Building a new peace movement
An interview with Jan Adams and Rebecca Gordon
by Ethan Flad

Jan Adams and Rebecca Gordon are among the founders of War Times (www.war-times.org), a national anti-war tabloid created to help broaden and deepen the fight against the Bush administration's "permanent war against terrorism at home and abroad." War Times is to be "a free, mass-produced, nationally distributed tabloid-sized newspaper" that the editors hope will be "a valuable outreach and education tool for organizers on the ground and an entryway for new people into the peace and justice movement." Until recently, Jan Adams was associate director of the Applied Research Center in Oakland, Calif. She is now an electoral and community-organizing consultant. She was a founder of a statewide political advocacy organization, Californians for Justice, and has been a long-time activist in solidarity with people's struggles in South Africa and Central America. Many years ago she was a member of Catholic Worker communities in New York and San Francisco. Rebecca Gordon, who is now in seminary at Starr King School for the Ministry at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif., has spent many years in political work, including in movements for women's liberation, racial justice and in solidarity with the peoples of Central America. She was a founding editor of Lesbian Contradiction: A Journal of Irreverent Feminism (along with Adams) and is the author of Letters From Nicaragua and Cruel & Usual: How Welfare Reform Punishes Poor People (Applied Research Center, 2001). The two women are life partners.

Ethan Flad: Last fall Jan told me, "There is the need for a new peace movement." So I want to start out by talking about how you define a movement -- and what is the need for a peace movement at this time?

Rebecca Gordon: To start with, there's a difference between a movement and an organizing project. A movement develops its own momentum -- it's inherent in the meaning of the word. It becomes bigger than the people who started it, because it arises in response to particular historical conditions. Unless the seed falls on good ground, you're not going to get a mustard plant. You're not going to get anything. But when the ground is there -- and the ground is very often there both because of obvious injustice and wrong that needs to be corrected and because people perceive there is some possibility that it could be corrected -- it's possible for a movement to take hold. When that happens, what you will see is not just one single set of leaders that are directing something in one particular direction. More what you will see is a lot of organizations and people surfing a wave that is moving in a particular direction. We at War Times all think that, since September 11th, we are in a moment that is both horrific in what it threatens, but also in which it is possible to break through the typical U.S. refusal to look outside the borders of the country. The permanent "war on terrorism" is opening people's eyes in a new way to the activities of the U.S. government around the world. A lot of these activities are the things that Jan and I have spent the last 20 years trying to reveal -- the so-called "low-intensity warfare" in Central America, the U.S. complicity in the apartheid regime in South Africa, the various counter-insurgency projects that the U.S. has been involved in, now in Colombia, for example. These are all things that in some sense haven't really increased, although certainly the war in Afghanistan has stepped things up, but this is a moment when people can become aware of them in a different way.

Jan Adams: A movement is not professional. It is something that is done in volunteer activities, because people feel that they have to. Growth of the non-profit sector in the last 40 years has had great effect on inhibiting what I think of as movement activity. Because it's professionalized the work -- people expect to make a living at it. Certainly, these professionals have better training and have more idea of what they're doing and possibly spin their wheels less, but they're all tied up in strategic planning processes and fulfillment of grant conditions and are not available to respond to realities on the ground in quite the same way as they would if they were doing it as voluntary activity. We won't have major, large-scale movements in this country unless we have that. I think it's possible that the "war on terrorism" has created a situation where a broad mass of people in this country, maybe 3 percent, feel like they have to have a movement.

Rebecca Gordon: But 3 percent is sufficient to really ...

Jan Adams:... do an enormous amount! It becomes possible to build various kinds of infrastructure to support that activism. That's what War Times is -- it's providing the kind of infrastructure that a peace movement would need.

Rebecca Gordon: At the close of the efforts to stop the U.S. war in Vietnam and in subsequent movements, a lot of people made a fetish of information. People thought the problem was: "The mainstream media isn't covering it and if we could just get the information in peoples' hands, then the movement would happen." But although yes, there's a lot that people don't know -- and the knowledge base of the U.S. public has been intentionally eroded, in my lifetime certainly -- the fact is, information does not make a movement. Showing people that there is something that they can do and that there are other people who are doing something -- that's what makes a movement. That's what gives people hope. So War Times would not be a project I was interested in if it were only going to be read by a bunch of lefties, who would say, "Yeah, that's right, I totally agree with that. Ain't it awful." The point is that it tells people, "Oh, I'm not the only one who feels this way, and in Fresno there's been a vigil every Friday night since September 11th saying war is not the answer. We could do something like that here in Peoria."

