewed by Patrick Jordan

Web Editor — Sat, 21 Feb 2015 08:02:35 +0000

If Ammon Hennacy were around to update his 1970 posthumously published The One-Man Revolution in America, he would likely add a chapter on David Hartsough (b. 1941). For nearly sixty years, this Quaker-inspired activist has resisted war, racism, and injustice at home and literally around the world. Hennacy’s book was a veritable Profiles in Courage for America’s unsung peacemakers and radicals. In Waging Peace, David Hartsough brings that tradition up-to-date by forty years, every year of which includes his actions of protest and courage. This autobiographical record begins with David’s Ohio roots. His mother was a first-grade teacher and an activist, his father was a Congergational minister. At age seven, young Hartsough faced down a group of town bullies who had bloodied him. Later, he sought out—and became friends with—their jefe. From there the story moves quickly to Pennsylvania, where the teenage David organizes his first peace protest (at a Nike missile site); then to Virginia, where the angered patron of a segregated lunch counter David and others were attempting to integrate threatens his life; and then on to the White House, Berlin, Red Square, and even the Holy Land, all places where he demonstrates nonviolently for reconciliation. The book concludes half a century later, with his arrest outside a U.S. drone base. I got to know David (a fitting name for one taking on Goliaths), his wife Jan, and their two small children in 1970 at Pendle Hill, the Quaker Study Center outside Philadelphia. He had just completed an arduous, five-year stint as a national organizer for the Friends Committee on National Legislation. Little did I know, until reading Waging Peace, that in that capacity he had organized many of the huge antiwar demonstrations Catholic Workers and others had taken part in during the 1960s; or that before that, his father had worked with Martin Luther King Jr.; that Bayard Rustin had encouraged David to enroll at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and that in 1960, with fellow student Stokely Carmichael, he had led protests for integration in Virginia; or that as part of a 1962 Quaker delegation, he had met with President John F. Kennedy to call for a national policy of “waging peace”: the inspiration for this book’s title. David first came to the attention of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI at age fifteen. In fact, Waging Peace reads like a chronology lifted from his FBI file—a lifetime of protests, arrests, and agency misperceptions concerning David’s actions and motivations. It’s not hard to see why. There are his Quaker summer work camp in Cuba (1959), only months after Castro overthrew the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Batista; David’s experience in Communist Yugoslavia the following summer (he would return again in 1997, attempting to reconcile warring Serbs and Kosovars); his junior year in Germany (1961), auditing classes at East Berlin’s Communist Humboldt University; and summer forays for students he organized to Eastern Bloc countries and the Soviet Union in 1961 and ’62. There, David was nearly arrested in Red Square and threatened with twenty years in prison for demonstrating against nuclear testing. Back in the U.S., he was arrested outside the White House during a similar demonstration. In one instance, he was released from jail in the nick of time to accept his college diploma. Then came alternative service as a conscientious objector, a master’s degree in international studies at Columbia, five rewarding but hectic years in Washington, D.C., with Quaker lobbying groups, and marriage and a family. Here is where the story gets particularly interesting and challenging for someone like me, close to David’s age and with a similar family constellation. For during David’s time at Pendle Hill, he and Jan decided to continue following a path of protest and simple living that would allow them to take risks in the service of peace and to resist paying the federal taxes that go for military expenditures (over 50 percent of the annual discretionary budget). A simple lifestyle, often shared with other like-minded families in community, allowed the Hartsoughs