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Global Transformation: Strategy for Action
Dedication Epigraph Preface Acknowledgments One Two Three Four Five Six Seven Eight Epilogue Comments

Chapter Four: Biography

Childhood
Berkeley, Phase One
Dallas
Berkeley, Phase Two
San Francisco, Phase One
Post-Recovery
San Francisco, Phase Two
Going National
Reflections

Before considering more fully how we can most effectively move forward, I offer myself as a case example of how one can be a social change agent. Reflecting on what worked for me and what didn’t, I’ll try to be honest, even when I’m embarrassed (and ask that you not judge me too harshly). Perhaps we can learn from my mistakes, and maybe some achievements will be instructive as well.

Childhood

My political education began at the age of five. My parents, my sister, and I drove into town from my maternal grandfather’s small farm where we lived on the outskirts of Little Rock. At one intersection, we had to wait for an African-American woman to cross the street before we could make a right turn. As we drove by her, I yelled out the window, “Get out of the way, nigger.” My mother immediately turned to me and declared, “Don’t ever let me hear you use that word again.” I was shocked, and never forgot what she said.

In Arkansas at that time, 1949, there weren’t many white people who shared my mother’s convictions. As I discovered much later, my father didn’t and I doubt her parents did either. I assume that I picked up my racist language from one of them, for I didn’t have much interaction with people outside my immediate family. But my mother was a moral person with strong convictions and the courage to express them (I suspect her sensitivity to racism was prompted by her mother having had Native American ancestors, which was reflected in her mother’s physical features and probably made her an outcast in white Arkansas in the early 20th century).

My parents and my grandfather demonstrated great interest in public affairs. During dinner, for example, we watched the evening news. As I was turning twelve in 1956, I recall my grandfather watching the Democratic National Convention on television with great passion and cheering on John Kennedy in his quest for the Vice-Presidential nomination (he lost to Estes Kefauver). So I absorbed from my family a pro-Democrat, New Deal liberalism, though primarily I was immersed in baseball.

The summer before I entered high school, I made my first visit to the public library in Dallas, where my family had moved when I was seven, and quickly became entranced with a variety of iconoclastic free thinkers like H.L. Mencken, Thomas Paine, Ralph Ingersoll, and Ambrose Bierce. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, Mencken was largely conservative in his politics, but I enjoyed his humor. The first time I read it in 1960, I liked Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative.

My greatest influence, however, was Bertrand Russell. So after I became familiar with his critique of capitalism, I read Goldwater’s book again and concluded that when he talked about “freedom,” he was mainly talking about freedom for Big Business, regardless of the consequences. Russell, who was vehemently opposed to the Soviet Union’s brutal totalitarian Communism, affirmed the democratic socialism that was manifest in Great Britain and other Western European countries at the time. I was very sympathetic to Russell’s politics, though I didn’t consider myself a socialist.

After reading Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s Kennedy or Nixon: Does It Make Any Difference?, I became a strong Kennedy supporter during the 1960 election. The civil rights movement was heating up and I followed it to some degree, with sympathy, but mostly I pursued my interests in religion and philosophy, while timidly rebelling against rules in high school that struck me as unfair. For example, I would sneak away from mandatory pep rallies and play chess with my chemistry teacher (it still amazes me that he collaborated). Other than being captain for sandlot softball games, my first organizing was to start the Chess Club.

The passions of the Cold War permeated Dallas during those years. The John Birch Society, a radical right-wing organization that was strong in many areas of the country, had billboards plastered with their propaganda all over town. Many car bumpers had radical-right stickers on them. When Adlai Stevenson visited Dallas shortly before the Kennedy assassination, an angry crowd mobbed him, which prompted him to warn Kennedy not to visit Dallas. My high school teachers preached the radical-right orthodoxy and refused to engage in honest dialogue with me.

My junior year, the entire Dallas school system had a special, semester-long course on “anti-communism.” The only textbook was J. Edgar Hoover’s The Masters of Deceit. Needless to say, I did not feel at home in Dallas.

My first political act was symbolic. I went by myself to a large rally that featured Ronald Reagan when he came to Dallas in 1962 as part of his General Electric speaking tour that paved the way for his political career. Having been influenced by Bertrand Russell’s pacifism, Reagan’s militaristic fervor worried me. So when the crowd stood up to sing the national anthem and recite the Pledge of Allegiance at the beginning of the event, I remained seated, in protest. The next day, in civics class, a student told our teacher and the whole class about my rebellion and I had to defend myself publicly.

My mother wanted me to stay in Texas to go to college, but a documentary I saw during that anti-Communism course gave me another idea. The film, Operation Abolition, made by the House Un-American Affairs Committee included footage of a 1960 hearing that the committee had held in the San Francisco. When the people who gathered to protest the committee’s McCarthyism overflowed the meeting room, a crowd gathered outside. The police responded by using a fire hose to sweep protestors down the steps of City Hall, which contributed dramatic footage to the documentary. The narrator blamed the turmoil on troublemakers from the University of California at Berkeley.

So when it came time to apply for colleges, I went to the library to review the catalog for the University of California at Berkeley. The opening sentence to the Introduction began, “Renowned for its richness and diversity, the San Francisco Bay Area….” That sounded like heaven to me. Since I knew that I met the admission requirements, I eventually persuaded my mother to let me escape Dallas. It was the first time I had left Texas. Years later, I discovered that Operation Abolition had inspired many other like-minded people to go to Berkeley for their schooling. Little did I know that a social, political, and cultural hurricane would soon sweep me up and change me profoundly.

Berkeley, Phase One

Shortly after entering the University in September 1962, I discovered that my working-class education ill-prepared me for a degree in physics, which had been my goal. So I switched my major to political science, which had been my strongest interest anyway.

I lived in a room in the house of a woman whose children had gone to college out-of-state and ate my meals in a nearby student co-op one block from campus. The campus continued to buzz from an inspiring speech given earlier that year by President Kennedy. I was still fond of Kennedy, but I was greatly disturbed by his actions in the Cuban Missile Crisis that brought the world to the brink of a total nuclear war. I stayed up late one night writing an unassigned commentary on the crisis and gave it to my Poli Sci teaching assistant, who gave me positive feedback. My basic position was that if the United States could have missiles near the Soviet Union in Turkey, I didn’t see why the Soviet Union couldn’t have missiles in Cuba. Instead of risking nuclear war, I wanted both countries to pursue nuclear disarmament, as Bertrand Russell and others were demanding.

In response to a flyer, I went to my first political demonstration at the corner of Telegraph and Bancroft on the edge of soon-to-be-famous Sproul Plaza. But this time there were only a few people there. The speaker was standing on a box attached to a light pole, hanging on with one hand and using his other hand to rant and rave through a megaphone about the coming apocalypse. Being emotionally repressed in general, his passion disturbed me and the smallness of the crowd offered me little support. So I stayed away from political demonstrations for some time.

Years later, however, I was pleased to learn that Kennedy had defused the crisis in large part by secretly promising to withdraw missiles from Turkey in exchange for the withdrawal of missiles from Cuba. It seems that my reaction was not as extreme as it seemed at the time.

The next spring, I heard James Baldwin speak to a full house in Harmon Gym on campus. With great eloquence and passion, he discussed the trauma of the civil rights movement, the fire hoses and police dogs, the church bombings, the beatings and the murders. He spoke directly to the white community by affirming that we need to address racism not only for the sake of African Americans but also for our own benefit. Our own salvation depends on it, he said.

As he finished and I walked out with some 15,000 other people, tears were streaming down my face. I had never cried in public, but I didn’t care if anyone noticed.

Over the next several months, I read Baldwin voraciously, mesmerized by his novels and essays. Toward the end of the year, back home in Dallas for Christmas break, I decided that when I returned to Berkeley, I would get involved with the civil rights movement.

Upon my return, I went to a meeting of the Young Democrats, but Campus CORE soon grabbed my interest. Affiliated with the national Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), this student-based group was demanding that the local Lucky Stores supermarket hire more people of color. (Less than two percent of employees in Bay Area grocery stores were black.) After the store refused, Campus CORE initiated a “Shop-in” during which demonstrators would go into the store, fill up their shopping baskets, have the cashier check them out, and then walk out of the store without paying, leaving their basket behind. I participated enthusiastically. It was great fun, and we won our demands.

Shortly after the Lucky Stores conflict was resolved, a similar dispute emerged over the lack of minority hiring at hotels in San Francisco. Given its central location, the Sheraton Palace on Market Street was the primary target. After the hotel association refused to budge during negotiations, protestors, including myself, formed picket lines in front of the hotel and soon started marching through the hotel lobby. Eventually, we sat down in the lobby in an overnight “sleep-in.” Though hotel patrons were inconvenienced, they could still conduct their business. I spent the night in the hotel lobby, singing freedom songs and feeling a great sense of community with the 1,000 or so other demonstrators who were still with us.

After negotiations still made no progress, the protestors decided to block entrances to the hotel and force arrest. Almost 200 protestors were arrested before the hotels signed an agreement to achieve specific goals for minority employment. The deal was reached just before I was to be arrested.

Most politicians, newspapers, and commentators vehemently denounced the demonstrators’ tactics, arguing that it would set back the cause of civil rights. The liberal Governor Pat Brown predicted that it would help pass Proposition 14, a referendum that would reverse the Fair Housing Act that had been adopted the previous year prohibiting housing discrimination. Brown’s prediction may have been correct, for the measure passed by a two-thirds majority vote. Its passage provoked outrage among African Americans and likely contributed to the Watts Riot that broke out the following year.

Later that same month, the focus shifted to auto dealers in San Francisco. During a series of pickets and sit-ins, some protestors threatened “creative destruction,” but the conflict was resolved before the situation escalated to that point. I participated in many of these picket lines, once again rejoicing in the singing, chanting, and deep sense of community. My life has been dedicated to personal, political, social, and cultural change ever since.