Ethan Flad: So you can't even think of starting a movement without knowing that there are lots of people out there who are already trying to do something?

Rebecca Gordon: Or another way of saying it is, people try to start movements all the time, and most of the time they don't go anywhere because the moment isn't there. With the civil rights movement there were a whole bunch of things that came together at once that made that movement possible: the end of World War II, the experience of black soldiers overseas and how that compared with what they found when they came back to the U.S., the U.S. government's competition with the Soviet Union for colonial power in Third World countries which made it no longer useful to have this embarrassing problem in the southern U.S. Rosa Parks could have refused to stand up in the bus, but if a bunch of things hadn't also been in place, it wouldn't have made a difference. At the same time, it's also important to remember that Rosa Parks was not just a random woman who decided not to give up her seat because she was tired. She was an organizer who had trained at the Highlander School [in Tennessee], and who conceived of herself as being part of organizing a movement. So it takes those two things. It takes the willingness to go out there and hope that there's going to be a wave to catch. And it takes the wave.

Jan Adams: Movements take off when people go beyond their everyday activities and are prepared to accept some level of personal sacrifice.

Rebecca Gordon: Too often this is overlooked. In addition to fetishizing information, we fetishize certain tactics as being a movement, or as being the content of the movement. So, for example, there's a whole culture now of "getting arrested": the nonviolence training that's the preparation for getting arrested and the whole ritual in the court where you get to make your statement about why you chose to get arrested. But the risk of arrest that black people faced in the South meant something very different and functioned on a different level than what happens when a group of white people negotiate the terms of their arrest.

Ethan Flad: What made the two of you so involved in movement stuff?

Jan Adams: We're different. I've never been particularly ideological. I think I have a vocation to go where the action is. So if something that seems liberatory is moving people, I am drawn to it. As I've become an experienced person, I am then drawn to trying to help it work.

Rebecca Gordon: I was brought up in a home where it was important to know what was happening and it was important to be there if there was a movement happening. So my mother essentially brought me up to be an activist by example -- by the kinds of things that she drew my attention to from my earliest childhood. When I think about Christianity and the meaning of Incarnation, part of the way that I believe the Divine is incarnated in the world is in that struggle for justice and liberation. So in a sense it's my connection, however tenuous, to the Divine that has in some way kept me doing all of this. That doesn't mean it's always pure delight. It can be extremely unpleasant working with your compañeros sometimes, but there is real joy in feeling that you are part of something that is bigger than you are, that began before you were born and is going to go on, God willing, long after you die.

Jan Adams: When I was managing the Northern California campaign against Prop. 187, a 1994 California statewide initiative which denied social services and education to undocumented immigrants, that was being in a movement. That was one of the most extraordinary campaigns I ever had anything to do with because Prop. 187 was such a violent violation of basic humanity. That's how it was experienced in the Latino community -- that for some reason the State of California wanted to turn around and tell them: Your children should starve and they shouldn't be allowed in schools.

Rebecca Gordon: And they shouldn't have health care.

Jan Adams: My job was to take this incredible outpouring of feeling of injustice and turn it into something effectual in an election. There wasn't a huge amount you could do, but we did enormously well where we were able to give people outreach activities. It was unbelievably painful. During that time period I had on the wall a poster with a picture of a Guatamalan woman and a poem that said in Spanish: "We have more death than they do, but we have more life than they do." Very often that is profoundly the condition of people in struggle. I felt that somewhat with some of the people I worked with in South Africa. And we've certainly felt that in the civil rights movement here.

Rebecca Gordon: I worked with Witness for Peace, living in the war zones in Nicaragua for six months in 1984. Living in a war is the most bizarre thing because you are simultaneously preparing for death tomorrow and planning for things that might not come to fruition for another 20 years! So it's this strange dual consciousness. But in that context, you could sense among the people who were part of it that they were both very much more aware of death, because they were losing people all the time, and more aware of the life that they were hoping for and that they were, with their own hands, trying to construct.