to live below a taxable income for many years. When they did exceed that minimum, they made it difficult for the IRS to extract its blood money. The IRS threatened to confiscate their home, but eventually settled for garnishing a savings account. For over forty years, the Hartsoughs have been able to resist paying war taxes outright; during the same period they have welcomed countless guests, all the while remaining exemplars of sane and caring resistance. Ammon Hennacy would be particularly impressed with the long, consistent list of David Hartsough’s protests, fasts, and jailings. They include organizing several peace flotillas to block free passage of munitions ships during the Viet Nam War; helping form the Abalone Alliance (1977-84) to impede completion of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant; protests and arrests at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (1981-83). These were followed by years of actions against U.S. counterinsurgency policies in Central America, based on David’s own fact-finding trips to the region. He personally accompanied threatened villagers in Chiapas, Mexico, as well as Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. In 1987, he and others pledged to disrupt weapons shipments to Central America from the Concord Naval Weapons Station in California. In one of those protests, his good friend Brian Willson was run down and nearly killed by a munitions train. The callousness of the event, and David’s assistance to Willson, then and for many years after the train had severed Willson’s legs, make for heart-pounding reading. “The war came home in a powerful way that day,” David recounts. “What our government had long been willing to do to poor people and people of color in other parts of the world, it was also willing to do to peaceful protesters in the United States who tried to impede the war effort.” Here, as elsewhere, David reflects on the necessary courage of those who would wage peace. The Concord protest lasted 875 days. David was arrested repeatedly, but, he writes, “an amazing, inspiring community grew up around the Concord tracks,” one that included ex-CIA agents, many war veterans, and even his own aged and infirm parents. David later traveled to the Philippines, the Soviet Union, Iran, and the former Yugoslavia; and served as executive director of the activist group Peaceworkers. In 2001, he co-founded the Nonviolent Peaceforce with Mel Duncan. Its aim is to send teams of nonviolent “soldiers” into war-threatened areas to short-circuit violence and offer peaceful models of resolution. David’s arrest in Kosovo in 1997, under orders from Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, is another heart-palpitating episode in this inspiring chronicle. For David, nonviolent protest for change is never on the cheap. The Nonviolent Peaceforce has now fielded support groups in over forty countries, and has received growing recognition and support from the UN and the European Union. In his final chapters and appendices, David provides further stories of successful nonviolent campaigns and offers resources for those wishing to challenge the status quo. He finds hope in living near his own grandchildren; contact with them, he writes, “renews our commitment to helping build a world in which all children can look forward to a future of peace and justice.” If anything might have further enriched this book, it would have been to include more about the author’s own inner geography: the effect of the storms he experienced on his inner thought and person. Further, the macro geopolitical landscape alluded to here relies almost entirely on a “Democracy Now” point of view. For many readers that will be a high compliment, even an endorsement; for others, it will seem an unnecessary but limiting liability. For those who don’t know David Hartsough in person and have not experienced his hearty, self-deprecating laughter, his purity of spirit, and his hospitality, that might diminish this exemplary autobiography. That would be a loss for our times, so in need of exemplars and “one-man revolutionaries.” Waging Peace is a book that challenges, inspires, and offers hope: all gifts that will endure and even transcend the heroic witness of its remarkable author.