During these first two years of college, I became quite involved in my student co-op, Ridge House, where I gradually assumed more responsibilities. Owned by the University Students Cooperative Association and overseen by a central board of directors, each house was managed by its own members, some of whom were residents while others only ate meals there. Dinners and lunch were mostly prepared in a central kitchen and delivered, but we cooked our own breakfasts and were responsible for routine maintenance. We elected our managers as well as chairpersons of social, education, and other committees. As far as most of us were concerned, central management was remote and irrelevant. We were largely autonomous.

The sense of community I found there was very supportive and shaped my life-long interest in cooperative living. It was somewhat like a fraternity, but was less elitist because any student could join. I immediately started hanging out with two graduate students, Lyle Downing and Dave Roberts, whose conversations about politics, theology, and philosophy intrigued me. I remember in particular that my questioning the fundamentalism with which I had grown up did not shock them, as it did my high school teachers. They gently suggested that modern theologians offered a more persuasive perspective by reinterpreting the old myths into contemporary language. I wasn’t convinced, but I kept an open mind.

Dallas

That summer I returned to Dallas and quickly became involved in the civil rights movement there. My father was none too happy about me running around in his car gathering canned goods to be sent to the Mississippi Freedom Summer project, but he didn’t stop me. My mother was sympathetic to the movement, but felt the leaders should be more patient.

That summer, I participated in a demonstration at the Picadilly Cafeteria, which was refusing to serve black people. We quickly won our victory, but before we did, I met Richard Koogle. Connecting with him was easy, for he was the only other white person on the picket line. He invited me to the Single Adults Group at Northaven Methodist Church, which was led by a young minister fresh out of seminary, William Holmes. I still had my doubts about Christianity, but was curious.

The Single Adults Group meeting was remarkable. The members engaged in an open-ended self-examination about the purpose of their group and what they should do. There were asking the same kind of questions about the group that I asked about my life. I was very impressed, but left Dallas the next week to return to Berkeley.

Berkeley quickly turned sour, however. Unhappy with my civil rights activity, my landlady had evicted me and my new room was far from campus. My father reduced his financial support, so I had to get a job, where I was cooped up behind the counter of a small cigar store on the corner of Telegraph and Bancroft. My immersion in the civil rights movement had destroyed my grade-point average. The University issued an order prohibiting political organizing on campus (which led to the Free Speech Movement) and I felt a major storm brewing, which would make it even more difficult for me to be a good student. As I went back and forth between work and a demonstration at the welfare department protesting an attempt to force welfare recipients to work for menial wages, I realized that I wasn’t going to make it as both a working student and a political activist. So I picked up my bags and returned to Dallas.

I spoke with an acquaintance I had met the summer after I graduated from high school. He and a friend of his had conducted a study group for several of us freethinkers through a connection with our high-school valedictorian at her church. I had greatly appreciated our sessions, one of which included my first drink, a crème de menthe. We read Freud, Darwin, Marx, and Ferlinghetti, among others, which was far more interesting than any of my assignments in high school. So I consulted with this friend about jobs, and following his suggestion, I applied for a job at the county psychiatric hospital. Even though they technically required orderlies to be twenty-one and I had just turned twenty, they hired me. The experience changed me profoundly

Working at Woodlawn opened my heart. I discovered the rewards derived from serving others. Though I would later come to be very critical of the medical model that dominates psychiatry, I was fortunate to work in a setting that was more humanistic than most institutions. Based on using a “milieu therapy” that fostered patients’ natural healing powers with the assistance of counselors and fellow patients in a “therapeutic community,” even at the age of twenty I was able to help people get through crises, primarily just by listening to them.

Shortly after returning to Dallas, I visited the Northaven Single Adults Group again and discovered that they had already started producing a play, “After the Fall” by Arthur Miller, with a professional from the Dallas Theatre Center directing. I got a bit part and thoroughly enjoyed it. A few months later, we produced the one-act “An American Dream” by Edward Albee, in which I was given a major role. We opened the evening with a piece of “total theatre” during which performers seated in the audience would stand and present dramatic readings.

These productions provided me with a strong sense of community, which was enhanced by the fact that after we finished “After the Fall,” the group decided to read and discuss The Noise of Solemn Assemblies by Peter Berger, a scathing critique of how Christian churches had become part of the Establishment in violation of their basic principles. I was greatly impressed with a church group that would seriously consider such strong criticism of the Church.

Some time that year I read an article in Look magazine by George Leonard titled “Revolution in Education,” in which he used the phrase “human potential” and referred to Esalen Institute. Just south of Monterey and Big Sur on the California coast, this new retreat center had been conducting workshops on “Human Potentialities” with luminaries in humanistic psychology, Eastern spirituality, and other fields. I got their address, wrote them, and received some of their literature, including a booklet on massage.

A few months later, in early 1965, I heard that a campus ministry in Austin, the Faith and Life Community headed by Joe Matthews, was conducting a weekend workshop utilizing techniques learned at Esalen. Some other members of the Single Adults Group and I went down to participate and it blew my emotionally repressed mind. I particularly remember exchanging foot massages and various “sensory awareness” exercises that were profoundly rewarding.

During that year in Dallas, Bill Holmes conducted at Northaven Methodist Church a series of weekday evening events titled a “Community Dialogue.” We had assigned readings and after a catered meal discussed the readings in small groups, and then listened to a lecture by Holmes. We began with a consideration of the human condition, framed by authors such as Kierkegaard and other existentialists who analyzed the limits of human finitude, including death. Their analysis made sense to me. Then we considered contemporary theologians like Paul Tillich who argued that nevertheless we can accept life as good and meaningful. That position also made sense to me. Then, in one of his lectures, Holmes said, “If we accept the Creation, we accept the Creator,” and my reticence about affirming “God” vanished.

The spring semester of 1965, I studied at Southern Methodist University (SMU). My best course was Contemporary Theology, during which we studied the process theology of Charles Hartshorne, which was greatly influenced by the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Hartshorne argued that consciousness emerges from pre-sensual, pre-conscious experiences that are fundamental to spirituality. He also considered the ever-changing evolution of relationships between humans and between humans and the world to be central to human experience. Thus, he rejected Platonic dualism by placing more importance on the relationships between things than on things themselves. I found this approach convincing.

Even more important, however, was reading and discussing I and Thou by Martin Buber, who spoke with poetic power about the nature of authentic relationship. Being fully present and responsive to “the other,” including nature, in a relationship that is truly mutual and equal can be profoundly transcendent. Buber explored these realities with great passion. His work has had a lasting influence on me. Given its impact on others, including leaders in the human potential movement, I consider it one of the most important books ever written.

That spring, Martin Luther King, Jr. led what proved to be the final, climatic march of the civil rights movement from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. I was determined to go and was greatly disappointed that no one from the Single Adults Group wanted to go as well. Even more disturbing, they tried to persuade me not to go. So I signed up and got a ride with some strangers.

Well aware of the murders and beatings that had been inflicted on white “outside agitators,” all of us were very scared as we drove through Louisiana and Mississippi toward Alabama. When we stopped at gas stations, we left as quickly as possible and looked over our shoulders as we drove away. But we arrived for the final leg of the march without incident and marched with 25,000 other people through the outskirts of Montgomery to the state capitol, cheered on by black families on their front porches along the way. I returned to Dallas gratified for having participated and was heartened when the Voting Rights Act was signed into law several months later.

But I lost a sense of community with the Single Adults Group, partly because no one wanted to go to Selma with me. In addition, very few of them shared my opposition to the war in Vietnam. I had participated in the first student demonstration against the war on May 2, 1964, which was held simultaneously in San Francisco, New York, and other cities and remained opposed to the escalation of that engagement.

Also SMU was not my cup of tea. My most vivid memory of the school, for example, was sitting at the back of the Art History class at eight o’clock in the morning and looking forward over all the enormous hairdos on the heads of the women students. I figured that they had to wake up hours early just to fix their hair. So Dallas couldn’t hold me much longer. I had missed out on the Free Speech Movement and wanted to go back and see what was happening now in my old stomping grounds.

Berkeley, Phase Two

I returned to Berkeley in the fall of 1965 planning to become a clinical psychologist and moved into Ridge House. What a difference one year can make.

During my first two years at Ridge House, I never heard one comment about marijuana, much less LSD. But on my return, the co-op was filled with both and I soon started to indulge. I read Varieties of Religious Experience and The Tibetan Book of the Dead, started listening to rock-and-roll including San Francisco bands like the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, went on back-packing trips in the High Sierra where I had drug-induced religious experiences of unity with the universe, and hung out in the Avalon Ballroom and Fillmore Auditorium to soak up the vibes of the new scene.

In school, I took a psychodrama course in the Criminology department offered by Richard Korn (who I believe was a mentor for Mimi Silbert who later became head of the remarkable Delancey Street residential rehabilitation program for ex-offenders). The explosiveness of the emotions that were released in that class shocked me, but it helped to loosen me up. In addition, I benefited immensely from workshops in San Francisco held by Esalen Institute, especially the sensory awareness sessions that helped me get in touch with my body. I was beginning to see the relationship between the personal and the political.

Throughout the school year, after having missed out on the first draft-card burning earlier that year, I participated in a number of Bay Area demonstrations against the Vietnam War. At that time, only about 25% of the public opposed the war. As I studied the history of American foreign policy more closely, I became increasingly outraged by the blatant imperialistic attempt by the United States to violently suppress the Vietnamese independence movement led by Ho Chi Minh.

Along with many other black and white civil rights activists, I was also becoming more impatient with the resistance on the part of the elite to addressing the concerns of poverty and racism. A real turning point had been the refusal of President Johnson and the national Democratic Party, at the party’s convention in the summer of 1964, to seat any of the delegates from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Endorsed by Martin Luther King, this compromise inflamed the growing, youth-based Black Power movement and radicalized the white New Left.

