It Runs in the Family by Frida Berrigan Read Free Book Online Page B

items checked off on a to-do list.
    It meant learning to fully embrace, enjoy, and celebrate my new role as mother, and to integrate the new responsibilities, graces, and challenges into the person I already am.
    Many women have to go back to work after six weeks, and most daycare centers take kids that young. But my husband and I made a choice to live on one salary. This choice means that we don’t go out to eat or to the movies that much, we don’t buy new clothes or expensive computer devices. We don’t have a lot of extra money, but we do have more time for family, for each other, and for the world.

    One Good Friday, I trudged down the side of the road carrying a small sign: “I am waiting for YOU to shut down Guantánamo.” We were marching towards the submarine base in Groton, CT. I was grateful for the orange jumpsuit that added a layer of warmth and the black hood that blurred my sight. It was nice to not be seen. Usually at demonstrations, I like to be out and about. In New York City, where I was an activist with the War Resisters League and Witness Against Torture for twelve years, I often opted to pass out leaflets or hold a lead sign in a demonstration. I even honed an outgoing, chatty, aw-shucks persona that helped me greet everyone with enthusiasm and openness.
    But New York City is not Southeastern Connecticut. Even when the response was hostile and barbed in New York, it was brief. Even the biggest haters are in a big rush in the Big Apple. In a city of eight million people, the person who tells you to “Get a job!” or “Move to Russia!” or who wants to “Behead all the Muslims!” is probably not going to be pulling you over for speeding on Route 32 or taking your gas money at the local Pump ‘N Munch.
    What I was really worried about was the people I already knew and liked who worked at the base or at General Electric—the big military contractor in the area. I was not quite ready to “come out” as a peace activist.
    Until moving to New London in 2010, I had never been friends or even acquaintances with people in the military or people who worked as military contractors. For years I have casually and professionally referred to them as Merchants of Death. I am a second-generation activist whose last name is synonymous with prophetic witness, long prison sentences, and military-related property destruction. We weren’t hanging out with army brats outside the local VFW. My dad was a veteran of a foreign war, but a repentant one. I knew lots of those—men haunted by their time in war, who were strengthened and healed by their resistance. But I didn’t know people who saw the military as a smart career move or a chance for adventure or the only way out of poverty. I wasn’t likely to meet them as a pudgy eleven-year-old wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the message “Join the Army: travel to exotic, distant lands; meet exciting, unusual people—and kill them.”
    Now I live in a town that sees its economic vitality as dependent on General Electric, the Coast Guard Academy, and the submarine base. My massage therapist is a subcontractor at Electric Boat, the company that makes submarines. My best friend’s new next-door neighbor makes great beer and also works for EB. Our old downstairs neighbors were in the Navy. When my car battery died, he helped me get my car started again despite my assertion that I knew what I was doing (which I did not). Half the moms in the local La Leche League and the play groups we love live on the sub base.
    Joanne Sheehan, my mother-in-law, the nonviolence training guru and long-time War Resisters League staff person, often says that it is easier to “speak truth to power” than to “speak truth to family and community.” She has lived in this area for more than thirty years. I am starting to understand what she means.
    It is a new thing for me to relate to people in the military across dinner tables, church pews, and street corners instead of across picket