83yo peace activist jailed awaiting sentencing for trespass in Oak Ridge, TN

83-year-old Bloomingdale peace activist awaits sentencing for trespassing on federal property in Tennessee
Published: Thursday, May 19, 2011, 7:40 AM Updated: Thursday, May 19, 2011, 10:15 AM
By Gabrielle Russon | Kalamazoo Gazette




BLOOMINGDALE — Less than a week before her 84th birthday, Jean Gump sits in Blount County Jail in Tennessee after she and 11 others were found guilty this month in U.S. District Court for trespassing on federal property in Oak Ridge, Tenn.

Gump, who lives in Bloomingdale, has been a longtime regular on the protest circuit, from her days marching with Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement to weekly picketing outside the Federal Building in downtown Kalamazoo to protest U.S. military action.

In her most recent protest, Gump and other anti-nuclear protesters tres­passed July 5 at the Y-12 National Security Complex, according to a news release from U.S. Attor­ney William Killian’s office.

The Y-12 facility, known as the Manhattan Project, was where the nuclear bomb was developed that was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, during World War II.

more...

http://www.mlive.com/news/kalamazoo/index.ssf/2011/05/84-year-old_bloomingdale_peace.html

Will we ever be able to "retire" from our protest "circuit"?

and plan and raising a whole bunch of more trouble before I depart this Earth. There's quite a few young folks willing to throw down. But I'll admit, not nearly enough.

I appreciate your activism, and I didn't just mean civil disobedience. That definitely has its place, but it isn't for everyone.

I have been trying to get younger people here to become more active. Just trying to convince them that democracy isn't a spectator sport, and just getting them to write a danged letter is like pulling teeth!

I appreciate your efforts very much! We are getting tired.

When you are 83 and still standing up for what you believe in to the point of getting arrested, you are a national damn treasure.

mindset that prevails in a society wherein so many would seemingly make a mockery of his/her oath of office by voting to extend the so-called Patriot Act, an act which is unpatriotic on its face imnsho. :patriot:

Well worth the time!


The Crime of Ms. Jean Gump
She poured blood on a missile hatch and got eight years in federal prison.
By Lila Sarick


The 96-acre federal women's prison in Alderson, West Virginia, is surrounded by an eight-foot-high chain-link fence topped with three strands of barbed wire. The penitentiary is set in the rolling Appalachian hills and is modeled after a college campus. Inmates live in ten-person dormitories, called cottages, or in single rooms if they've been there a long time. Fifty-eight-year-old Jean Gump receives her husband Joe, and other visitors who make the 12-and-a-half hour drive to see her from Chicago, in a room that resembles an airport lounge, with vinyl chairs and blaring televisions. In nice weather, however, she and Joe can go outside and walk past picnic tables and flower beds and playground equipment provided for prisoners' visiting children.

At Alderson the usual trappings of jail -- cells, bars, and watchtowers -- are absent. But the demeaning customs fostered by institutions still remain. Gump's mail is sometimes opened, she is strip searched, and inmates are counted regularly.

Gump views prison as a place to practice love and tolerance. "I have to think of my jailers as people. We have to have strip searches. I find it so vulgar, so demeaning, so intrusive, it just makes me cringe. But that guard is just trying to feed his family. Maybe, if there were no other jobs, I'd be doing that too."

Jean Gump broke the law in the early morning hours of Good Friday, March 28, 1986.



The early morning sun was beginning to glow red over the horizon as a trio ran through the dew-soaked Missouri field.

Silently, a young, bearded man cut the chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, while his two companions, another man and a woman, hung banners beside the scarlet sign that warned them not to enter.

Beside the warning sign, the pair hung a photo collage of the woman's 12 children and 2 grandchildren. Alongside it, they hung a pennant that bore the group's logo: "Swords into plowshares -- an act of healing."

The trio then clambered through the hole in the fence and entered M-10, a Minuteman II missile site at Whiteman Air Force Base, Knob Noster, Missouri.

lots more...
http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/the-crime-of-ms-jean-gump/Content?oid=870513

In fact, she sounds a lot like Dorothy Day:
Dorothy Day: Giving Proof that the Gospel Can Be Lived
11/18/2009
Sharon Autenrieth
Dorothy Day was an anarchist and a pacifist who was arrested multiple times throughout her life (the last time when she was in her 70s). The FBI had a 500 page file on her, and J. Edgar Hoover hoped to see her arrested for sedition. She’s also been called “the most significant, interesting and influential person in the history of American Catholicism” (by historian David O’Brien in “Commonweal” magazine), and the Vatican has approved considering her cause for canonization.

That’s my kind of saint. I love Dorothy Day. In the great communion of saints, there are a handful of people that I look to as my heroes and role models, my “household saints”. Dorothy Day is one of them, and today is her birthday. She was a “sign of contradiction”, “holiness not easily domesticated”, to quote Robert Ellsberg. She managed to defy stereotypes, and confound both supporters and opponents over the course of her life.

Her radical politics came before her conversion to Catholicism, but her political commitments only grew deeper when she came to faith. In the gospel she found a rejection of power, oppression and violence and a call not only to serve the poor, but to be one of them. Her advocacy for justice was now accompanied by a devotion to works of mercy and to life in community. Along with the eccentric French peasant and itinerant teacher Peter Maurin, Dorothy founded the Catholic Worker movement. I am reminded of Frederick Buechner’s line that “God makes saints out of fools and sinners because He has nothing else to work with.” I think Dorothy would have enjoyed that, and agreed, seeing what came from the partnership she had with Peter Maurin. There are now over 185 Catholic Worker houses of hospitality, including three in St. Louis, and it all started with soup and coffee in Dorothy’s kitchen.
http://www.sisterfund.org/news/dorothy-day-giving-proof-that-the-gospel-can-be-lived


Dorothy Day talks about voluntary poverty and anarchism. This clip is from a 1970′s television special, “New Heaven/New Earth” which interviewed Day. Dorothy Day was a Catholic, a professed anarchist, and an advocate for the poor and an advocate of pacifism. In her early years she worded as a journalist for some radical newspapers and as an activist for socialist and anarchist causes. After converting to Catholicism, she pondered how best to take the life and example of Jesus seriously. In 1932 she met French Catholic Peter Maurin, who had developed an idea for a “green revolution,” which combined rural farming with establishing houses of hospitality in cities on behalf of the poor. Out of this idea grew the Catholic Worker movement, aimed to unite workers and intellectuals in joint activities ranging from farming to educational discussions. The movement grew quickly. Within three years their monthly newspaper, The Catholic Worker, had a 150,000 subscribers, and houses of hospitality had sprang up in other cities outside of New York. The workers at these houses commit themselves to voluntary poverty and works of mercy.
Dorothy Day talks about voluntary poverty and anarchism. This clip is from a 1970′s television special, “New Heaven/New Earth” which interviewed Day. It is available for purchase at cost from the Marquette University Catholic Worker Archives.
(Video at the URL)
http://www.jesusradicals.com/theology/dorothy-day/

Thanks for that posting.

But fer Christ's sake. Invade another country based on lies? Torture innocent people? Ignore basic safety and cause a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? Destroy the world's economy through fraud? Retire and live well.

Trespass for peace? Go to jail, even if you're 83 years old. What a great country we live in.

It definitely *does* sound a bit :crazy:

But we can't hold people with status and $$$ accountable. We must "move forward, not backward."

GAK.