KIM LAWTON, Correspondent: For the Occupy Wall street protesters in New York’s Zuccotti Park, it’s become a familiar sight—religious groups offering spiritual and moral support.

VOICES AT SERVICE: We represent. We represent. The New York City communities of faith. The New York City communities of faith.

LAWTON: Growing numbers of leaders from across the religious spectrum have been supporting Occupy Wall Street’s protest against greed and economic inequity.

REV. MICHAEL ELLICK, Judson Memorial Church, NY: This is not just a jobs issue. This is not only a health care issue or a pension issue. This is also a spiritual issue of the nature of what has happened in the United States and how we function as a people together. And that is very, very, much a matter of moral concern, not only to my Christian tradition but to Islam, and to Judaism, to Buddhism.

LAWTON: There have been regular interfaith prayer services at the park. And religious groups are also providing practical help by donating tents, food and money. They’ve been opening their facilities to the protesters, giving logistical advice and helping to get the message out.

ELLICK: Churches are an excellent place to organize this kind of information because we’re under the radar of commerce or of government.

LAWTON: Many say there is a prominent spiritual dimension to what’s been happening. Inside Zuccotti Park is a makeshift community altar, where protestors of all faiths come to pray or meditate. In several cities, protest chaplains—many of them seminary students—minster to the protesters.

ERICA RICHMOND, Protest Chaplain: We are here to provide a religious presence. We are here to listen to people, to hear what’s on their hearts. And we’re here to pray with people. And people do come up to us and ask us to sit with them in prayer, because people are in crisis and that’s why we are all here.

LAWTON: On this Sunday, United Methodists led a communion service. Participants said concern for economic justice is a core teaching of their faith.

REV. K KARPEN, Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew, NY: The Bible is all about just a fairer shake for people and God’s concern for all of God’s children, not just a small segment of the population.

LAWTON: Some religious conservatives have criticized the faith-based support of Occupy Wall Street calling it a 60’s style, leftist effort to redistribute wealth. The Family Research Council urged its members to pray that God would prevent what it called “these radical organizers from stirring revolution.” But faith leaders at the Wall Street protests deny any political agenda.

KARPEN: It’s a broad movement of religious groups to support what’s going on and really to support the conversation, not to take a particular side or another side, but just to say these are the things that we need to talk about.

And they say it’s only going to spread.

ELLICK: What’s very, very real is the frustration. And if people don’t think that’s real, if people don’t think that reflects a real existential reality for the majority of Americans, the faith communities see it. Because we are who they come to when mom can’t pay rent, when the immigration officers steal grandma and there’s no one home. I mean, we’re who they come to. So for us it is an obvious, immediate, moral imperative.

I’m Kim Lawton reporting.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: This weekend of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, religious services are planned around the country to remember him and his legacy. Some of them will be in synagogues that are honoring both King and the late Abraham Joshua Heschel, one of King’s many courageous supporters. Heschel is widely considered to be one of the greatest American religious figures of the last century — a rabbi, theologian, social activist and mystic admired by Christians as well as Jews. He would have been 101 years old this month.

Our segment was produced by Steve Brand, a New York filmmaker who is completing a documentary on Heschel called “Praying With My Legs.” Brand gathered powerful recollections from those who had known Heschel and who wish his prophetic voice were still sounding.

Heschel marching in Selma with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
(Photo courtesy of AP Images)

It was his participation in the civil rights movement that first made Heschel widely known. In a famous photo of the Selma march in 1965, its leaders wearing garlands, Heschel was the white man with the prophet’s beard, two to the right of Dr. King. That was the occasion on which Heschel said he felt he was praying with his legs.

Rabbi ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL (from file footage, “The External Light,” NBC, 1972): God is either the father of all men or of no man, and the idea of judging a person in terms of black or brown or white is an eye disease.

ABERNETHY: Heschel also publicly and passionately opposed the war in Vietnam.

Rabbi HESCHEL (from file footage, “The External Light,” NBC, 1972): How can I pray when I have on my conscience the awareness that I am co-responsible for the death of innocent people in Vietnam? In a free society, some are guilty, all are responsible.