I sided with the radicals. When the liberal New Republic magazine, which I had read religiously, published a series of essays titled, “Thoughts of the Young Radicals,” my identification with the New Left crystallized. We objected to the oppressive paternalism of the welfare state, called for those affected by decisions to have more voice in making those decisions, demanded a peaceful foreign policy, and, as Todd Gitlin expressed in his article, called for the government to assure that “a decent income is guaranteed for all who will not or cannot work.” Dissatisfied with gradual progress, we pushed for rapid, dramatic reform.

The growing “counter culture” movement also enlisted me. In early 1966, I participated in the University of California Extension program’s “Conference on LSD,” which featured established scholars such as Huston Smith and newcomers like Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, who later became Ram Dass. At this conference, I connected with my previous boss at Woodlawn hospital, Dr. W. Robert Beavers, and sent him my notes when he had to leave early, which led to a friendship that I renewed with late-night visits to his house when I went to Dallas during breaks from school.

At this time, LSD received considerable positive attention from certain circles within academia. As reported on the San Francisco State University (SFSU) website:

Many forces were also pushing for educational reform. The SFSU website reports:

On January 14, 1967 in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, along with some 30,000 other people, I participated in the "Human Be-In." As the wikipedia summarizes, this event “focused the key ideas of the 1960s counterculture: personal empowerment, cultural and political decentralization, communal living, ecological awareness, and consciousness expansion.” Speakers included Leary, the poet Gary Snyder, the comedian Dick Gregory, anti-war speeches, our new music, and concluded with Allen Ginsberg chanting “Om” as the sun went down. It was a time of great optimism rooted in “peace, love and happiness.” We had a sense that we were riding a wave that would spread throughout the world.

In the fall of 1967, as Education Chair at Ridge House, I invited a professor from the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, Charles McCoy, to give a seminar, during which we discussed contemporary theology and new developments such as coffee house ministries, which were church-funded community centers that served coffee and light food, while offering a variety of cultural presentations. After we adjourned, he suggested that I might be interested in applying for admission to his seminary. I never intended to preach from a pulpit, which struck me as too hierarchical. Believing instead in the “priesthood of all believers,” I applied with the intention of organizing “communities of faith, love, and action” once I graduated and became ordained. Some time later, my application was accepted.

Overwhelming the peaceful vibes of the counter culture, violence was on the rise throughout the world. The United States continued to escalate the war in Southeast Asia. Revolutionary movements based on armed struggle were common in the third world. Police forces in the States were resorting to violence to disrupt peaceful demonstrations, which provoked demonstrators to throw rocks in response, leading to more police violence. Urban riots had broken out in Watts, Detroit and elsewhere. Malcolm X had been assassinated under circumstances that led to suspicions about governmental complicity. Angry, frustrated demonstrators, black, brown and white, were refusing to be patient. Martin Luther King, Jr., who had moved to Chicago where he was met with violent white demonstrators, was finding it difficult to persuade people to follow his path of non-violence.

The summer of ‘67, the “Summer of Love,” I finished my education at Cal by participating in the experimental Residence College. The basic concept was that all 200 students received a full semester’s credit with no grades and no requirements, while choosing a topic to pursue in a seminar with a tutor. As I recall, about half the students turned in a term paper by the end of the semester. Mine was a reflection on R.D. Laing’s The Politics of Experience, Paul Tillich’s The Courage to Be, and Edgar Friedenberg’s Coming of Age in America. These works, by a psychiatrist, a theologian, and a sociologist respectively, represented my diverse interests, which led me to graduate with a “field major in social sciences.” (Shortly after I graduated, the post-graduate School of Social Work announced that they would no longer accept such field majors as a prerequisite for admission, which reflected the trend toward specialization in academia.)

The Residence College was hardly a complete success, but it proved very meaningful for me, partly because someone nominated me for the position of Co-Coordinator and I was elected along with two others, which boosted my self-confidence. Also, the summer provided me the freedom to pursue my intellectual interests at my own pace. Once the semester was over, the student newspaper, The Daily Cal, asked for a report for their weekly magazine. So I submitted my comments, “An Evaluation of the Residence College,” which was published in November 1967.

In conclusions that guided me for decades, and still largely do, I reported:

My first semester in seminary, the fall of 1967, I conducted a chapel service that offended the school President because it consisted entirely of the words and music of Bob Dylan, arranged in the order of a traditional worship service: Call to Worship, Confession, Redemption, and Going Forth. He felt that that my ceremony wasn’t truly Christian because I didn’t include scripture from the Holy Bible.

The main event that semester, however, was Stop the Draft Week in Oakland. The organizers planned to escalate tactics by trying to stop buses taking draftees to basic training. Pacifists like Joan Baez objected to this escalation, which led to a compromise. She and her supporters were given one day, October 16, for traditional passive resistance. Despite their commitment to nonviolence, however, “police in Oakland used clubs and chemical sprays to clear the streets (BBC).” The radicals mounted their confrontation four days later. I participated in both demonstrations, without subjecting myself to arrest on either occasion. With the radicals, we blocked the streets by moving cars, trashcans, and other obstacles into intersections. The buses finally got through, but we brought the city to a standstill.

We felt that we had made our point. “No more business as usual” was our motto. We believed that we had to increase the price that the Establishment would pay for their war. As Mario Savio had said during the Free Speech Movement:

And we believed that “repression equals radicalization” – that police violence would deepen and spread the commitment of people with anti-war opinions. As for those who weren’t yet opposed to the war, we believed we had to force them to confront the issues, even if they couldn’t get to work or do their job because of the chaos. And, as it became more difficult to get media coverage with non-violent tactics, we found that violence, even if who provoked it was unclear, would garner attention. Though I never threw rocks (and never have), I participated in these (and other) disruptions enthusiastically.

Later that month, an even more momentous event took place in Oakland. Huey Newton, who had co-founded of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense one year earlier, was involved in a shootout with Oakland police officers that resulted in the death of an officer and the wounding of Newton.

I had previously encountered Newton during a panel discussion on racism at the Residence College that featured Ron Dellums, who was then a member of the City Council. He later became a prominent member of the House of Representatives, and is now Mayor of Oakland. During the discussion with the audience, Newton stood up and spoke with great passion and charisma about routine police brutality in Oakland. His statement, which was well received by the panel, was unforgettable.

Anti-capitalist and loosely socialist in their ideology, the Panthers were based on a Ten Point Program that affirmed black self-determination, full employment, decent housing, relevant education, free health care, an end to wars of aggression, freedom for people in prison, community control of modern technology, and an end to police brutality.

Aware of a provision in state law that allowed them to carry weapons in self-defense so long as they did so openly, prior to the October 1967 shootout the Panthers had begun patrolling the streets of Oakland and observing from a distance when police stopped and questioned black people. Within a short period of time, they had chapters in many U.S. cities.

On October 28, an officer stopped Newton and called for backup. What happened next was never proven in court. One conviction was overturned on appeal and subsequent attempts to convict resulted in mistrials. The black community rallied to Newton’s defense and in February 1968, I participated in a large Free Huey rally in downtown Oakland, believing that the City of Oakland needed to resolve the situation by reforming their incredibly brutal, mostly all-white police department.

The next year, 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated in April, leading to riots in many cities, and Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June. Having joined the “Clean for Gene” campaign and knocked doors for Eugene McCarthy’s anti-war campaign, I was angry at Kennedy for jumping on the anti-war bandwagon in what seemed to me to be blatant opportunism (years later I concluded that he had undergone a moral transformation and would have been our strongest candidate). But his assassination, following on the heals of the assassinations of Malcolm, King, and his brother, were profoundly disturbing, especially since it seemed (and still does) that the government could have warned Malcolm, that rogue elements of the CIA and/or the military may well have been involved in the Kennedy assassination, and some people in the FBI were likely involved in the King killing (they certainly engaged in many efforts to hurt King). Our leaders were being knocked off, one after the other, which led to a sense of desperation. Time was running out. “Can’t put it off another day… My tears have come and gone… I’ve been crushed by a tumbling tide… I have no place to hide… Time has come today (Chambers Brothers).”

In the face of these catastrophes, third world students at San Francisco State University, frustrated in their attempts to get a more relevant education and increase minority enrollment and hiring, went on strike and called on people like me to participate in their pickets. After many months, with some occasional violence on the part of the demonstrators, we finally persuaded the University to create a School of Ethnic Studies and to expand its Black Studies Department.

Toward the end of my first year at Pacific School of Religion, I was elected Chair of the Education Committee. That summer I resolved to return to seminary and push hard to change its educational philosophy. I was about to move from being a foot soldier in the Movement to being an organizer.

During summer break, I was tempted to go to Chicago for anti-war demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. But I had little money for transportation and instead participated in a remarkable convention of the American Association for Humanistic Psychology at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. The association had opened its membership to the general public and invited all members to participate in a series of “human potential movement” workshops of the sort conducted at Esalen Institute. The San Francisco Chronicle carried a front-page story on the opening event, which was held in the Grand Ballroom and involved everyone lying on the floor doing sensory awareness exercises. Over the next few days, between workshops I’d go up to one of the rooms rented by friends from Dallas to watch the turmoil in Chicago on television. The split between the personal and the political was manifest.

As it turned out, several other students entered Pacific School of Religion determined to challenge its educational philosophy. We soon organized the New Seminary Movement, published a manifesto that called for faculty and students to get out of their “ivory tower” and into the community, and in the spirit of participatory democracy, wildly called for an annual community meeting that would include everyone, including secretaries and janitors, to make decisions like selecting faculty. Needless to say, our proposals weren’t widely endorsed.

When the President resorted to a technicality to prohibit our use of the chapel for a benefit poetry reading (which was normally granted routinely), we proceeded nevertheless. That afternoon, the faculty persuaded the President not to have us arrested, as he proposed. As co-chair of the Cultural Committee, I was selected to moderate the event. Having finished last in every extemporaneous debate tournament during my sophomore year in high school and sometimes having felt petrified in college classes, unable to speak, I was nervous about speaking in front of the several hundred people who had come to hear Lawrence Ferlinghetti and other prominent San Francisco poets. But I began the evening by telling the crowd how we had circumvented our President who had locked us out of our own chapel and turned off the electricity, and the audience responded with repeated laughter. It was a liberating moment.

