I am concerned with improving human rights and social conditions of all peoples. I'll share a little bit below about my experiences with various issues, groups, and peoples around the world. This is why I have often been involved with volunteer and
international organizations.
During my undergraduate days at Bethel College, Kansas I first became involved with
AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL. Years later, while doing my MA at the University of Kansas, I would take time to hike up a hill every Thursday night to a local restaurant where I joined others in writing letters on behalf of prisoners. This was a good way for people to get involved with what was really happening outside our USA borders. The Urgent Action letters were organized by AI and gave quite a few details about the situation and conditions of each prisoner-of-conscience and how they had come to fear for their lives and/or came to be in prison. Also, during my days at KU, I was involved with the
Lawrence Coalition for Peace and Justice and related organizations. The coalition has good links to other social justice home pages concerned with preservation and improvement of societies and security issues.
I should note that over a decade earlier, I had arrived at Bethel College the very year that men were once-again required to sign up for selective service--for a draft which not yet taken place.
This was a big issue there in the 1980 to 1983 period, and I eventually wrote a nice letter asking the U.S. Selective Service Agency to remove my name from there sign up list. (I did this two months after I had done my legal duty of signing up.) Three of the first twenty people indited for not registering were from Bethel College. I was proud of them. Of these three, two went to court. Eventually, even the one member of the 3 BC students who claimed religious objection received only community service--i.e. he was never sentenced to jail time; the other one who claimed philosophical reasons also was not sent to jail. One, under great duress, did finally register on his own. Meanwhile, across the USA, others who hadn't registered were not so lucky. Some went to jail.Sadly, mostly those who were arrested,persecuted and prosecuted were people of conscience, who had carefully thought out their rationale for opposition to any commitment to renewing a U.S. draft one day. Check out the punishment for a male not registering here:
LEGAL PUNISHMENT . I am also proud to say that Bethel College alumni and administrators agreed throughout the 1980s to support students financially who had lost their rights to student loans and federal or state grants for not registering. Bethel College
was founded by the Mennonites, who are one of the recognized traditional Peace Churches in the USA.
Every month I was at Bethel College, students were asked to fast for a day and have their cafeteria lunch money sent to an organization called
Bread for the World. It is a neat from of fund raising and a great empathy raising idea. Later, when I was teaching in public schools in Kansas in the early 1990s, I invited a speaker from
Heifer Project International to come to my classes and speak about hunger and the NGO's other projects work helping farmers become more self-sufficient in the underdeveloped and war-torn corners of the world.
My last year (1985)at Bethel College, I was co-chair of our city' NUCLEAR FREE ZONE Campaign Committee. We gathered signatures from the residents in North Newton, Kansas in Autumn 1984, i.e. while Ronald Reagan was busy spending our nation's money on the biggest military build-up in history. eventually in Spring 1985, the residents of North Newton voted 4 to 1 to make their city the first Nuclear Free Zone township in Kansas. This was done as part of the national and international movement of dissatisfaction against the dangerous status quo in Washington, D.C. and in the former Soviet Union.
(By the way, as a historian, I have always said that Reagan was just plane lucky!!! No other U.S. president in office outlived two--let alone--three Soviet Premiers. The passage of Soviet Premiers had occured almos biannually between 1979 and 1985. These deaths of RR's older counterparts in the Soviet Union was statistically unlikely--despite the bad health habits of USSR males. This remarkable series of deaths finally made the way for the much younger Michael Gorbachev who took office and began changing Post World War history.
Check out this site to find out more about the continuing
NUCLEAR FREE Zone Movement.
When I began to teach in Japan in 1992, I became more and more aware of the plight of the people in Burma via my hardworking Buddhist friends at
Burmese Relief Center--Japan, who led many actions promoting awareness of the Burmese victims of tyranny while I was living there in East Asia.
In December 1992 (and again in the subsequent two visits I made in 1993 and 1994) I took packages or medicine or clothing for for refugees living in Thailand.
The plight of the Burmese people suffering under possibly the worst political conditions in the world has affected me greatly and I want you to know more about how slave labor etc. is still going on in this nation (Myanmar) despite Aung San Su Kyi' release from house arrest on several occasions years. Please see:
Human Rights: Burma
A major concern for me--and a topic I have discussed with some of the soldiers and officers I have taught from NATO lands-- is the need to do something to reduce weapons in my home country and around the world.
I am happy that our world has made some strides against chemical weapons in recent years. (By the way, at Bethel College in I wrote my first term paper at on chemical and biological weapons used in the post WWII era.)I do hope the new U.S.A. president, Russia, and China join the United Nations and the Dublin process in banning land mines and bomblets as much as possible.
There are too many limbless adults (I saw this personally in Nicaragua when I lived down the street from a clinic.) and dead children due to them. I have visited centers for such victims in Vietnam and have visited Laos where so many mines were used and abused by American military leaders 4-5 decades ago.
Meanwhile, look here and see what chemical engineers have to say in support of abolition:
LAND MINES
I donate money to organizations like
DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS who also have a tremendous list of non-profit organizations in which you might consider donating your time and money as well.
The Doctors Without Borders are among other very important organizations on borders of such nations as Thailand where so many refugees from Burma are relocated, but where, nonetheless Thai military often prohibits the United Nations High Command on Refugees to carry out their work
(UNHCR)
.
Some good links for finding out more about our world and peace or social justice issues include:
Before leaving Nicaragua in 1996 I donated seed money to support teachers through
Mennonite Central Committee. I sought to aid teachers and education centers in rural areas & in the barrios near Managua since government commitment to the poor- and uneducated has dried up since the 1980s, i.e. after the non-Sandinista governments took over in the 1990s.
Please consider helping me continue to aid these people in the 1990s and in the coming millennium!!!!!!!!
If you would like to empower yourself and your friends, you are welcome to join these sites and make a statement to be sent to over 140,000 elected officials and other bureaucrats in order to make this country more democratic by participating on behalf of your concerns.
WE THE PEOPLE. Another site for sources of linkage is:
ACTIVISM IS PATRIOTISM.
The Draft and Conscientious Objection is an another important site for those who need to and ought to consider not supporting unjust wars, etc.