WAGING PEACE: Global Adventures of a Lifelong Activist, by David Hartsough with Joyce Hollyday, PM Press, Oakland, California, 2014 [$20, 243 pp.]. Reviewed by Patrick Jordan.

WAGING PEACE reviewed by Rev. Sharon Delgado

Web Editor — Wed, 28 Jan 2015 13:08:01 +0000

New book relates ‘global adventures of lifelong activist’

by the Rev. Sharon Delgado on January 26, 2015

Waging Peace: Global Adventures of a Lifelong Activist by veteran activist David Hartsough is part autobiography, part recent history, and part call to action. This new book shows how a commitment to active nonviolence can plant the seeds and provide the impetus for significant social transformation.

In 2012 I was arrested with David and Jan Hartsough, Shirley Osgood and Janie Kesselman at a demonstration at Beale Air Force Base, near my home in Northern California. We were the first of many to be arrested at anti-drone protests at Beale, home of the Global Hawk, a surveillance drone that helps identify targets for armed Predator and Reaper drones. Our arrests resulted in a trial that generated significant publicity. Our case and others like it at bases around the country got people discussing and questioning the morality of killing people by remote control. Throughout the trial, David urged our lawyers to focus on the Nuremburg Principles and International Law, even though the judge refused to consider these factors as a defense. We were found “guilty” of trespassing onto base property. Before being sentenced we each gave a statement to the court. David’s complete sentencing statement is an addendum to Waging Peace.. The judge could have sentenced us to six months in jail. After hearing our statements, she acknowledged that we were motivated by “deeply held ethical and religious beliefs,” and consequently sentenced us to just 10 hours of community service. We continue to demonstrate at Beale, however. As David says, “Sustained resistance brings transformation.”