Afterwards, the President expelled several of us, but we appealed to the Board of Trustees, who re-instated us. Shortly thereafter the President “resigned.” The Board replaced him with a young chaplain from Stanford, who quickly reformed the school and led it into a more progressive, community-oriented direction. Our New Seminary Movement hardly achieved its utopian goals, but the unintended consequences of our actions were long lasting.

As this controversy was being resolved, in April 1969 Berkeley was heating up with the prelude to the battle for People’s Park. A few blocks from the edge of campus, the University had purchased a large parcel of land to build another student dormitory. Students, however, had become less interested in tall, impersonal buildings. Unable to fill their existing dorms and not knowing what to do with their land, the University allowed the vacant lot to become an informal parking lot.

In the spirit of Abbie Hoffman and his book Woodstock Nation, with which I resonated, a small band of radical activists decided to turn the parcel into a “People’s Park.” They raised some money, bought sod, bushes, and trees, and invited everyone to help create a park with no formal leadership. Decisions were made spontaneously, as first scores and then hundreds of people joined in. Within two or three weeks, a remarkable collective creation flourished. As the University’s website states, “People from all walks of life came to participate [in] a huge group effort creating solidarity and community.”

The project was discussed at Bay Area political rallies, where people were urged to help defend it. Frank Bardacke researched the parcel’s history and wrote a leaflet that was widely distributed. In the background, there was a half-tone photo of the Native American resistance leader, Geronimo. Across the top, in large, bold letters, the title read “WHO OWNS THE PARK?” The text read:

Shortly thereafter, in the early hours of the morning, the University erected a fence around the park. At Noon, thousands of people gathered in Sproul Plaza. When the President of the student body, Dan Siegel, spoke about possible actions, he started to list a series of options. The first option he mentioned was, “We could go tear down the fence.” As soon as he completed the sentence, the crowd immediately started moving down Telegraph Avenue toward the park. The street was so congested I went down one block to take a detour. As I turned to go toward the park, I saw people running away with their shirts ripped off and their backs bleeding.

As the demonstrators had approached the park guarded by local police forces, some rocks had been thrown and the Alameda Country Sheriffs, known as the “Blue Meanies,” repelled the demonstrators with shotguns, killing one man who was only watching from a rooftop and blinding another. [Years later, a jury found the sheriffs innocent of any crime, concluding that they acted in self-defense.]

For the next several weeks, the city was in total chaos. Demonstrators held open meetings at night to decide on the next day’s tactics, which normally consisted of marching through the streets of Berkeley more or less randomly, avoiding tear gas and arrest as music blared from the windows of houses as we passed by. Governor Ronald Reagan called out the National Guard and declared, “If they want blood, let them have blood.” Bardacke debated the Mayor of Berkeley on live television, winning handily. Public opinion polls showed that the overwhelming majority of Berkeley’s citizens supported the park. But the University refused to allow it, apparently feeling that defending the principle of private-property rights was paramount. I could go into any restaurant, sit down, and start talking with total strangers about the struggle.

Prior to Memorial Day, the call went out to people from throughout the state to join us for a major demonstration on that holiday. Tens of thousands participated. As we marched through Berkeley, National Guard sharpshooters stood on rooftops with their rifles pointed at us. I feared a massacre if the march turned violent. But non-violence prevailed. As we got next to the park, people tore up the asphalt street and planted grass. The overall mood was festive. That night, at “People’s Park Annex,” the celebration continued with drummers, bonfires, and people jumping through fires, sometimes colliding mid-air and almost falling into the flames. It was very primordial and enchanting.

The conflict died down after that, but the next spring, on Bastille Day, another demonstration took place at People’s Park and I participated in tearing down the fence. It never went back up. Eventually, the University and the City of Berkeley negotiated a compromise that has allowed the park to remain.

After the Woodstock Music Festival, the journalist Andrew Kopkind wrote in Rolling Stone magazine, “For those who never experienced the intense communitarian closeness of struggles like Cuba or Paris in May or People’s Park, Woodstock gave them a glimpse of what life could be like after the Revolution.” I seldom remember what I read word for word. But that sentence rang true and has stuck with me, as has the amazing sense of community that we felt in Berkeley during those days.

San Francisco, Phase One

By stroke of luck, in the middle of this turmoil I was offered a position as Intern Minister at Glide Urban Center in San Francisco, home of Glide Church, which was headed by the renowned, charismatic African American, Rev. Cecil Williams. Feeling that official roles like that of an ordained minister placed professionals on a pedestal, undermined egalitarian relationships, and promoted dependency, I accepted the job and never returned to seminary.

Since Glide had its own private foundation and was very involved in the world of foundations, I was hopeful that working there would enable me to find support for democratic, grassroots organizing without the blessing of the institutional church. After a number of discussions, I even agreed to leave my magical redwood house in the Berkeley hills and moved into the Alternative Futures in Ministry commune in San Francisco.

Explicit “faith” dropped by the wayside. I trusted instead that an implicit affirmation of long-term, humanistic, progressive values would suffice, rather that a clear affirmation of any particular faith tradition or philosophical worldview. But “love and action” remained central to my efforts to build communities that engaged in political action and offered their members mutual support.

Apparently influenced by my reports about the Residence College, a number of Bay Area seminaries had established the Alternative Futures in Ministry commune on the same, freeform model. Or perhaps, after the turmoil of the New Seminary Movement, they decided to seduce potential troublemakers away from seminary campuses into the wild “Barbary Coast” of San Francisco. Located in a former apartment house that had previously been turned into a church, about fifteen seminarians, some wives, and myself lived together and shared meals.

At Glide, I helped with the psychedelic light show in the sanctuary during Sunday morning “celebrations,’ operated multi-media equipment during educational workshops conducted by Glide’s National Sex and Drug Forum, and assisted with occasional conferences. Mostly, however, I was free to do whatever I wanted.

One decision I made was to get arrested along with some ministers associated with Clergy and Laity Concerned when the police secretly transported Black Panther leader Bobby Seale across country to Chicago to stand trial for conspiracy following the demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic Convention, which the Chicago police all too eagerly had helped turn into a major riot. Not only did we object to the unnecessary secrecy, we felt that the conspiracy charges themselves were unjustified.

In a number of cities during this period, the Nixon Administration filed charges of felonious “conspiracy” against anti-war demonstrators. Prosecutions could have resulted in lengthy prison terms. Though largely unsuccessful in their legal objectives, these trials did intimidate potential activists and contributed to paranoia and divisions among those who risked organizing any political demonstration that might turn violent, even if provoked by police.

So we conducted a “sit in” in the U.S. Marshal’s office demanding that the veil of secrecy about Seale’s location be lifted and were arrested when we refused to leave. Being church people, we were treated lightly and let off with a slap on the wrist.

In early December 1969, the same weekend of the free concert by the Rolling Stones at Altamont that involved considerable violence and one murder, I went to Los Angeles to participate in an Urban Plunge conducted by the New Adult Community, which was led by Jim Donaldson, a Methodist minister. Donaldson had studied at Perkins School of Theology at the same time that Bill Holmes and Cecil Williams had been students there and Joe Matthews was a prominent professor. Matthews had started the campus ministry in Austin where I had participated in my first Esalen-style workshop and later started the Ecumenical Ministry in Chicago, where the lead organizer of the New Seminary Movement, Rich Smith, had received training. In these ways, though I never met him, Matthews greatly influenced my life.

The Urban Plunge was a weekend marathon conducted by a team of several people with 20 or 30 other participants. On Friday night, the men went to gay bars and the women went to lesbian bars and then gathered to have late-night men’s and women’s groups to discuss their experiences. On Saturday, we ate next to nothing and visited with black organizations in the ghetto to address racism and other political issues. When we returned to our meeting place, starving, the staff brought out a feast, sat in a circle, and proceeded to eat. After none of the participants objected, some of the staff circulated amongst us and forcefully challenged us about why we were so passive, sometimes pushing people around, asking, “How much will it take before you start acting?” Eventually, after much turmoil, the staff let us eat. Later on, there was music and dancing, and the rest of the weekend was positive and future-oriented, while still geared toward examining traditional roles and political realities.

Following the Plunge, I spent Sunday night in one of the New Adult Community houses. In the middle of the night we received a telephone call. The Los Angeles Police Department was conducting a raid on the Black Panther Party headquarters and the Panthers wanted us to come witness the events and show support. At the scene, barricades were erected nearby to block off access. With 100 or 200 people, we stood vigil.

After sunrise, when the police finished with the Panthers, the officers near us moved forward in formation to clear our intersection. When they did, a few rocks were thrown. As they approached me, I gave them the Nazi salute and walked away. As my friend and I headed toward our car, the formation reversed direction and moved toward us. Suddenly a few officers broke ranks and ran toward us. Instinctively, as I had always done in Berkeley, I ran. But in the South Central ghetto, as a white man, I stood out more than I did in Berkeley. I dashed between two houses, hoping to hide, but found myself trapped. The police encircled me and beat me fiercely with their nightsticks, splitting open my skull. They placed me in a car and repeatedly, convincingly told me that they were going to kill me. I believed them and wept uncontrollably.

They threw me into a jail cell with the Panthers, who still reeked with tear gas so strongly I could barely stand it, and charged me with a felony assault on a police officer. Once I went to court, the charges were reduced to three misdemeanors and I was told that if I pled guilty to one charge, the other two would be dismissed. I later learned that this sequence is typical in cases of police brutality. The victim is charged with a felony and then offered a deal so that once convicted, law suits charging police brutality are harder to win. With a lawyer paid for by Glide, I refused the deal and was found guilty on two counts, disturbing the peace and resisting arrest.

