Guilty of Peace Making.

I spent two days in February in a federal courtroom in Madison, Wisconsin, that was packed with peace activists. Even Dave Dellinger was there, one of the Chicago Seven, still keepin' on at eighty-five.

He and the rest of us wanted to witness the fate of two modern-day abolitionists, Bonnie Urfer and Michael Sprong. Part John Brown, part Mahatma Gandhi, Urfer and Sprong were on trial for the crime of attempting to save your life and mine.

That wasn't the official charge, of course. The official charge was criminal destruction of federal property.

On June 24 last year, Urfer and Sprong used a hand saw to chop down three transmission poles at the Navy's ELF facility in Clam Lake, Wisconsin, dismantling it for twenty-four hours. No one was hurt. (See page 19 of our August 2000 issue, "Giving the Ax to Nuclear Subs.")

ELF stands for Extremely Low Frequency, but there's nothing elfin about that naval operation. It's deadly serious business: the business of waging nuclear war.

The ELF towers send one=way messages to the U.S. fleet of Trident submarines loaded with nuclear warheads. And if the orders come for nuclear war, they would be delivered from the wires on the very poles that Urfer and Sprong chopped down.

At the trial, Urfer said, "ELF is the hair trigger to start nuclear war. It's continuously cocked and ready."

She and Sprong maintained they were acting in accordance with international law when they sawed down the poles.

"I believe that stopping the annihilation of life on this planet is lawful," testified Urfer.

But the judge wouldn't let them present a defense based on that argument. The only defense they were left with was that they were relying on the advice of a lawyer they had consulted months before they took up the ax. This lawyer, an expert in the field, assured them they had a legal right to do what they did.

Well, the jury didn't buy it. And after three hours, it returned a guilty verdict. Urfer and Sprong will be sentenced on May 5. They face a maximum of one year in prison and a $100,000 fine.

The issue of nuclear war may seem passe these days; the first Cold War is over, and the second one is still in the making. Nevertheless, the United States has thousands of nuclear warheads ready right now to hit targets within fifteen minutes from launch. It's not a pleasant thought to consider, but Urfer and Sprong have done so. And they took dramatic action, at some personal cost, to rouse the American people from amnesia about this threat that looms, even today.

There's nothing like the sight of a lightweight President doing heavy lifting for the wealthy to get the juices flowing. This month, Molly Ivins and Barbara Ehrenreich are in rare form as they lay bare the inequities of Bush's tax plan and expose the flimsiness of the justifications. For Bush's contributors, it's service with a smile. For the rest of us, the check's in the mail.

We've been trying to get an interview with the Indian novelist and activist Arundhati Roy for two years now. Finally, this month, we've succeeded, thanks to the persistence of David Barsamian. He met up with the author of The God of Small Things in Amherst this February, and his conversation with her delighted all of us who've read it here at the office. I'm usually in favor of instant gratification, but this was worth waiting for.