Many adventures

David is Executive Director of Peaceworkers, based in San Francisco, and co-founder with Mel Duncan of the Nonviolent Peaceforce. In Waging Peace, David shares some of his many adventures in active nonviolence, as well as his strong faith and the spiritual beliefs that motivate his actions as a Quaker and as a Christian. This book engages the reader every step of the way.

A man held a knife to his heart and threatened to kill him

Waging Peace is a compelling autobiography that tells the story of a life-threatening encounter David had at age 20 while sitting with African American students at a “whites only” lunch counter in Arlington, Va. A man held a knife to his heart and threatened to kill him. Fortunately for David, he had already incorporated a deep inner commitment to nonviolence, and was able to respond in a way that diffused the anger of his would-be killer. As he tells the story of his childhood, David explains what brought him to this life-threatening event, how he handled the situation. He describes how the seeds of peace were sown by his remarkable parents, how he came to understand what Jesus meant when he said to love your enemies, how he began early experiments with nonviolence, and how he came to dedicate himself to living a life consistent with his values.

Modern-day history

David’s father was a Congregational minister who worked for the American Friends Service Committee, and his friends and colleagues had a big influence on David, especially the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. By the age of 15, David was organizing demonstrations against nuclear weapons. In addition to being an autobiography, this book is a modern-day history of nonviolent social movements, written from the perspective of a committed activist. As an agent for nonviolent social change, David seems to have always been at the right place at the right time. During the Cold War, David travelled to Russia and organized peace demonstrations there. As the United States and Soviet Union were threatening nuclear war over the divided city of Berlin, David lived in West Berlin just a few blocks from Checkpoint Charlie. He traveled back and forth to East Berlin, learning as much as he could and speaking out against both communist and capitalist propaganda. Ten years later the FBI issued a warrant for his arrest and questioned him about his activities there. David and Jan, his beloved wife and partner in nonviolent action, stopped paying “war taxes” early on. David claimed conscientious-objector status and was an outspoken critic during the Vietnam War.

Committed to the good

David was protesting with his friend Brian Willson on the day that Brian was run over and his legs severed by a train carrying munitions to Central America. David writes about the trauma of that event, but also about how many people continued to block the trains. A short time later his elderly mother and father joined him and others on the tracks. David and Jan traveled in Central American war zones during the 1980s, when U.S. financial support to corrupt regimes and death squads made such travel and life for people who lived there extremely dangerous. He worked in the United States with Cesar Chavez in the struggles for the rights of farmworkers. In the 1990s, David was part of a Fellowship of Reconciliation delegation for peace in Bosnia-Hertzegovnia. He has travelled extensively in his peacemaking work, including to Iran and Palestine. His peacemaking work continues, including through Peaceworkers and the Nonviolent Peaceforce. The book is written not only by an observer in these historic events, but from the perspective of one who is committed to the good: to compassion, justice and peace.

Call to action

In addition to being an autobiography and a first-hand history of social movements,Waging Peace is an inspiring call to action. Every page expresses David’s hope for lasting social transformation based on his faith and his experience. By reading about David’s adventures as a skilled practitioner of active nonviolence in key historical events of our time, the reader gains hope and confidence that significant change is possible. Waging Peace is a “how to” book for transforming our society and the world. It encourages us to start where we are, by learning and practicing nonviolence in all areas of our lives. It includes a wealth of suggestions and resources for would-be activists. This book not only gives practical direction, but also shows us the strong foundation built by others upon which we can stand in solidarity with other people of faith and conscience around the world. After describing some of the astonishing changes that nonviolent action has brought about in recent years in places around the world, David writes: What other spots on our earth are waiting for such stunning change? What corner is beckoning to your heart and spirit? Where is God leading you to invest your life on behalf of a world where all God’s children share the abundance and live as one family in peace and harmony with the earth? David closes Waging Peace with this statement of faith: “Deep in my heart, I do believe, that — together — We Shall Overcome!” You can order signed copies of Waging Peace from Peaceworkers or order from a local bookstore. It is also available on online outlets, such as Cokesbury.com.