Jan Adams: So I think we think a movement is the thing that unleashes the forces that carry people very near to that place where life or death are close.

Ethan Flad: You mentioned Rosa Parks. Hearing about Central America brings to mind the Mothers of the Disappeared; and what you're talking about right now strongly evokes the Middle East, and I'm thinking about the Women in Black. Do women bring to movements a different consciousness?

Rebecca Gordon: Yes, but it might not be what you would think. There is a way that women understand that you can't be in struggle forever, that it is impossible for an individual, a community, a country, a family to live its entire life at that pitch of revolutionary fervor. It tears the soul apart. The Sandinistas were voted out of office in 1990. Part of the reason was that the women in that country knew that as long as they were in power, the U.S. was going to continue to make war on them. They were never going to stop sending their kids off to be killed and the war was not going to stop. Now you could say the women were reactionary or a conservatizing force or something like that. But I don't think that's true. Women are often at the very front of movements. But I think we're also sometimes a brake on the romanticizing of war and violence. I think we understand better why peace is necessary. I think that's as true in cities that are torn up by gang warfare as it is in Palestine today.

Ethan Flad: With all the work you've done over the years, what's brought you in the last couple of years to what you're doing now?

Jan Adams: That's a good question. The last thing I wanted to be doing was trying to build a peace movement at this moment. But we need a peace movement, so I guess I have to try to build one. I never really quite know how I made those transitions. And I'm not sure I know any more now than I did 15 years ago. But as I said earlier, I have in me this sense of, "OK, I've got a responsibility to put my shoulder to the wheel," where something liberatory is happening. And I've had a wonderful life as a consequence.

Rebecca Gordon: We do an awful lot of pointing each other in directions that we might not go otherwise. We spent the first summer we met, when I was 13 and she was 18, arguing about the war in Vietnam. I was opposed to it; she wasn't sure. We've been arguing about politics every since. I dragged her into the movement to oppose what the U.S. was doing in Central America, and we spent a large chunk of the 1980s doing work about that and trying to support those revolutions. Because -- well, for their own precious selves -- but also because they represented some hope in a hopeless world. And she pulled me, in the 1990s, into an involvement in electoral politics, which is actually one of my least favorite activities. But it has the benefit of being a place where you can really give people the experience of working together in an effective way, in an organized way that's very powerful.

I also pulled/pushed us into doing stuff in the early 1980s in the women's movement, into publishing Lesbian Contradiction: A Journal of Irreverent Feminism, which we did for 12 years. It was never gigantic, but it was influential in its own little way.

Ethan Flad: How did you get to seminary?

Rebecca Gordon: I had come to the point in about 1999-2000 when it felt as though a lot of progressive movements had run out of useful ideas. And I thought: "This is a good moment for me to step back and take what I've learned over all these years and see how I might incorporate the faith dimension more directly in the work that I do." The other thing was that I had spent the last eight or nine years taking care of my mom. Especially the last couple of years. She died in April of 2000 after a long bout with emphysema. After she died I no longer had to make quite as much money, because Jan and I had been supporting her financially, too. Also, I just suddenly had evenings. I majored in religion 25 years ago in college, and I had thought about going on to seminary then. But that was at the moment when the radical women's movement was really breaking the world open. It was very hard for me. I left college with no language at all to talk about God, because the wound of the hatred of women that I experienced in Christian churches, in Judaism, in the world around me, was just so raw. I started to be able to have language again and to think about some ways I could consider coming into the church when I was able to work in Nicaragua and see in action the theologies of liberation in Christian-based communities. Now I'm in seminary and I have not had so much fun in years!

Ethan Flad: How did you become involved with starting Seminarians for Peace?

Jan Adams: I'm not a student at the Graduate Theological Union (GTU), but I took one look at the situation after September 11th and what it said to me was that people needed to talk with each other just to process what had happened and what was going to happen. The way people could do that talking would be through little local organizing projects in workplaces and schools and wherever people were. Since Rebecca and I already knew how to found an organization and because Starr King is the kind of place that it is, it seemed like we could probably start Seminarians for Peace out of that consciousness and people would want it. And the fact is, people have proved to want it.