That Christmas, while working the holiday season at a Methodist Church in Squaw Valley in the Sierra mountains, I recuperated from my trauma and reflected on my experience. Seething with anger and feeling that I had merely been exercising my constitutional rights, I deepened my commitment to social change. In my case, the old maxim, “Repression breeds radicalization,” did apply.

I returned to San Francisco and invited my colleagues at Alternative Futures to organize our own Urban Plunge. We recruited people primarily by circulating brochures at Glide Church on Sunday mornings and used a similar format as the one in Los Angeles, except that on Sunday morning we would go to the celebration at Glide. At the end of each Plunge, all of the participants would be invited to help plan the next one. Invariably, several accepted the invitation, resulting in a self-perpetuating process.

Heavily influenced by the black, women’s, gay, and sexual liberation movements as well as the counter-culture in general, the thrust of the Plunge was to challenge traditional, consumer-oriented roles and inspire people to embrace the counter-culture and help build new counter-institutions. Sisterhood is Powerful by Robin Morgan heavily influenced most of us. And Sally Gearhart, a local lesbian activist who taught at San Francisco State, spoke at many of our plunges. But the feminist writer who affected me most deeply was Kate Millet, whose Sexual Politics revealed to me the domineering power trips that have commonly been associated with male "conquest" of women.

As we recruited more members through the Plunges, the size of the Alternative Futures Community grew and after the two-semester seminary experiment ended in May 1970, we stayed together using the same building as our center. Members moved into other houses in the city, typically several people living together in a Victorian flat, and we’d gather for shared meals weekly with 40 or 50 members, most of whom were white and in their 20s.

In the spring of 1971, two of us, Jed Riffe and myself, went to a small meeting to plan an anti-war demonstration in San Francisco to be held in conjunction with a large May Day demonstration in Washington on May 3. The goal of the Washington demonstration was to shut down the government by blocking all of the bridges and major intersections. At our meeting, I proposed that we try something similar in San Francisco – namely, tie up the Financial District by peacefully blocking entrances to parking garages and key intersections. The others eventually accepted my suggestion.

In both Washington and San Francisco, the police attacked the demonstrators and made mass arrests before the nonviolent blockades were implemented. But the chaos may have contributed to the end of the War in Vietnam, as pressure moved from the streets to the halls of Congress. Most of the arrests in both cities were thrown out of court for being illegal.

But the Nixon Administration filed conspiracy charges against organizers of the Washington demonstration and my San Francisco colleagues and I were afraid of being charged with conspiracy ourselves. Some of them went into hiding immediately afterwards.

I suppressed my fear, however, only to have it explode at the end of an Alternative Futures camping trip a few weeks later when I took some LSD and had a horrible bad trip that lasted for months. I ended up being hospitalized for three days in San Francisco, where I was convinced my roommate was J. Edgar Hoover and that planes overhead were dropping nuclear bombs, which prompted me to hold the hand of a Japanese man because I assumed he could understand.

Several weeks later, I flew to Dallas to see my friend, W. Robert “Bob” Beavers, who was still on the faculty of Southwestern Medical School, because I figured he was the most powerful man I knew whom I could trust. He placed me in the same institution where I had worked. After two weeks, he released me, strongly supported my returning to San Francisco, and told me that I could stop taking my medication after three months or so.

I returned to the Alternative Futures central building but after a few weeks, I started getting paranoid again. Then Riffe and some friends invited me to move in with them, which was an enormous relief. I, the organizer, didn’t have to organize this project. Rather, others took the initiative and welcomed me. The fact that the household of five adults also included two very young children was also extremely valuable, for I knew that I could trust the children, with whom I had a good connection. Children are transparent. Slowly but surely, I got myself back on my feet and got a job as a clerk downtown.

Post-recovery

Shortly after returning to San Francisco, I initiated a series of men’s weekends modeled after the Urban Plunge. I invited some old friends and members of various men’s groups around the Bay Area to plan it. The first meeting was remarkable. Everyone grasped the idea immediately and proceeded to work together as equals. It was one of those rare occasions when I’ve found myself working with a group free of power trips. We used the Alternative Futures Community as our base, had an excellent weekend (the first such gathering ever to my knowledge), and invited the participants to plan another. I participated in the next two or three, but gradually the ratio of straight to gay shifted from maybe 50-50 to predominantly gay, so I stopped participating because I felt less at home.

During this period, I connected with a social worker and a psychiatrist inspired by R.D. Laing who were starting to publish a newsletter titled Madness Network News. Deciding that I should use my own experience as an organizing tool, I helped mimeograph the first issue and then became a co-editor. Our articles countered the stigma associated with being a mental patient, exposed the inhumanity that is associated with the mental health system, and presented the Laingian perspective (also previously articulated by the psychoanalyst Karl Jung) that psychotic experience can be a growth experience that enables the individual to regress to a child-like state and then grow up anew into a healthier adult.

After a year or two, Glide Publications asked us to put together an anthology of our work, with some new material, the Madness News Network Reader. Working on the newsletter and book was a liberating experience, for it enabled me to overcome my shame about having “broken down.” The more I told people about having been a mental patient, I became less self-conscious about it. For money, I worked as an orderly at the country convalescent hospital and then as a mental health counselor at the Marin Crisis Clinic.

In 1974, I suggested to one of my co-editors who lived in San Francisco, Leonard Frank, that we launch a political organization to address the mental health system. After three exploratory meetings, four of us decided on the name, Network Against Psychiatric Assault, or NAPA (which was a play on words for the name of a nearby state psychiatric institution in Napa county) and our points of unity: no forced drugging, no forced shock treatment, no forced psychosurgery.

We recruited a panel for our first public meeting and with the assistance of a non-profit public relations firm, prepared a dramatic flyer, which we mailed to the Madness Network News mailing list. In the middle of a bus strike and a rainstorm, about 200 people came to our first meeting, which generated intense energy. We raised some money from foundations. I was hired as staff organizer. And we asked members and supporters to pledge monthly contributions. From time to time, we would terminate my employment and I would live on unemployment and food stamps.

When a neurologist informed us that the director of Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute at the University of California at San Francisco medical school suppressed open discussion at school about the dangers of shock treatment, or electroconvulsive therapy, we invited the director to an open public debate. When he refused, we held a demonstration in front of the Institute and proceeded to gather community support for a resolution calling on him to debate the issue in public. Soon, a key city Supervisor supported our demand and called the director before a public hearing to account for his use of shock treatment.

At the same time, we persuaded a state Assemblyman, John Vasconcellos, a devotee of Esalen Institute, to introduce legislation against forced treatment and convene hearings on the matter. The confluence of these two controversies, which received considerable media attention, led all psychiatric institutions in San Francisco to suspend their use of shock treatment. After various compromises, the Vasconcellos legislation was narrowed to focus on shock treatment. It passed, and required the state mental health department to compile and issue annual reports on its use of shock treatment, including the number of instances of forced treatment.

Prior to the 1976 Presidential campaign, one of the early candidates, Senator Birch Bayh, convened hearings on psychiatric drugging in Washington, D.C., and I was invited to testify. Walter Cronkite covered the hearing on his evening news and used footage of my testimony.

After being elected Governor, Jerry Brown appointed the United Farmworkers chief doctor, Jerome Lackner, Director of the state Health Department. And Lackner appointed one of the four co-founders of NAPA, Don Goldmacher, as his Director of Research. Feeling that we had support at high levels, we went to Sacramento and conducted a sit-in in the Governor’s office demanding a meeting with the Governor as well as action on forced treatment and forced labor in psychiatric institutions. Concerned about our health under the fluorescent lights, Lackner invited us to rotate taking breaks by visiting his house, which had a swimming pool. The demonstration lasted 30 days, a record for such sit-ins.

On the third of July, we were informed that the Governor was willing to meet with some of us at Lackner’s house. After waiting some time, Brown showed up at about midnight, as the clock changed to Independence Day. As I recall, he had never met Lackner’s wife and wasn’t very friendly with her as he entered. Then he turned to Lackner and abruptly said, “What’s going on here? Why haven’t you solved this?” I considered his attitude rude, but at least he was willing to talk with us.

We began by showing him a 90-minute documentary, Hurry Tomorrow, which had largely been filmed inside Metropolitan State Hospital in southern California. It was a scathing indictment of the brutality and inhumanity at that all-too-typical institution and included an interview with me during which I discussed the debilitating effects of the time-released anti-psychotic drug that I had received when I was discharged from the San Francisco hospital. I compared it to chemical rape, a violation of my soul.

After the film, Brown continued to talk with us for hours and pledged to look into our issues further. Shortly thereafter, Lackner asked the state legislature to conduct an investigation into deaths in state mental hospitals. The results of that study proved terribly embarrassing to the State when it was released and prompted new regulations on acceptable dosages for psychiatric drugs. Again, as with the New Seminary Movement and the campaign against shock treatment in San Francisco, our initial demands weren’t met, but unforeseen improvements did result.

On the legal front, NAPA worked with the Brown Administration to pass legislation requiring each local mental health director to appoint a patients' rights advocate to help resolve complaints posed by clients. In order to increase the independence of these advocates, I proposed that the legislation allow for each county to contract with a private non-profit corporation to provide these services. My recommendation was adopted.

One notable NAPA action was a campaign against “sleep therapy” at St. Mary’s Hospital in San Francisco. After drugging troublesome adolescents so heavily they would sleep for days, the staff would wrap the inmates in sheets like mummies, forcing them to urinate on themselves while restrained. During a national mental-patients rights’ conference, we marched to the hospital, conducted a picket line outside, and some of us used a key loaned to us by a friend who worked there to enter the locked ward to confront the staff face-to-face. With TV cameras running out front, we left the ward just before the police arrived. Shortly thereafter, along with a friendly TV newscaster, we paraded up and down the aisles of the prestigious St. Mary’s Cathedral during Sunday mass carrying a “patient” wrapped in a sheet on a stretcher, while passing out flyers asking the parishioners to stop the abuse at their hospital. Within no time at all, the hospital stopped using “sleep therapy.”

