| Peace group lauds activists
By ARTHUR JONES
Los Angeles
The evening of Nov. 2 began with guitarist Roy Zimmerman singing
Phil Ochs-style satirical lyrics about the Bush administration. Guitarist Ross
Altman added fuel to the sardonic fire. It ended with actor Martin Sheen, Blase
and Theresa Bonpane, and the United Farmworkers’ Dolores Huerta linking
arms with a dozen others -- including Rabbi Leonard Beerman -- in the bima,
the sanctuary, of the University Synagogue on Sunset Boulevard, to sing,
“We Shall Overcome.”
None of this is hard to believe about an organization -- the
Office of the Americas, often called the OOA -- that has a downtown thrift shop
called “The Closet Liberal.” The organization, founded by the
Bonpanes and based in Los Angeles, recently celebrated its 19th
anniversary.
But this is not Left Coast radical chic -- this is serious
organizing in the interests of nonviolent change sometimes linked to serious
jail time. Board member Don White and both Bonpanes were jailed for protests
against the first bombings in the 1991 Gulf War.
A war threat later, Office of the Americas has organized since
mid-September the ongoing Friday evening peace vigils at Westwood Federal
Building to protest administration war aims against Iraq. Mid-October brought
members of the Office of the Americas with the Los Angeles-area Interfaith
Community United for Justice and Peace to Loyola Marymount University on Los
Angeles’ west side for a peace conference.
For the Oct. 26 antiwar demonstrations in San Francisco -- Blase
Bonpane was one of the speakers -- Office of the Americas joined with local
lead organizer, ANSWER -- Act Now to Stop the War and End Racism -- to fill the
convoy of buses that went up from Los Angeles.
At the synagogue, the Bonpanes, their colleagues and supporters
were marking the Office of the America’s 19th anniversary as an outspoken,
frequently organizing, deeply involved world peace and justice program that
started in the Bonpanes’ home.
Sheen, who plays President Jed Bartlett in the television program
“West Wing,” was a founding member. He paid rent for the group the
first three months when, in 1983, Office of the Americas formally moved into an
office. The money came from the check Sheen received for work on a movie of the
four U.S. Catholic churchwomen slain in El Salvador in 1980. He called Theresa
Bonpane and said, “I can’t take money for making a movie on these
great women,” and asked her to name five organizations that could use
it.
She included Office of the Americas in the five.
An underrated humanist
Forty years ago, Blase Bonpane was a Maryknoll priest in Central
America -- from where he and others were expelled for their involvement in
political protests and organizing.
Back in the United States, Blase Bonpane earned a doctorate, and
was a UCLA professor when he and Theresa Killeen, who had been a Maryknoll
sister in Chile, met and wed. They have two children, Colleen, a medical
doctor, and Blase Jr., a musician. (A favorite Bonpane family aphorism is:
“Don’t moan, organize.”)
Blase Sr.’s UCLA period was short-circuited, he said, when
California’s governor at the time, Ronald Reagan, told the regents to oust
him for outspokenness. Bonpane has worked as a commentator on Pacifica radio
network and for two years in the early 1970s was in La Paz, Calif., as editor
of Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers’ newspaper, El Macriado.
He twice made bids, unsuccessfully, for political office -- as a candidate for
the U.S. congress and, later, for the California state assembly.
He returned to teaching, organizing for peace, and protesting. In
the late 1980s, the Los Angeles Weekly called him as “the most
underrated humanist of the past decade.”
Today he’s Office of the America’s director, a professor
of ethics at Los Angeles Harbor College, and a KPFK radio talk-show host. His
books include Guerrillas of Peace: On the Air (Red Hen Press, 2000), a
collection of his radio commentaries and reports.
The curriculum vitae of Office of the America’s executive
director, Theresa Bonpane, almost outpaces her husband’s for social issues
involvement -- from Spanish-speaking specialist in L.A. public schools, to case
worker, to secretary of the East Los Angeles Town Meeting. In addition to
teaching educationally disadvantaged adults, she was a full-time volunteer for
the United Farm Workers in the early 1970s, later twice department chairperson
of English as a second language programs, board member of Women for Legislative
Action, and manager of Blase’s political campaigns.
From the late 1970s for a decade she taught English at Santa
Monica College, and is today active in committees that range from the Pico
Neighborhood Youth and Family Center to the Free Lori Berenson Committee.