Rebecca Gordon: But the faculty is not doing anything! I don't understand why there isn't nationally an organization of divinity school faculty who in a public way are saying: "Stop this!" These are the people who both are supposed to be the religious leaders and are training the religious leaders. So where is the leadership?

Ethan Flad: Is Seminarians for Peace at this point overwhelmingly focused in Berkeley at the GTU?

Rebecca Gordon: Yes. It's not a national movement. I wish it were a national movement, but it's not. Now we're putting easily 30 or 40 hours a week each into War Times -- we had to make a decision which vehicle was more likely to do something bigger faster and decided it had to be War Times. That kicked off last Halloween here in our living room with our friend Bob Wing, the former editor of ColorLines, and Max Elbaum, who's a former editor of a publication named Crossroads and a long-time leftist activist. We were sitting around and talking about the war and suddenly the idea of doing War Times developed among the four of us. We were talking about how during the war against Vietnam there was a national paper that provided people with information that wasn't available other places -- the information really wasn't available. In a way that is less true today, because we have the Web and if you look for international sources of information you can get it.

Jan Adams: But the available information is not contextualized.

Rebecca Gordon: Right. So we decided to pull some other people into this, especially more people of color, and see whether they thought this is such a good idea. Unfortunately, they said, "That's a great idea! Y'all do it!" So we've got a core group now of 12 people who are the organizing committee, and then there are other groupings around the editorial function and around the fundraising function and the distribution function. So there are 500 distributors nationally. And there are about 40 or 50 people in the Bay Area who have something to do with War Times. We're now in the process of bringing out the second issue. The first issue went to press in February. We had a big kick-off event

Jan Adams: We went through 75,000 copies in six days and said, "Oh, my God, we've got to reprint!" We printed another 25,000 and we are almost out.

Rebecca Gordon: This is the new technology: Over the years each of us had developed email lists of hundreds -- or in the case of Bob Wing -- thousands of people. And so we sent out emails describing what we would want to do. And don't you know that before it ever even existed people sent us money and said, "Yes, do this!"

Ethan Flad: Looking back to some of the movements you've been in, what are some of the lessons?

Rebecca Gordon: Check your race stuff. That is lesson number one. It's crucial that a peace movement in the U.S. not be built and run by white people. That doesn't mean there isn't a lot of space for white people in a peace movement -- and there are more white people than people of color in most places in the country, although not in California. But a peace movement that is not consciously, intentionally anti-racist will not succeed in this country. Because it won't speak to the people who are the most likely to be skeptical about what the U.S. government is doing -- on a tactical level and on a moral level. On the same grounds, I'd say, check your sexism.

Jan Adams: Actually, your queers are very useful, too. [Laughter]

Rebecca Gordon: It's true! We tend to have more disposable time. Especially those of us who weren't part of the lesbian baby boom! If you look at most of the movements that I've been in, whether closeted or openly, there have been large numbers of queer people.

Jan Adams: Yeah. It's a reality that is very hard sometimes for other people among us to deal with. Especially in the churches.

This peace movement is very hard to build in this country, because peace is not in any easy way in the interests of Americans. Being "head empire" is in the interest of the living standard of almost all Americans. And yet, peace is essential to the world. So raising peace as important to the U.S. involves moral leadership, which means that the churches -- who at least claim to be in that business -- are extraordinarily important.

Rebecca Gordon: I think also we are in a moment when -- and you can see it in Newsweek and everywhere -- people in the U.S. are described at least as experiencing some kind of spiritual hunger. We're fed to the teeth with stuff in this country, but there is something that people are hungry for, and right now the government is feeding it with patriotism. And that desire to be part of something bigger than you are, and that desire to be in connection with humanity and with the holy -- the U.S. government is taking that desire and perverting it and turning it into a murderous kind of patriotism. So there is really a place for the spiritual leadership of the church in the peace movement. We have to have the guts to do it.

Ethan Flad is editor/producer of The Witness' web site, including the site's "A Globe of Witnesses" project.