PETER A. GEFFEN (Founder, Abraham Joshua Heschel School, New York City): The war in Vietnam, for Heschel, was an ultimate act of dehumanization — to no longer even see that there was an enemy on the other side who was a human being. And Heschel was convinced that if I act with a disregard for the humanity of my fellow human beings, I am ultimately — I am really ultimately attacking God.

Dr. Susannah Heschel

ABERNETHY: Heschel’s daughter, Susannah, teaches Jewish studies at Dartmouth College.

Dr. SUSANNAH HESCHEL (Eli Black Professor of Jewish Studies, Department of Religion, Dartmouth College): He upset a lot of people, because he felt his role was to go and tell people what they didn’t want to hear.

My father was sleepless over Vietnam. He would be up late at night — one, two, three in the morning — couldn’t sleep he was so upset. It was on his mind all the time.

ABERNETHY: Heschel’s experience of the Holocaust was one reason for his social activism. He had seen close up what racism and apathy can do, and how violence towards human beings often begins with the abuse of language.

Dr. HESCHEL: Hitler, he said, did not come to power with tanks and machine guns. Hitler came to power with words.

ABERNETHY: Heschel was raised in Warsaw and did graduate study in Berlin. Just six weeks before World War II, he was able to escape from Europe. Heschel’s late wife, Sylvia, remembered.

SYLVIA HESCHEL: There were sisters of his who were killed, and that was a very painful thing for him — very. His mother died of a heart attack as soon as the Nazis came to the door. She just fell to the ground. It was awful.

Sylvia Heschel

ABERNETHY: But Heschel never blamed God.

Ms. HESCHEL: He said God didn’t do it. Man did it.

ABERNETHY: Heschel’s biographer is Edward Kaplan.

Professor EDWARD KAPLAN (Author, SPIRITUAL RADICAL: ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL IN AMERICA): There are moments when he talks about overcoming despair and overcoming gloom. But the response to the catastrophe is not to focus on the catastrophe but to focus on human possibilities.

Dr. ARTHUR GREEN (Rector, The Rabbinical School, Hebrew College): When you asked Heschel Where was God during the Holocaust, his answer was always, of course, where was man? But if you read Heschel carefully, I would say, God cares. God weeps with man at his sufferings, God participates in human suffering, and therefore God was there in the Holocaust.

ANDREW YOUNG (Human Rights Activist): Whenever I get a little down or depressed I go get one of his books and I read the prophet Isaiah, what he has to say about Isaiah, because Isaiah was written at a time of the desolation of Israel, and yet it’s the loftiest vision of dreams for humankind. It’s peoples’ ability to have faith in the midst of persecution and destruction.

ABERNETHY: At the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, Heschel was a professor of social ethics and mysticism, two powerful strands of Jewish thought. From the prophets he learned to speak out about the world’s evils. From his ancestors, who were Hasidic Jews known for their ecstatic spirituality, he learned to celebrate life.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

Rabbi HESCHEL (from file footage, “The External Light,” NBC, 1972): I say that this world in itself is so fascinatingly mysterious, so challengingly marvelous, that not to realize that there is more than I see, that there is endlessly more than I can express or even conceive, is just being underdeveloped intellectually.

Rabbi MORTON M. LEIFMAN (Vice President Emeritus, Jewish Theological Seminary): One of Heschel’s main attempts in getting to you, in a sense, is his own sense of “radical amazement” — to be aware of so many different things: “Did you notice the trees?” Well, Heschel was in love with trees. You’re walking in Riverside Park: “Don’t forget the trees,” you know, “don’t forget the river.” You have to react.

ABERNETHY: Heschel described the spiritual power he felt as “the ineffable.”

Ms. HESCHEL: Oh, ineffable. He loved that word — that which is inexplainable but you know is there. It points to something beyond — that which we pray to, meaning God.

ABERNETHY: Heschel’s biographer notes his use of dramatic language to try to reach others’ hearts, not just their minds. He read a Heschel description of a mystical experience.

Prof. KAPLAN (reading): “A moment comes like a thunderbolt in which a flash of the undisclosed rends our dark apathy asunder. The ineffable has shuddered itself into the soul. It has entered our consciousness like a ray of light passing into a lake.” I can’t believe that someone could write a passage like this without having experienced it himself.