In 1998 she founded the Los Angeles Peace Center Coalition, and in
2001 co-founded the Coalition for World Peace.
Acknowledging activists
It was honors night for 500-plus Office of the Americas
anniversary celebration attendees. First honored were Kelly Campbell and Barry
Amundsen, sister and brother-in-law of Craig Amundsen, who died in the Pentagon
on Sept. 11, 2001. The two are founding members of “September Eleventh
Families for Peaceful Tomorrows.”
Both have visited Afghanistan to commiserate with families there
who lost loved ones in the resultant U.S. bombing (NCR, Aug. 2).
Greg Palast, the U.S. journalist who reports for Britain’s
Observer Sunday newspaper and BBC television, was honored for his
investigations into the Bush family money trail, the Florida elections
irregularities that led to George W. Bush being elected by the U.S. Supreme
Court, the Bush administration’s quashed investigations of Saudi
Arabia’s financing of terrorist organizations, and influence peddling in
British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s cabinet “by Enron and others U.S.
corporations.”
(Few revelations could startle this gathering, one at which Blase
Bonpane referred to the current head of the U.S. government as “the
resident in the White House,” and acknowledged Martin Sheen as “the
acting president.”)
Acknowledging one of its own, Sheen was the Office of the
America’s other honoree. Yet Dolores Huerta, who introduced Sheen, had
insights about Sheen fresh even to this audience.
Cesar Chavez, said Huerta, had only three photographs in his
office: of Gandhi, of his own mother, Juanita, and of Sheen -- along with a
keepsake straw hat birthday present with the tag, “To Cesar, from Ramon
Estevez” (Sheen’s non-stage name).
“Martin,” said Huerta, “had a spiritual connection
with Cesar. When Cesar ended his fast against the use of pesticides, on behalf
of farm worker children dying of cancer, it was Martin himself took up the fast
to make it a ‘chain fast.’ He involved his children in the fast.
“When we did the 1994 March on Sacramento,” she
continued, “on Holy Thursday, it was Martin Sheen on his knees who washed
the feet of the marching farm workers.” Sheen “and his posse,”
she said, have been jailed for protests in Central America, for the United Farm
Workers and against war. “But Martin’s on probation and can’t do
anything right now.”
Said Sheen, “The world is in a much worse condition than when
I first became involved in peace and social justice issues. There are
infinitely more human beings with a far less certain future. It’s a world
made mad by the self-inflicted wounds of poverty, environmental disaster and
continuous wars and violence.
“Future generations deserve an explanation,” he said,
“or at the very least an apology for receiving such a pitiful inheritance.
Yet they have no choice but to accept this bitter cup as offered not altered,
and the contents are staggering.”
Yet what he found “truly miraculous,” said Sheen,
“is that in our dysfunctional culture there is no shortage of heroes or
martyrs who spring up along the way.” And he listed a dozen of them, from
well-known Catholic and other political and social leaders to priests and
people working for the oppressed, many being jailed for their nonviolent
actions. He accepted his award in their names.
The answer to why “a cynical culture such as ours
motivates” so many “extraordinary and committed people,” said
Sheen, is complex in “that we are all made so as to naturally seek a
transcendence with a power greater than ourselves. And while it may appear our
country is running the world, a higher power is actually leading it.
“And when we surrender to and rely on that higher
power,” he said, “we have discovered fire for the second
time.”
This is the fire, said Sheen. With a light that illuminates
“who we really are, it unites us with all of humanity, and when we commit
to healing human suffering wherever we find it, in all its forms, we win our
freedom and are made worthy of the long-promised blessings reserved for those
who hunger and thirst for peace and justice.”
Rabbi Beerman had opened the evening’s ceremonies with a
prayer “for a world of reason and compassion. Courage to those who work to
abate life’s miseries and heal its wounds. Those who are comrades in the
only battle worth waging -- the battle to create a more humane world.”
Sheen, the man who describes himself as “a human being first
and an actor second,” helped close the event by linking arms with those
around him, as guitarist Altman struck the opening chords to “We Shall
Overcome.”
Arthur Jones is NCR editor at large. His e-mail address
is arthurjones@attbi.com
Related Web site
Office of the
Americas
www.officeoftheamericas.org
National Catholic Reporter, November 22,
2002
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