The Times-Standard
June 19th, 2015
Global peace activist David Hartsough will speak on the “Power of Nonviolence” and his recently published book, “Waging Peace: Global Adventures of a Lifelong Activist,” at the Humboldt Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, 22 Fellowship Way in Bayside at 7:30 p.m. tonight (preceded by a potluck dinner at 6:30 p.m.). The Humboldt Friends Meeting, the Humboldt Unitarian Universalist Fellowship and the Veterans for Peace Golden Rule Project are sponsoring this gathering.
Hartsough has been active in peacemaking and nonviolent movements around the world and will share some of those experiences. He has used his body to block Navy ships headed for Vietnam and trains loaded with munitions on their way to El Salvador and Nicaragua. He has crossed borders to meet “the enemy” in East Berlin, Castro’s Cuba and present-day Iran. He has marched with mothers confronting a violent regime in Guatemala and stood with refugees threatened by death squads in the Philippines.
Hartsough’s stories in “Waging Peace” educate and encourage readers to find ways to work for a more just and peaceful world. Inspired by the examples of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., Hartsough has spent his life experimenting with the power of active nonviolence. His stories provide a peace activist’s eyewitness account of many of the major historical events of the past 60 years, including the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War movements in the U.S., as well as nonviolent efforts in the Soviet Union, Kosovo, Palestine, Sri Lanka and the Philippines.
“Waging Peace” is more than one man’s memoir. Hartsough shows how this struggle is waged all over the world by ordinary people committed to ending violence and war.
Hartsough will also be participating in the re-christening and launch of the Ketch, the Golden Rule at 2 p.m. Saturday at Zerland and Zerlang Marine Services, 1493 Fay Ave. in Samoa. The Golden Rule, found at the bottom of Humboldt Bay and refurbished by Veterans for Peace and others, was originally used in 1958 to protest the testing of nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands. It was part of Hartsough’s inspiration for his lifetime of peacemaking.
Hartsough is the director of Peaceworkers based in San Francisco, co-founder of the Nonviolent Peaceforce and co-initiator of World Beyond War: A Global Movement to End All War. Hartsough met Martin Luther King in 1956 and has been active in the civil rights and peace movements since the 1950s and has worked as a peacemaker in many parts of the world and helped build many nonviolent movements.