ABERNETHY: Heschel’s deep spirituality drew many Christians to him. He had many friends who were Christians, among them the Catholic priest and anti-Vietnam war activist Daniel Berrigan, who became a friend.

Father DANIEL BERRIGAN. S.J. (Human Rights Activist): I was seeing someone who was totally immersed in his own religious tradition and was at the same time charmingly ecumenical, you know, and open to others. I began to understand that the two went together, that if you were a person of deep faith you were open to others, and you didn’t draw lines or boundaries or say we’re inside the circle and others are out. He was one of the chosen who believed that everyone was chosen and that the very fact of existing in the world meant you were chosen.

ABERNETHY: Heschel fought all anti-Semitism. He campaigned for the rights of Jews in the Soviet Union, and at the Second Vatican Council, in the 1960s, he lobbied hard against church teachings that demeaned Jews or anticipated their conversion.

Rabbi HESCHEL (from file footage, “The External Light,” NBC, 1972): I came out with a very strong rebuke. I said I’d rather go to Auschwitz than give up my religion. My being Jewish is so sacred to me that I am ready to die for it.

ABERNETHY: Over his lifetime, Heschel published 18 books and more than 100 essays. He was driven to show the relevance of Jewish scripture to modern life. In THE SABBATH, he saw time as something to be made holy. In MAN IS NOT ALONE and other volumes, he said God expects and depends on human beings to carry out his will.

Dr. ARNOLD M. EISEN (Chancellor, Jewish Theological Seminary): So Heschel can say to the world, you know, the challenge today is nihilism. He says the enemy we all face is nihilism. The world is going to hell. The sense of meaninglessness is pervasive, and we have to do something about this.

ABERNETHY: His friends say Heschel did a lot about it by what he taught and even more by how he lived.

Rabbi HESCHEL (from file footage, “Directions,” ABC, 1971): We are called upon to be an image of God. You see, God is absent, invisible, and the task of a human being is to represent the Divine, to be a reminder of the presence of God.

ABERNETHY: One year after he said that Heschel died, on December 23, 1972. He was just 65 years old.

These successes, however, have taken place in developing and developed countries that respect human rights and religious freedom, such as Sri Lanka, Thailand, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan. In countries where freedoms are tightly controlled by central governments, these successes have, by and large, not happened. This is true of Myanmar.

For the near future, I expect the government of Myanmar to block the monks in their monasteries and repress any demonstrations by the Buddhist laity. The result of the demonstrations will be failure.

In the long run, however, dialogue between the monastic leaders and the government may lead to positive changes. This is now happening in China, where engaged “humanistic Buddhism” is working with the government to address social and environmental issues of concern to all Chinese. Since the Chinese government is a close ally of Myanmar, my hope is that they will encourage the Myanmar government to engage in dialogue with Buddhist leaders for the good of the country and region.

– Donald W. Mitchell is a religious studies professor at Purdue University and the author of BUDDHISM: INTRODUCING THE BUDDHIST EXPERIENCE (Oxford University Press).

“Hope has never trickled down,” writes Studs Terkel. “It has always sprung up.” His most recent book, HOPE DIES LAST: KEEPING THE FAITH IN TROUBLED TIMES (The New Press), is an oral history of social action — a collection of interviews about faith and hope with workers, organizers, school teachers, immigrants, chaplains, cooks, custodians, priests, politicians, and pilgrims from one of America’s most thoughtful listeners:

Q: Is there a difference between hope and optimism?

A: Hope is more of a tightrope. You can hope and still feel guardedly so, even a little pessimistic: “I hope it will be better tomorrow than it is today.” We use the word “hope” perhaps more often than any other word in the vocabulary: “I hope it’s a nice day.” “Hopefully, you’re doing well.” “So how are things going along? Pretty good. Going to be good tomorrow? Hope so.” With optimism, you look upon the sunny side of things. People say, “Studs, you’re an optimist.” I never said I was an optimist. I have hope because what’s the alternative to hope? Despair? If you have despair, you might as well put your head in the oven.

