A Handful of Buttons
Looking back on a life of protest, dissent, social action, taking long rides on buses to Washington, D.C to march and carry signs or banners, I was not the bravest one in any of those crowds. I was never arrested or threatened or intimidated by bystanders shouting their very different opinion of war and politics.
I collected buttons marking these events and am loath to throw them away.
I recall long walks, holding lighted candles on the steps of a wall opposite The United Nation Building to honor dead soldiers and civilians, but I did not have a button for that nighttime watch.
In the 1980s, I joined a group of nuns and priests near the Judson Memorial Church, facing Washington Square Park, that posted on its facade every day the number of people killed the day before in a foreign war.
There were huge handmade puppets with people inside, a group from the “Bread and Puppets Theater”, accompanied by a loud and raucous brass band, that marched with nuns and priests and ordinary people like me to protest the wars in Afghanistan, Central America and Iraq. We assembled in Washington Square Park, near the church.
I talked with one older nun who had known and marched in protests with the Berrigan brothers, Daniel, a Jesuit priest and Philip, of the Josephite order. They had burned, with napalm, the records of the Cantonsville, Maryland draft board and were sentenced to three years in prison; that arrest and conviction brought them to the attention of draft opposers nationwide and led to more huge crowds following them wherever they led a march.
There is a square button with two figures in the center, on a white circle, holding hands with one hand and dancing with their flags in their other hand. The button celebrates the hope for peace between Israel and Palestine. Peace, in six languages, surrounds the dancers on a black strip that forms the square shape of the button.
A large, round button marks a bus ride I took to Washington, D.C. Our bus was one among many to form a fleet of buses on the highway in 1991, during the presidency of George Herbert Walker Bush, our 41st President. The buses stopped at The Mall, I believe. The button was marked January 26th, but with no year marked on it. There’s a bloody hand print on a white circle at the center of the button. On the red hand print is written in black letters: No Blood For Oil.
It serves to remind me that since I was born in 1939, we have been involved in overseas wars or “ Police Actions”, the euphemism for the war in Korea.
When I could still walk, my friend, Bart, urged me to join The Shorewalkers, a group that walked the entire perimeter of Manhattan, calling it The Great Saunter. The walk threw a spotlight on the fact that large portions of the waterfront cut off citizens from a view of the rivers that surround the city, either by buildings or large fences marked ``Private Property”. I could never do the entire 32 mile walk, but one year, I joined Bart at the starting point in lower Manhattan and went on to the red lighthouse under The George Washington Bridge, which was the finishing point of half the walk for me.
On that occasion, we were joined by an elderly man whose voice was gravelly and had tremors in it, but was very familiar to me. He told us that this would be his last walk for he was too old to do it anymore.
The man was Pete Seeger, who I heard singing with his group, The Weavers, at their last concert in 1955 in Carnegie Hall before they were blacklisted. His activism including songs of protest and his early membership in 1940 in the Communist Party when it was the only group opposing the union busters, thugs employed by big business to intimidate and often beat and encourage the arrest by corrupt policemen of union members.
My Shorewalkers button is just a small blue and white button, but it represented a companionship with Pete Seeger’s efforts to clean up The Hudson River. His Sailboat, The Clearwater, succeeded in calling attention to the polluted waters until finally, The Hudson was cleaned up.
The last time I heard Pete Seeger singing was at a fish fry on the far side of the river.
His performance was unannounced, so it was by sheer luck that I was there to hear him play his banjo and sing some of his most well-known songs. There was no button to buy or ask for. The occasion was a celebration of the clean water to which fish, once native to these waters, had begun to return.
I have heard that sturgeon used to swim in the Hudson and, just think, those Native American tribes who used Manhattan Island as a summer resort before Hendrik Hudson claimed the river for the Dutch, might have been feasting on fresh sturgeon and caviar!
What have we learned, the buttons ask me? And I reply: protest, march, carry banners and signs, and wear buttons to remind you that you did not just watch, you participated as long as you could walk or ride a bus and cheer for singers and dancers who hated war, loved peace and hoped for change. And so, how can I bring myself to toss in the garbage pail that handful of buttons?