NAPA soon splintered, however. The original idea behind the organization was to build an alliance between patients, ex-patients, mental health workers including psychiatrists, and members of the general public, all of whom would have an equal voice. Membership was open; anyone could join. We had a kitchen in our office, where we prepared community meals, held public seminars, and threw parties. Overall, there was a strong sense of community. Some of the more active members, however, who were ex-patients, were hostile toward any mental health worker who walked in the door. They wanted the organization to be only for patients and ex-patients, an approach similar to black, women, and gay separatists. Eventually, I pushed the issue, forced a vote, and when I lost by one vote, I left the organization. NAPA continued for many years thereafter and did some good work, but never regained its prior effectiveness.

During these years, I joined the governing boards of Baker Place (a halfway house for ex-mental patients) and Westside Community Mental Health Centers, worked on other citywide issues such as successfully placing limits on high-rise development and rent control, and played a leadership role in two San Francisco Community Congresses, which developed proposals for reforms in local public policy. The first Community Congress led to the election of City Supervisors by district rather than citywide, which gave citizens more direct access and a greater voice in city affairs. I was also invited to serve on Vanguard Public Foundation’s first “community board,” which decided how to disburse half of the foundation’s grant money. Being the only white man on this board provided me with a valuable, rewarding experience.

San Francisco, Phase Two

After leaving NAPA, I immediately looked around for other political work to do. Initially, I took a six-month job with the statewide Campaign Against More Prisons and organized and conducted a series of public forums throughout California in opposition to the construction of more prisons. We were able to help hold off the push for a while, though years later the prison-industrial complex got the upper hand and started building prisons like crazy.While collecting unemployment insurance from the gig with the Campaign Against More Prisons, I went to a meeting of the Citizen’s Action League (CAL), an organization inspired by the Saul Alinsky style of organizing, which consists of identifying a widespread complaint in a specific neighborhood and mobilizing the residents to agitate dramatically, non-violently, until City Hall agrees to implement a reform. The meeting was very spirited and well conducted. Being very concerned about environmental issues, I joined their Muni Committee, which focused on improving San Francisco’s public transit system, the Municipal Railway, or “Muni.”

A key issue was the looming threat of a fare increase, which would hurt low-income citizens and reduce the use of public transit. The State Legislature was on the verge of passing legislation that would require every transit district to raise one-third of its revenue from the fare box, which would force repeated fare increases. After working on the issue for a while, given the need to mobilize enormous pressure in Sacramento, my closest colleagues and I proposed that CAL form a coalition to address the issue. The leaders objected, however, arguing that their primary interest was building membership in CAL and increasing its effectiveness.

So we left CAL, started another organization, the Muni Coalition, and raised a small grant to pay me a subsistence salary. In the early morning, we’d go to the yards where the buses were parked and leave flyers in every seat. The response from riders was strong. Then we met with progressive organizations in the East Bay and formed the Bay Area Transit Coalition. Despite our efforts, however, the legislation eventually passed.

After moving to the Outer Sunset neighborhood near Ocean Beach, I soon decided to focus on neighborhood organizing and left the Muni Coalition, which continued for many years as a small but respected voice for improved public transit. Our efforts had not stopped the fare increase, but they did leave behind a community-based organization that persisted.

Shortly after I moved to the Outer Sunset, our neighborhood food co-op, Other Avenues Community Food Store, was threatened with closure. The city was laying new streetcar tracks in front of the store, which caused sales to plummet. And the founders were getting burned out and leaving. So I was hired as the Coordinator and served in that part-time position for a few years. My connections in the foundation world enabled me to get us a small grant that enabled us to survive. During the construction, all of the other workers were volunteers who bought food at a discount in exchange for their labor.

We sold healthy food, much of it organic and in bulk, with customers serving themselves. We strictly limited our markup to keep prices low. As part of a network of similar stores throughout the country, we paved the ground that led to the growth of corporations like Whole Foods and persuaded supermarkets to adopt many of our practices. Initially, however, we were definitely a “counter institution,” controlled by our customers, any of whom could come to our meetings and have an equal vote. A few years later, the store became a worker’s cooperative and moved one block up the street. It still thrives as a valuable, community-oriented business. Several of us who worked at the store used our contacts with our customers to organize the District Eleven Residents Association, a neighborhood group that lobbied on various issues and regularly went door-to-door to register voters, distribute campaign literature, and get out the vote. We also threw occasional square dances in the local church, clam bakes on the beach, and volleyball games at Sutro Park. On New Year’s Eve, we had a “progressive party,” going from house to house throughout the night.

When the owner of my home, where I lived with three other people, tried to demolish our house to construct a large condominium, the neighborhood rallied in support of us, turning out in sizeable numbers at public hearings. Eventually, the Coastal Commission voted in our favor and stopped the demolition.

On occasion, when large demonstrations would happen downtown, a bunch of us would jump on a streetcar together and join in. We had a vibrant, neighborhood-based sense of community rooted in vaguely defined common values.

In 1981, Don Goldmacher invited two of my former associates at NAPA, Steve Sears and Leonard Frank, to join him and two other psychiatrists at an international “Alternatives to Psychiatry” conference in Cuernavaca, Mexico featuring Franco Bassaglia, an Italian psychiatrist who had led the replacement of a locked psychiatric institution with a voluntary community-care facility, and David Cooper, who had worked closely with R.D. Laing in England. A few hundred people, mostly Mexicans, participated.

As ex-mental patients, Sears, Frank, and I represented a novelty, garnered considerable interest, and gave some good speeches to large crowds. In combination with the hospitality of the Mexican people and the beauty of its country, the conference inspired me to initiate a new organization affiliated with this loose international network. We called it the Bay Area Committee for Alternatives to Psychiatry (BACAP) and began with a roughly equal balance of ex-patients, psychiatrists, and others, as had been the original intent with NAPA.

I soon got myself appointed by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to the countywide Mental Health Advisory Board, which unlike most such boards had some real power because state legislation required that it approve the annual mental health plan that was required to qualify for state funding. With that board, I initiated a process of developing an informed consent process for the administration of psychiatric drugs. Our intent was to adopt drug-information sheets detailing possible benefits and risks that would be given to all outpatients prior to their signing consent. We held a public hearing on the dangers of psychiatric drugs that was well covered by local media. As my term on the Board was nearing its completion, I thought that we had reached an agreement on the content of the sheets, but then I discovered that the administration made a major last-minute change without consulting with my committee. After I left the board, I discovered that the drug-information sheets were never utilized.

In addition to convening our own international Alternative to Psychiatry conference in San Francisco, another major focus of BACAP was dealing with a six-million-dollar law suit filed against Leonard Frank and other unnamed defendants. An official in the state health department had alerted us to the fact that a psychiatrist in Stockton, Alan Gunn-Smith, was administering a high volume of shock treatment to elderly patients, often against their will. As staff in the office, Frank and I called a press conference to denounce his practice.

In response, Gunn-Smith sued Frank and others to be named later for libel. We lined up pro bono counsel from one of the most prestigious law firms in San Francisco, Morrison and Foerster, so when Gunn-Smith and his lawyer came from Stockton to the Morrison and Foerster conference room to depose Frank, they were greatly impressed by the strength of our support and the spectacular view of the San Francisco Bay from their high-rise offices. Shortly thereafter, they dropped the lawsuit.

BACAP, however, had not clearly adopted an understanding that Frank and I as staff had the authority to act without approval from the full committee and the threat posed by the lawsuit, which could have included loss of medical licenses, created considerable tension within the organization. After a while, most of the psychiatrists stopped participating for reasons that weren’t completely clear but seemed to me to be related to this tension. So, since the original idea was to grow an alliance between ex-patients and psychiatrists, I withdrew from the organization and it soon folded.

During my time with BACAP, I continued my neighborhood organizing in the Outer Sunset, but after a few years, in 1982, the lure of money and power pulled me away from those efforts. A group of public interest lawyers with Public Advocates had organized a statewide Emergency Food Coalition to bring affordable food to inner-city ghettos that had been abandoned by supermarket chains. Having strong connections with the Brown Administration, they had raised a large sum of government money from the state for this project. During planning to start a consumer-controlled co-op in San Francisco’s low-income South of Market neighborhood near several high-rise buildings that housed senior citizens on fixed incomes, they invited me to serve as store manager and offered me a substantial salary, much more than I had ever earned before. In combination with the opportunity to be part of a potent statewide coalition, the money seduced me. Then, because my round-trip, public-transit commute took two hours or more and I wanted to be closer to the action downtown near City Hall, shortly after being hired I moved to a South of Market apartment, breaking my ties with the Outer Sunset.

As it turned out, the manager of one of the nearby senior housing units had had considerable political experience in the Philippines and proceeded to organize the residents of his building to take over the store. I had to call on all of my skills as an organizer to mobilize seniors in the other buildings to withstand this effort. But we succeeded and managed to get the store on its feet. For several years, until the non-profit organization that owned the storefront leased it to a fast-food outlet as supermarkets started entering the neighborhood, the store enabled folks in the neighborhood to get better food at much better prices with much less effort

While working at the South of Market Grocery, in 1983, I moved into a residential hotel in the North of Market neighborhood, the Tenderloin, which was (and still is) a multi-racial ghetto. Some radical Catholic priests had raised money from Franciscan Charities to buy some residential hotels as a way to preserve low-income housing. Their plan also involved maximizing tenant participation in the management of the buildings, including moving toward eventual tenant ownership.

The building I moved into had been called the Aarti Hotel, a single-room-occupancy building with shared baths. We kept the name, calling it the Aarti Cooperative Hotel, and knocked out walls in some of the rooms to create a communal kitchen and living room on each floor, while leaving 40 rooms for living. Each room had a sink.

