"Pardon us, friends, for the fracture of good order, for burning paper instead of babies."

That quote is from Daniel Berrigan, SJ, one of the "Catonsville Nine" whose raid of a suburban Baltimore draft board center and burning of over 600 draft files on May 16, 1968, made national headlines and galvanized the anti-war movement.

Berrigan served one of the longest of the resulting prison terms: 18 months of a three-year sentence. His brother, Phil--also imprisoned for the Catonsville raid--has continued to this day participating in, and being imprisoned for, direct actions against the US military and especially nuclear symbols.

Let us agree, for the purposes of this article, that the United States government, presently propelled by one George W. Bush, represents, along with its patrons, an extraordinary, even unprecedented threat to the lives of countless people in an extraordinary number of places around the planet. And, moreover, to the very existence of countless other plant and animal species everywhere on the planet--even in the places humans don't go. If you disagree with that statement, you need read no further. This article is not for you.

That leaves an awful lot of people who should still be reading.

The last time there were this many crises in the air, over 30 years ago, a burgeoning civil rights movement informed and inspired a decade-long struggle to stop the war in Southeast Asia, which in turn helped birth the feminist, environmental, farmworker and Chicano, Native American, and countless other vibrant, effective movements. Battles--nonviolent and otherwise--were lost, and won. Young white people massed in once-unthinkable numbers; for several years, every summer brought struggles across the south, and for summers after that, fresh waves of black riots in inner cities.

Today, there is no longer Jim Crow--unless you want to vote in a close presidential election in Florida or in any number of other states--and there is no war in which hundreds of thousands of Americans are fighting, many of them dying, on the soil of a distant country. Just as the crises of the '60s were different from those that prompted Depression-era hunger marches and sit-down strikes, today's crises resist comparison to yesterday's. Global warming. Large numbers of species extinctions. Genetically modified organisms and food. Sperm contamination in countless species (including ours), and contamination of all animals, including humans, with ever-increasing numbers of heavy metals and other toxins. Corporate dominance of media. Big business destroying small businesses, and whole communities in the process. In the US, two million people in prisons. Torture. Indefinite imprisonment without trial. Loss of civil liberties. Increasing poverty, hunger, and disease in much of the world, with an ever-widening gap between rich and poor, at home and abroad, enforced by US-dominated economic institutions and "free trade." Big corporations and the rich effectively no longer paying taxes, and using a fraction of their resulting wealth to buy off America's political system. The US military in 140 countries around the world, with open talk of literally conquering the world ("American Empire") and dominance through space-based and nuclear weapons. The list goes on.

In the civil rights and anti-war eras--and in the struggles of the 1930s, and previously through suffrage and union battles and abolition of slavery and all the other struggles for progress and human dignity that define this country's history--the long-term struggles were won. even as the individual battles were lost time and again. Occasionally, victories came through courageous court decisions or risk-taking politicians; far more often, they came through subtle, long-term shifts in society's attitudes toward a question, as the old not so much changed its mind but died off and was replaced by the new. And they came through people figuratively and at times literally going to the streets, a usually young, usually radical edge that drew attention to an issue and that expressed in vivid terms the more moderate concerns and activism of millions of others.

>From these came (and still come) people who take risks--risking their comfort, their jobs, their wealth, their bodies, their freedoms, even their lives--and who, by doing so in the service of a larger movement, demonstrate the depth of passion and commitment they bring to their demands for change--from freedom rides to voter registration drives to sit-ins and blockades and the burning of draft files.

Where are they?

The list of today's issues is neither frivolous nor abstract. When Daniel Berrigan spoke in 1968, lives were at stake. Today we're also talking about lives--literally, billions of them, human and otherwise. It's serious stuff. It demands a creativity and commitment strong enough to overcome countless people with unlimited money working 24/7 to achieve bad things. It requires a response more passionate, and a risk greater, than dropping a dime in the check-out counter donation display, or chanting "No justice, no peace!" for a half-hour, and then rushing home and wondering why we aren't on tee-vee.

To be sure, there are risk-takers among us. The internationals who've traveled in recent months to accompany Palestinians, protecting them at times with their very bodies, are an obvious example. They helped draw attention to Israel's perpetration of atrocities in a way that didn't happen during Israel's similarly thuggish invasion of Lebanon 20 years ago. And there are other effective examples--the tree-sitters (most notoriously, Julia Butterfly Hill) whose dedication has saved some Pacific Northwest old growth and brought at least a bit of attention to the ongoing destruction of our forests; Jennifer Harbury, whose hunger strikes on behalf of her kidnapped (and, as it turned out, tortured and murdered) Guatemalan husband eventually both brought that case to light and forced, at least until 9-11, ostensible reforms in how the CIA operated.