Editor’s note: The Rev. Sharon Delgado is a United Methodist member of the California-Nevada Annual Conference. You can read more about her atsharondelgado.org/.

Giants on the Earth: A Review of Waging Peace by David Hartsough

Web Editor — Sat, 17 Jan 2015 19:31:27 +0000

By Winslow Myers WorldBeyondWar.org There were giants on the earth in those days . . . (Genesis 6:4) The fear that we citizens of the United States have been seduced into since 9/11 spreads across our benighted nation like a fog, inhibiting all policy alternatives not based in blind vengefulness. Special are those who have the spiritual clear-sightedness and persistence to make people-oriented global connections that pierce the fog of fear with the light of visionary possibility. One such giant is David Hartsough, whose vivid, even hair-raising, memoir of a lifetime of peace activism, Waging Peace: Global Adventures of a Lifelong Activist, has just been published by PM press. It ought to be required reading for every U.S. citizen befogged by the crude polarization between Islamic extremism and the equally violent, ineffective, but seemingly endless Western military reaction it has elicited. It hardly seems possible that Hartsough has been able to crowd into one lifetime all his deeds of creative nonviolence. He was there with Martin Luther King in the late fifties in the South. He was there when a train loaded with bullets and bombs on their way to arm right-wing death squads in Central America severed the leg of his friend Brian Willson in California. His initiatives of support for nonviolent resistance movements span both decades and continents, from efforts to get medical supplies to the North Vietnamese, to reconciliation among Israelis and Palestinians, to support for Russian dissidents as the Soviet Union was breaking up, to the resistance to Marcos in the Philippines, and on and on. Hartsough’s book thus becomes a remarkably comprehensive alternative history to set against “the official story” of America’s—and many other nations’—often brutal and misguided reliance upon military intervention. David Hartsough gave himself a head start by getting born into the right family. As a boy he heard his minister father preach the gospel of loving your enemies and almost immediately got a chance to try it out when bullies pelted him with icy snowballs. It worked, and Hartsough never looked back. Having determined to do integration in reverse by attending the predominantly black Howard University, he soon found himself sitting in with courageous African-American students at segregated restaurants in Virginia. A white man crazed with hate threatened him with a knife. Hartsough spoke to him so gently that the man was “disarmed” by the unexpected shock of a loving response and retreated open-mouthed and speechless. Sixty years of innumerable protests, witnesses, and organizing efforts later, Hartsough is still at it as he helps to begin a new global movement to end war on the planet, called “World Beyond War.” While his book is a genuinely personal memoir that records moments of doubt, despair, fear of getting shot, and occasional triumph, even more it is a testament to the worldwide nonviolent movement that still flies completely under the radar of American media. Living in a bubble of propaganda, we do not realize how intrusive the bases of our far-flung empire are felt to be. We do not feel how many millions worldwide regard the U.S. as an occupying force with negative overall effects upon their own security. Even more importantly, we remain insufficiently aware how often nonviolence has been used around the world to bring about positive change where it appeared unlikely to occur without major bloodshed. The U.S. turns to military force reflexively to ”solve” problems, and so it has been difficult indeed, as we are seeing in our ham-handed response to ISIS and the chaos in Syria, for us to learn lessons that go all the way back to the moral disaster of Vietnam. We have not registered how sick of the madness of war the world really is. Now academic studies are starting to back up with hard statistical evidence the proposition that nonviolent tactics are more effective than militarism for overthrowing dictators and reconciling opposing ethnic or religious groups. Coincidentally, the book I read just before Waging Peace was its perfect complement: a biography of Allen Dulles, first director of the CIA, and his brother John Foster Dulles, longtime Secretary of State. The Dulles book goes a long way toward explaining the hidden motives of the military-industrial-corporate behemoth which Hartsough has spent his life lovingly but persistently confronting—truly a moral giant named David against a Goliath of clandestine militarism that props up narrow business interests at the expense of the human rights of millions. Always this David has kept in his heart one overarching principle, that we are one human family and no one nation’s children are worth more than any other’s. Hartsough’s tales of persistence in the face of hopeless odds remind us not to yield to despair, cynicism, fear mongering or enemy posing, all temptations when political blame is the currency of the day. Hartsough is a living exemplar of the one force that is more powerful than extremist hate, reactive fear, and weapons, including nuclear bombs—the human capacity to be harmless, helpful and kind even to supposed adversaries. If—let us say optimistically when—peace goes mainstream and deluded pretentions to empire are no longer seen as the royal road to security, when we wake up to the hollowness of our selfishness and exceptionalism, when we begin to relate to other nations as opportunities to share good will and resources rather than to bomb, it will be largely because of the tireless efforts of insufficiently heralded giants like David Hartsough. Winslow Myers, the author of Living Beyond War: A Citizen’s Guide, serves on the Advisory Board of the War Prevention Initiative and writes for Peacevoice.