After I had lived there for a while, Rob Waters hired me as Associate Editor at the award-winning neighborhood newspaper, The Tenderloin Times. Published by Hospitality House, a multi-service agency, we practiced “advocacy journalism” and often proved to be a thorn in the side of City Hall when the mainstream media picked up our stories. An article in The New York Times about homeless people dying on the street, for example, prompted me to suggest that we investigate that issue in San Francisco. After extensive research, we published a report that eventually prompted the City to issue its own annual report on homeless deaths, which helped to dramatize the hardships suffered by homeless people. After a while, I became Co-Editor along with Waters and Sara Colm.

At the Aarti, we advertised in the neighborhood and screened applicants, looking for people committed to the cooperative ideal. A few other people with college degrees like myself joined, but most members ended up being low-income people from the neighborhood struggling to get their feet on the ground. We assigned responsibilities, shared meals, and threw some good parties with live jazz organized by a musician member who was a cab driver. A pretty good sense of community developed, with strong multi-racial and cross-class participation.

From the outset, however, tension between the tenants and the board of directors of the non-profit corporation that owned the building undermined the project. Initially, the main problem was that the Franciscan priests idealistically wanted the tenants to work totally without any compensation. The tenants, including me, objected. We argued that the board should pay the tenant’s association what they would otherwise have to pay a manager. After one or two years of argument, the board finally relented and after another period of negotiation, signed a one-year management contract with us. The tenant’s association hired me as Resident Manager. During that year, we met our budget and managed the building well.

While living at the Aarti and working at the Times, my fellow editors and I occasionally became directly involved in helping to organize various projects. One effort of mine was the Tenderloin Jobs Coalition, which aimed to persuade nearby hotels to hire Tenderloin residents. That effort had only limited success.

My main project was securing funding for an alternative mental health program, the Tenderloin Self-Help Center. A close friend, who had worked with the Chair of the city’s Health Commission, introduced me to him over lunch in a neighborhood dive. Following our discussion, the Times convened a public forum on problems with the San Francisco mental health system. The forum was well attended and received good press coverage. Shortly thereafter, the City offered a $500,000 contract for a self-help center and Hospitality House won the contract.

From the outset, I had pushed for the center to be client-run, based on models elsewhere that had been successful. The basic idea was that the clients themselves would hire and fire the Executive Director and establish key policies, with Hospitality House overseeing the operation and retaining the power to intervene if initial agreements were violated. I felt that neighborhood activists generally agreed with this concept, but prior to signing the contract, Hospitality House hired a new Executive Director who vehemently opposed granting so much power to the clients.

A series of conflict-resolution sessions produced a vague compromise and I recruited someone from Esalen to conduct some “active listening” workshops for peer counselors. But the agency’s lack of commitment to client empowerment soon became clear to me. Although the center operated for many years and provided valuable services, it never fulfilled my dream.

When the lease on one of the Aarti’s storefronts, a bar called the 509 Club, was running out, one of our members picked up on an idea that I had casually mentioned and suggested that we take over the bar and turn it into a neighborhood cultural center. I responded enthusiastically, got a grant to help, and lined up some volunteers from a labor union to assist with the renovation.

Initially, when meetings were open to anyone who wanted to participate, interest was exceptionally high. Fifteen or twenty of our 40 members would participate in meetings. But after people agreed with me that we should select a small committee to manage the center, interest declined, though we still had some lively events. The most memorable was parties thrown by a group of bicycle managers, who were as raucous when they partied as when they rampaged through city streets on their bikes. I also recall when Michael Franti and Charlie Hunter dropped in for a benefit. Our regular jazz jam sessions were often very stimulating.

After five years at the Aarti, however, I felt like I was beating my head against the wall and that the project might not work without me, which was counter to the cooperative ideal. After learning some details about the taxi industry in San Francisco from a fellow member who drove a cab, I decided to drive taxi for several months, save some money, and hit the road. I figured that it was best for the co-op not to be dependent on me. If it were to flourish, the co-op would need to sink or swim without me, at least for a while. I didn’t rule out returning to the Aarti, but in the spring of 1988 I decided to take a long vacation on my motorcycle, not knowing where I’d end up or how long I’d be gone. (As it turned out, the tenant’s cooperative folded but the 509 Cultural Center flourished, eventually expanding to the award-winning Luggage Store Gallery on Market Street.)

Going National

After hanging out at Harbin Hot Springs for a few days, I put a copy of a biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson in Gary Snyder’s mail box in the Sierra foothills, left a note suggesting that he get Robert Redford to make a movie based on it, and headed east. After a visit with my father and some friends from high school in Texas, I dropped in on the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, and went to Key West. Then I parked my bike in Miami (illegally in a long-term storage unit) and flew to the Dominican Republic (DR).

One of my taxi passengers had recommended the north coast of the DR as a beautiful, affordable place to experience the Caribbean. First I stayed in a concrete hut on the beach for $2 per day (including breakfast) and then I lived with a family with nine children, all girls, in the nearby hills.

As I wrote a few years later:

These reflections led me to concentrate on the need for major change in national economic policy in the United States. In neighborhoods throughout the country like the Tenderloin, human-service agencies are swamped by human misery. One can help a few people get a handle on their lives, only to be confronted with more people at the front door asking for assistance. The sense of swimming upstream is overwhelming. Most of this misery is due to policies established by the federal government.

So I decided to go to Washington, DC to see what folks there were doing to address poverty on a national level. After getting part-time jobs doing research for the Center for the Study of Psychiatry and telephone fundraising for the anti-war organization, SANE/Freeze, I connected with Chester Hartman and Sean Gervasi at the venerable Institute for Policy Studies, where I ended up serving as a de facto intern. I also started attended services at the prestigious national Metropolitan Memorial Methodist Church, which was headed by my minister from Dallas, Bill Holmes (it included among its members a Supreme Court justice and other luminaries). I then walked in the door of the Social Concerns Commission for the national Methodist Church and offered my services to its director, George Ogle. After telling me it was the first time anyone had ever volunteered in that manner, he asked me to prepare a research report on “solutions to poverty.” This phrase crystallized my focus. My research, however, led me to discover that no advocacy organization in Washington had adopted concrete proposals for ending poverty in this country.

After I had published an article on my conclusions in the national Methodist magazine, Christian Social Action, Bill Holmes quoted from it during a series of sermons on poverty, which boosted my self-confidence. And shortly thereafter, I presented a seminar on my research at the Institute for Policy Studies, where I received a positive reaction. These supportive responses encouraged me to return to San Francisco to work with low-income people in the Tenderloin to develop these ideas more fully and then, hopefully, help strengthen anti-poverty efforts nationwide.

For money, I realized that I could drive taxi part-time for money and be free to do my community organizing as a volunteer without having to prove anything to any foundation. Little did I appreciate at the time that driving taxi would also help me keep my finger on the pulse of the mainstream, enable me to learn from my passengers, and provide me with more money than I’d ever had, which taught me first-hand the value of the economic security I had been writing about. Nor did I realize that I could I place my name on the first-come, first-served list to become an owner (or co-owner) of my own cab company (which I did and moved to the head of the list several years ago).

Upon returning to San Francisco in late 1989, I organized a public forum in the Tenderloin in March 1990 and invited people to participate in a Solutions to Poverty Workshop. About 20 people began meeting every two weeks to develop specific proposals for how to end poverty in the United States. Generally, I’d research issues and present questions, proposals, and options for discussion and decisions at our meetings.

Our initial focus was on defining what a single person needed to avoid poverty. Once we answered that question, we considered what families of various sizes needed. Early on, we decided that rather than propose an automatic guaranteed annual income, as the welfare-rights movement from the 60s had done, we would advocate instead for a guaranteed living-wage job opportunity to be assured by increasing federal funding for public-service jobs.

After considering other essentials for avoiding poverty, such as health care, childcare, and retirement income, we calculated what our proposals would cost and determined how we could raise the funds needed to implement them by restoring progressive income tax rates, transferring funds from the military budget, and increasing tax income by boosting economic growth. It took us about one year to finalize our proposals, at which point we gathered co-sponsors for a San Francisco Antipoverty Congress in early 1991. Our Congressperson, Nancy Pelosi, presented the keynote address to about 100 participants. Following considerable discussion, the participants in the Congress adopted our proposals by an overwhelming majority.

After that vote, however, considerable dissension developed over whether we should add a plank about education to our platform. I explained that the Workshop had focused on essential requirements that are absolutely necessary for eliminating poverty for the country as a whole, including people without a high school degree. Other measures, such as improved education, training, and other social services can help people advance individually, but completion of such programs should not be a requirement for being offered a living-wage job. Even people without formal education have skills that can be applied to meaningful work and they should be provided decent job opportunities, but there are never enough jobs for everyone who wants to work. We wanted to focus like a laser beam on that issue and other absolute requirements for assuring everyone the real opportunity to avoid poverty. Other participants in the Congress, however, offered various arguments for including a point on improved education.

When the proposed amendment on education came to a vote, the less educated participants generally opposed adding a requirement concerning education, but the college-educated professionals present prevailed by a tiny majority. In planning the Congress, we had agreed that any new proposals from the floor that were adopted spontaneously would be re-considered at a follow-up meeting to allow time for further research and reflection. At that second meeting, we decided to stick with the original 10-point program and to launch a new organization, the Campaign to Abolish Poverty (CAP), to promote it.

By mid-1993, we had persuaded Congressman Ron Dellums and several other congresspersons to introduce the Living Wage Jobs For All Act based on CAP’s call to guarantee the human right to living-wage employment – the linchpin of its program.

By this time, however, I had withdrawn from the organization and had begun writing a book, Economic Security for All: How to End Poverty in the United States. Under the leadership of Barbara Arms and in association with the national Full Employment Coalition, CAP continued to engage in advocacy and public education on poverty-related issues.