They are drops in the bucket.

Other people have been taking risks in recent years--the Plowshares movement, for example, in which Phil Berrigan and others nonviolently witness (mostly in obscurity) against America's nuclear juggernaut. Most visibly, global justice protesters have risked tear gas, pepper spray, and jail simply for showing up in the 30 months since WTO came to Seattle.

But these are mass street protests--a phenomenon both painfully familiar to the public and one whose message is too easily muddled or co-opted. Either the public sees the crowds as violent young hooligans deserving police brutality, or the protest is transformed into a debate over the right to protest itself, and the original intent is lost.

We need protesters, to be sure, and we need letter-writers and lobbyists and researchers and artists with a mission and people who donate their dimes. But we also need something riskier: smaller, rarer, and both more focused and more accountable. What is needed is the 2002 equivalent of Catonsvilles: direct actions in the US that have a clear and obvious connection to their issue, undertaken by people who are "respectable" in mainstream eyes, articulate, and willing to take public responsibility for what they do in order to change what is done in all our names.

Think, for example, of how much different the coverage would have been if the anti-GMO arsonists who torched research offices at UW last year had been middle-aged professionals who stayed at the scene, took responsibility for their deed, and used the resulting trial and publicity to articulately lay out their case for why property destruction was less of a crime than the genetic engineering research that, to their thinking, threatened countless lives. ("Sure, arson is bad. Why, there was even a tiny risk of somebody dying--as opposed to the certainty of a lot of people dying, had that research proceeded.") Many, many people believe that to be the case; if they genuinely do believe it, surely someone among them thinks the cause is worth, say, a few years of their personal freedom for the chance to block those deaths, and make their case publicly in the bargain. Committing a "crime" to prevent a larger crime isn't, even legally, a crime--in actuality, it's the highest expression of citizenship.

Instead, such an arson becomes labeled the work of anonymous vandals, or worse (and, after September 11, more likely), anonymous "eco-terrorists." In the fire's aftermath, what little coverage there was of the issue that apparently prompted the arson was given entirely to the often inaccurate or misleading claims of the researchers themselves and their backers.

The same holds true for just about any of the urgent issues our society faces. That's not an argument for arson or property destruction; it is an argument that people who believe there is an imminent threat to a lot of lives, or all life on earth, need to stop being so freakin' casual and polite about it. If we believe our own words, there should be people with something to lose refusing to pay their taxes (see the story on Wally Nelson elsewhere in this issue), or blockading or occupying someplace unexpectedly and holding it (say, an INS prison where "detainees" are being held: "If they're staying here, so are we. Go ahead, shoot us. Deportation will be a death sentence for them, too."), or otherwise unexpectedly and creatively clogging the gears in the machinery of death.

We talk of life and death, but don't risk arrest because we'd lose our job. Or our family would be upset. Or we don't refuse taxes because the IRS might send a rude computerized form letter or even (gasp) garnish our wages. Honestly.

In our last cycle of this resistance stuff, there was a war going on that a lot of Americans were fighting in--some willingly, some not. Many of the people in the military were risking their lives. The contrast then was much more direct: if they're risking and even giving their lives in a pointless sacrifice to bad ends, we should be willing to take similar risks as an effective contribution for good. It was true then; even without the obvious foil, it's even truer today.

We must be intentional; we must be focused; we must be creative and life-affirming; we must set the agenda, not react to it. The assholes who flew into the World Trade Center spent years planning their vile act; they moved halfway around the world, mastered a new language, even went to flight school. It's a worthy example--not the mass murder part, but the part where they put a lot of time and effort, including learning specialized knowledge, into an act that had the potential to in their case literally galvanize the world. (Unfortunately, it did.)

Today, unlike 30 years ago, most "evil-doers" have learned not to take those risks themselves; they run corporations, or program computers, or drop bombs from 40,000 feet, or design weapons of mass destruction for use somewhere else on someone else. They have names, and addresses, and many of them live quite comfortably here in the purported Land of the Free.

If anything, their lack of personal risk-taking, and the ideals they betray, make their acts even more despicable. But that just heightens the impact and power of the kind of risk-taking that it's inevitably going to take to help stop them.

What are we waiting for?