Book Review: Waging Peace

Web Editor — Thu, 13 Nov 2014 03:13:36 +0000

The ordinary, extraordinary life of David Hartsough
Book Review by Ken Butigan — November 12, 2014 (from https://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/ordinary-extraordinary-life/) Years ago, my friend Anne Symens-Bucher would regularly punctuate our organizing meetings with a wistful cry, “I just want to live an ordinary life!” Anne ate, drank and slept activism over the decade she headed up the Nevada Desert Experience, a long-term campaign to end nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site. After a grueling conference call, a mountainous fundraising mailing, or days spent at the edge of the sprawling test site in 100-degree weather, she and I would take a deep breath and wonder aloud how we could live the ordinary, nonviolent life without running ourselves into the ground. What we didn’t mean was: “How do we hold on to our radical ideals but also retreat into a middle-class cocoon?” No, it was something like: “How can we stay the course but not give up doing all the ordinary things that everyone else usually does in this one-and-only life?” Somewhere in this question was the desire to not let who we are — in our plain old, down-to-earth ordinariness — get swallowed up by the blurring glare of the 24/7 activist fast lane. These ruminations came back to me as I plunged into the pages of David Hartsough’s new memoir, “Waging Peace: Global Adventures of a Lifelong Activist.” David has been a friend for 30 years, and over that time I’ve rarely seen him pass up a chance to jump into the latest fray with both feet — something he’d been doing long before we met, as his book attests. For nearly six decades he’s been organizing for nonviolent change — with virtually every campaign, eventually getting tangled up with one risky nonviolent action after another. Therefore one might be tempted to surmise that David is yet another frantic activist on the perennial edge of burnout. Just reading his book, with its relentless kaleidoscope of civil resistance on many continents, can be dizzying — what must it have been like to live it? If anyone would qualify for not living the ordinary life, it would seem to be David Hartsough. As I finished his 250-page account, however, I drew a much different conclusion. I found myself thinking that maybe David has figured it out — maybe he’s been living the ordinary life all along. Which is not to downplay the Technicolor drama of his journey. Since meeting Martin Luther King, Jr. as a teenager in the mid-1950s, David has been actively part of many key nonviolent movements over the last half-century: the civil rights movement, the anti-nuclear testing movement, the movement to end the Vietnam War, the U.S. Central America peace movement, the anti-apartheid movement, and the movements to end the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In recent years he has helped found the Nonviolent Peaceforce and a new global venture to end armed conflict, World Beyond War. This book is jammed with powerful stories from these efforts — from facing down with nonviolent love a knife-wielding racist during an eventually successful campaign to desegregate a lunch-counter in Arlington, Va., in 1960, to paddling canoes into the way of a U.S. military ship bound for Vietnam; from meeting with President John Kennedy to urging him to spark a “peace race” with the Soviet Union, to being threatened with arrest in Red Square in Moscow for calling for nuclear disarmament there; from confronting the death squad culture in Central America and the Philippines to watching his good friend, Vietnam veteran Brian Willson, get mowed down by a U.S. Navy munitions train. These are just a few of innumerable vignettes of David’s peacemaking around the world. But there is much more to David’s life story than these intense scenes of nonviolent conflict. Much of this book recounts how the foundations of his career as an agent of nonviolent change were laid, slowly and organically. His decision to give his life to peacemaking was shaped by the inspiration of his parents, who were both actively involved in building a better world, and by a series of experiences in which he witnessed the impact of violence and injustice, but also at the same time met a series of remarkable organizers who were not content to simply wring their hands at such destruction, including the likes of civil rights movement luminaries Bayard Rustin and Ralph Abernathy. Most powerful of all, David set out on a series of illuminating explorations, with long stints in the Soviet Union, Cuba and a then-divided Germany. Everywhere he met people who turned out to be complicated, beautiful and often peace-loving human beings. His nonviolence — and resistance to war — was strengthened by seeing for himself the people his own government deemed “the enemy.” In Berlin — a city split between the East and West after World War II, but not yet separated by the wall the Soviets would build — he took classes on both sides of the divide and experienced up close what the “us” versus “them” of violence feels like: “In the mornings [at the university in the East] I would challenge the Communist propaganda and be labeled a ‘capitalist war-monger,’” he writes. “In the afternoons, at the university in the West, when I challenged their propaganda I was called a ‘Communist conspirator.’ I thought I must be doing something right if neither side appreciated my questions! I didn’t consider myself any of these things: capitalist, war-monger, Communist, conspirator.” Instead, he was a nonviolent activist challenging the confining labels that are used to foment the separations that fuel and legitimate violence and injustice. David has rooted his lifelong pilgrimage of peace in a simple conviction: that all life is precious. He has helped spark and build one campaign after another when that preciousness is forgotten or undermined. At the same time, he’s recognized that such a nonviolent life extends to himself. This is where the ordinary life comes in. David and his spouse Jan live a simple life interweaving family time (including with their children and grandchildren, who live downstairs from them) with building a better world. They are activists, but they rarely let organizing keep them from taking a hike in the mountains or a walk along the seashore. They are regulars at the local Quaker meeting. For decades they have been sharing their home with countless friends, who are often invited to the songfests that they frequently organize in their living room. When I stay with them in San Francisco, there is always a bike ride through Golden Gate Park to be had or time to be spent at a garden a few blocks away with its dazzling profusion of azaleas. Rather than giving short shrift to the fullness of life, David has found a way to live, as we say today, holistically. David’s life qualifies as “ordinary,” though, not only because it knits together many dimensions of everyday realities, but because it has dissolved the artificial boundary between “activism” and “non-activism.” All of life is an opportunity to celebrate and defend its preciousness, and this impulse gets worked out seamlessly in both watering the plants and getting carted off to a police van after engaging in nonviolent resistance at a nuclear weapons laboratory. Nonviolent action is a seamless part of the rhythm of life. It is a crucial part of the ordinary life. Once enough of us see this and fold it into the rest of our life, its ordinariness will become even more evident than it is now. This was Gandhi’s feeling — nonviolence and nonviolent resistance is a normal part of being human — and David has taken this assumption up in a clear and thoughtful way. Anne Symens-Bucher reports that she’s increasingly living the ordinary life — she’s developed a powerful example of it called Canticle Farm in Oakland, Calif. And I feel I’m getting closer to it day by day. But if you want to read a page-turner that reveals how one person has been doing it for the last 50 years, get a copy of David Hartsough’s new autobiography, Waging Peace.