“Hope dies last” was a phrase used by Jessie de la Cruz, one of the first women to work for Cesar Chavez in organizing the farm workers union. Very few women were involved in the beginning. She is one of the few. She said, “Whenever things are bleak and seem hopeless, we have a saying in Spanish: ‘La esperanza muere ultima.’ Hope dies last.” I thought, if ever there were a time [to write a book about hope], it’s now.

Q: What do you think September 11 has to do with this book and with what people told you?

A: I would have written this book anyway, I think, but September 11 italicized it. Even the book preceding this one [WILL THE CIRCLE BE UNBROKEN? REFLECTIONS ON DEATH, REBIRTH, AND HUNGER FOR A FAITH], named after the old hymn that the Carter family and Johnny Cash sang, was about death. I wrote that one before September 11. But of course it wasn’t about death. No, it’s about life. The whole point is it’s about life itself. What’s the meaning of your death if there is no life to talk about? It was a hymn to life. And HOPE DIES LAST, you might say, is what follows.

Margaret Atwood, the Canadian writer, was talking about my previous books and how they all seem to deal with more visceral events, like the Great Depression, of which young kids know so little. It’s as though it never happened. Nonetheless, it was a visceral event…

Q: But hope is visceral too, isn’t it?

A: Yes. All the other books ask, “What’s it like?” What was World War II like for the young kid at Normandy, or what is work like for a woman having a job for the first time in her life? What’s it like to be black or white? Hope is more abstract but, at the same time, this turns out to be the most personal of all the books. This, in short, is a tribute to all those people whom I call “the prophetic minority.” Through history, there always have been certain kinds of people who had a hope. They did stuff they shouldn’t have done. They discommoded themselves. They could have led nice lives. HOPE DIES LAST is an anthem to people who have hope, who always have been kind of a minority, who are called “activists.” “Activist” means what? Someone who does an act. In a democratic society, you’re supposed to be an activist; that is, you participate. It could be a letter written to an editor. It could be fighting for stoplights on a certain corner where kids cross. And it could be something for peace, or for civil rights, or for human rights. But once you become active in something, something happens to you. You get excited and suddenly you realize you count.

HOPE DIES LAST is also a tribute to Virginia and Clifford Durr, two people who lived in the South and who were well-off. I dedicate the book to them because it is about all those who succeeded them. He was from a top family in Montgomery, Alabama. Her father was a clergyman. He was a member of the Federal Communications Commission under Franklin D. Roosevelt when World War II was going on. He’s the one who wrote that the airwaves belong to the public, and the public has the right to all variety of programs. Then came the Cold War and Joe McCarthy. President Truman said to Clifford Durr, “Your people have to sign a loyalty oath.” He said, “I don’t believe in it. I won’t. Under no circumstances will I allow my people to be demeaned by doing this.” And he resigned.

And Virginia Durr — I first heard of her in 1944 at a big anti-poll tax gathering in Chicago. You know what the poll tax is? It was aimed primarily against blacks and poor whites. They couldn’t vote, especially African Americans in the South. So Virginia was campaigning against the poll tax in the company of Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, an eminent African-American educator. This big symphony hall in Chicago was jammed! Dr. Bethune was good, but Virginia Durr — this lanky forty-year-old white woman — set the house on fire. So I go backstage with a number of us to shake her hand. As I put forth my hand, she says, “Thank you, dear,” and she puts forth her hand. In her hand are a hundred leaflets. She says, “Now, dear, you hurry outside and you pass out those leaflets, because Dr. Bethune and I are due to speak at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in a couple of hours. Hurry, dear!”

Virginia and Cliff Durr were ostracized by their community. They suffered a great deal. They were under investigation by Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, who was very segregationist and very antiblack. He said the group the Durrs belonged to, the Southern Conference on Human Welfare, was subversive because it was antilynching, anti-poll tax, and for integration. The Durrs got themselves in big trouble. Virginia’s seamstress was a woman named Rosa Parks. She encouraged Rosa Parks to go to a school that was teaching organizers, the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, with Myles Horton, a great teacher. Rosa Parks went to school there and so did Dr. Martin Luther King and others. But the school was under attack. These people, few in number and way outnumbered, were fighting way back then. In the book I celebrate the ones who are doing this sort of work today.