While working on my book, in August 1995 The Nation published “A Call to Citizens: Will Real Populists Please Stand Up “ by Ronnie Dugger, founding editor of the Texas Observer. This article elicited an enormous response and shortly thereafter a few hundred people, including myself, gathered in Chicago to respond to his call for a new populist organization. I was selected for the national steering committee, led their Economic Insecurity Task Force, and coordinated their Internet presence and communications. In late 1996, delegates from 30 states convened in Texas to form the Alliance for Democracy. The next year, we convened a successful national meeting in San Francisco that drew large crowds and considerable media coverage.

I particularly resonated with Dugger’s call for “deep systemic change.” But over time, it became increasingly clear to me that the Alliance was adopting policies that weren’t consistent with my own beliefs. In terms of long-term goals, I disagreed with trying to totally dismantle all large corporations by replacing them with “democratic, human-sized economic systems.” And in terms of strategy, I objected to the lack of focus on winnable, short-term objectives and the reluctance to affirm simultaneous efforts in every aspect of society.

Though the Alliance’s position on these issues was ambiguous, when I developed some written proposals to clarify these matters, neither the San Francisco chapter nor the national body responded with any significant degree of support, so in 1997 I resigned from the national governing body. The Alliance continued to do good work on a number of specific issues for several years, including protesting the election irregularities in Ohio during the 2004 presidential election.

In 1996, I initiated the formation of the Economic Security Project, which published a limited edition of Economic Security for All as well as an online edition. Overall, the response was positive and I still occasionally receive enthusiastic emails from people who find the book on the Web. In its Central City office (on the edge of the Tenderloin), the Economic Security Project promoted federal action to guarantee economic security and in our Internet Learning Center provided low-cost computer rental and free training services to low-income San Franciscans.

About one year later, when the Institute for Policy Studies and the Congressional Progressive Caucus launched the Progressive Challenge based on the “Fairness Agenda for America,” the Economic Security Project circulated a petition for individuals to endorse the Fairness Agenda, which had been endorsed by over 100 progressive organizations. Its principles included: Dignified Work; Environmental Justice; Economic Redistribution; Democratic Participation; Community Empowerment; Global Non-Violence; Social Justice, including Racial and Gender. I felt that this project illustrated the kind of comprehensive approach focused on achievable objectives that I had been seeking with the Alliance for Democracy.

During 1998 some associates and I organized the San Francisco Progressive Challenge in support of the national Progressive Challenge, hoping to set an example of how local coalitions could rally in support of that program. To my knowledge, however, no other similar efforts formed. Then in early 1999, we faced the likelihood that Bill Clinton was going to rush NATO into a war against Yugoslavia in support of efforts by Albanians in Kosovo to secede from Yugoslavia. So we organized anti-war forces and tried to meet with our Congressperson, Nancy Pelosi, to persuade her to oppose this needless escalation.

Pelosi refused to meet with us, however, and supported Clinton’s militarism, which was apparently in large part an effort to take the military card away from the Republicans by demonstrating that Democrats were willing to wage war. In so doing, however, Clinton placed the nation on a slippery slope, for the Republicans then had to be even more militaristic to prove that they were “stronger” than the Democrats, which they did when they invaded and occupied Iraq.

The war against Yugoslavia was hardly the success that it appeared to be on the surface. As Michael Mandelbaum wrote for the mainstream Council on Foreign Relations in “A Perfect Failure: NATO's War Against Yugoslavia” for their September/October 1999 Foreign Affairs:

By forcing out of Kosovo the international observers who had kept a lid on the ancient hostilities between Albanians and Serbs, the war unleashed those tensions and resulted in a great increase in mutual brutality. In the name of protecting the Albanians, the war enabled the Albanians to brutalize the Serbs with as much ferocity as the Serbs had inflicted on the Albanians. Once again, rather than mediating, the United States took sides and escalated the situation. For the last eight years, NATO has suppressed the violence, but if they leave and give the Albanians their own country, which will include sites of religious significance to the Serbs, the violence will likely recur, for there has been no negotiated political settlement.

Years later, I happened to pick up Nancy Pelosi in my taxi at the San Francisco airport and drove her to the city. Along the way, I asked her, “Do you have any second thoughts about having supported the War Against Yugoslavia?” She responded initially by saying that the Clinton Administration had assured her that the war would be over quickly (it ended up requiring almost three months of massive bombing), and then proceeded to ramble at great length, more or less concluding that she had no regrets about her decision. About one minute before reaching our destination, she asked me what I thought. Recalling the phony negotiations that preceded the war and that the Albanians were basically wanting the Serbs to give them valuable land with little or no compensation, I answered, “I think they should have negotiated in good faith and sent in more peacekeepers.” Pelosi didn’t respond, so I asked her a question about the Presidential campaign and dropped her off.

In early 2000, while continuing to drive taxi part-time in San Francisco, I moved to a cabin in the Santa Cruz mountains, where I took a partial sabbatical from activism and brainstormed online with some 30 or so associates about possible new projects that could strengthen the progressive movement. Initially, I collaborated with Aileen Hernandez and Eva Paterson in developing the “Proposal for Community Dialogues with Elected Officials.” I also volunteered as Co-editor of Inlet.org, a progressive portal that published and highlighted ad-free progressive media on the Web.

In late 2001, I began writing a summation of my reflections, gave Howard Zinn a draft of “A Vision for a More Peaceful World” when he visited Santa Cruz, and suggested that he write a similar vision statement of his own. Zinn responded by saying:

This unsolicited endorsement encouraged me to consider more fully how the progressive movement might be more effective. With considerable input from a number of people, I developed the “Proposal for a Million Member Monthly Mobilization” and gathered some initial endorsers for it from some progressive leaders.

Following an April 2002 Time/CNN poll that found "most Americans believe the United States should halt or reduce economic and military aid to Israel if Prime Minister Ariel Sharon does not immediately withdraw troops from Palestinian areas," Inlet.org published a “Petition for Peace in Palestine” that called on the President to:

1. Work as a neutral mediator in the conflict and stop taking sides with Israel.
2. Apply strong pressure on both sides to reject terrorism.
3. Tell Israel that the United States will stop sending military aid to Israel unless Israel withdraws completely from the West Bank and Gaza.
4. Offer substantial aid to assist economic development for both countries once peace is established.
5. Support sending international monitors or peacekeepers to the region.

As the Bush Administration, following Clinton’s example, moved toward an occupation of Iraq in late 2002, I placed on hold my strategic brainstorming and applied for the Iraq Peace Team – a project of Voice in the Wilderness, an organization under the leadership of Kathy Kelly that had for many years been protesting the devastating economic sanctions against Iraq. When they accepted my application, I joined a team of some 30 antiwar activists from several countries, including members of the Christian Peacemakers Team. Our commitment was to stay in Baghdad throughout the invasion.

I joined because I wanted to be with the victims of what was being done with my tax money, be a spokesperson for the antiwar movement, and observe and report on events in Iraq from first-hand experience. Before I left for Iraq, Inlet.org started publishing my online Baghdad Journal, which eventually was read by about 1,000 people a day throughout the world.

My experience in Iraq was very rewarding. I felt that I was where I needed to be. Especially during the first few days of the bombing when the telephones still worked, media outlets in our respective countries were very interested in what we had to say. Once the assault began, Iraq Peace Team members inspected bombing sites, visited casualties in hospitals, and reported back to me at our headquarters, where I coordinated our Web-based report, “Civilian Casualties and Infrastructure Damage in the 2003 U.S.-led Attack on Baghdad,” which included extensive photos.

Being in the middle of the war was like being a frog placed in lukewarm water that is slowly heated. One gets used to it. But I’ll never forget the heart-rending stories that the Marines told us once they took over our neighborhood. One commander, for example, talked about how he hadn’t been sleeping because he knew that he had killed innocent civilians when he made split-second decisions that proved to be wrong. These soldiers had signed up to get a college education and George Bush used them to get re-elected by sending them to kill people whose nation had never even threatened to attack the United States.

Overall, though ironing out wrinkles working with strangers had its difficult moments, I was able to make a positive contribution to the peace team, in part by facilitating some well-run meetings under very stressful conditions. Others seemed to appreciate my efforts and I cherished the solidarity that emerged. I was where I needed to be. We didn’t stop the war, but we did everything we could and our analysis and predictions have proven correct. On a personal level, I feel more grounded and self-confident as a result of my service with the Iraq Peace Team.

In early 2004, I moved back to San Francisco, formed the Strategy Workshop, and self-published Promoting the General Welfare: A Campaign for American Values, which elicited considerable positive feedback, including another warm endorsement from Howard Zinn, who wrote:

In early June 2004, I participated in the Take Back America 2004 Conference, reported on it in an article for Common Dreams, and discussed the conference at a Strategy Workshop in San Francisco. This forum led to another workshop shortly thereafter with Susan Strong, founder of the Metaphor Project, and that event led to the formation of the independent Reaching Beyond the Choir Project, which elicited participation from other parts of the country following an article in Common Dreams. In early 2005, this project issued a report on the results of its deliberations.

Working on the Reaching Beyond the Choir Project clarified for me certain points concerning long-term goals for the progressive movement and led me to write and circulate "An Open Letter to the Progressive Community," in which I argued:

These reflections also led me to conclude that we need to articulate a holistic, or systemic, analysis of our current situation and shape our proposals for action accordingly. During this period, I frequently shared with the Strategy Workshops articles of interest that I discovered and would occasionally post questions, for which I would invite members to offer responses. One set of questions included the following:

1. Does it make sense to talk about "the System"? Does a particular social system prevail in this country at this time?
2. If it does make sense to talk about "the System," does it have a primary purpose? If so, how can we best describe that purpose in one sentence?
3. Do we need to "change the system"? If so, how can we best frame a message that affirms “systemic change”?

I also circulated these questions to a number of prominent progressive spokesperson. Overall, I was a bit surprised that the response was very mixed. It seemed that less than half of the people with whom I consulted clearly affirmed a systemic analysis. These discussions led to a public forum on April 2, 2005 with former State Senator John Vasconcellos, who spoke on