Q: You interview a number of Catholic priests, or former priests, in this book. What did you learn from them about hope?

A: Religion obviously played a role in this book and the previous book, too. You happen to be talking to an agnostic. You know what an agnostic is? A cowardly atheist. Nonetheless, do I have respect for people who believe in the hereafter? Of course I do. I might add, perhaps even a touch of envy too, because of the solace. If solace is any sort of succor to someone, that is sufficient. I believe in the faith of people, whatever faith they may have.

It turns out that there are a great many Catholics in this book, like Kathy Kelly, a disciple of Dorothy Day. Kathy taught at a very wonderful parochial school, St. Ignatius, in Chicago. More on her later. We’ve got John Donahue [executive director for the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless]. He’s not a priest anymore and he is married. His story is about worker-priests, the phrase that was first used by some French priests. Pope John XXIII admired worker-priests — those who work in the community, work in the neighborhood. John Donahue tells the story of the priest in Panama who organized a cooperative of coffee pickers. Their coffee is so terrific that it’s being sold all over the world. It was a priest who did that. Then we’ve got two ex-seminarians — Jerry Brown, the mayor of Oakland, and Ed Chambers, who succeeded Saul Alinsky as a community organizer and who teaches how to organize. He was a disciple of Dorothy Day, too. Jerry Brown still believes in his Jesuit training. A number of them still believe in that.

There’s a priest at the very beginning of the book, Father Bob Oldershaw, and his brother, who is a neurosurgeon. I interviewed him about his experiences in the Vietnam War with soldiers he had treated and what he saw. But along comes his brother who said, “Why don’t you have the two of us talk and reminisce, and you ask provocative questions?”

Father Oldershaw had a parish. His altar boy, a Mexican kid, Mario Ramos, was part of a gang, and he shot Andrew Young, son of Steven and Maurine Young, a nice kid. It was a mistake, because he thought Andrew Young was a member of another gang. Here is Father Oldershaw: “That was my altar boy who did the killing. At first, I said to myself, No way! Then I started thinking about what made him do it, where he comes from. Then I had to go see the couple,” who are not members of his parish, but he was praying for them. It was pretty tough. Finally, he did see them and they got together. That couple, in a sense, have adopted as theirs the boy who killed their son. The one who arranged the whole thing was Bob Oldershaw himself. The kid has been in prison and is now rehabilitated. Throughout the book, you have this aspect of faith. [Read the related R & E story "Forgiveness" about the Young murder.]

Kathy Kelly heads a group called Voices of the Wilderness, a campaign to end economic sanctions against Iraq. These are people who bear witness, as Dorothy Day did. Dorothy Day got in trouble and was arrested many times. Why did she do this when she could lead a nice, easy life and mind her own business? Dorothy Day said — and I’m sure that Kathy Kelly would say the same thing — “I’m working toward a world in which it will be easier for people to behave decently.” Now, think about that: a world in which it will be easier for people to behave decently. Kathy Kelly has borne witness in Basra and Baghdad to the innocent victims of war. She’s been mentioned for the Nobel Peace Prize several times. She has shadowed some of the thousands of missile sites we have. Many people may not think they have seen any, but they have when they drive by one in the Midwest. It’s like a little hill, but it just ruins the corn country around it. Corn can’t be planted. One day Kathy Kelly cut through the barbed wire at one of the missile silos. There she was — all eighty-five pounds of her — on this missile site. She starts planting some corn next to it. Of course, she put up a sign. She wanted people in the passing cars to see the sign: “Beat your swords into plowshares and study war no more,” from Isaiah, the Old Testament prophet.

She called up the authorities to be arrested, because obviously she violated security. Here comes a big truck with machine guns and everything. The commander says, “Will the person on that site get off with your hands raised and kneel to be handcuffed.” And she does. Just then, a young soldier, a kid of about nineteen, comes off the truck toward her with a gun pointed at her head. He’s trembling, because here’s the enemy. It’s Kathy Kelly. He’s told she’s a terrorist. He’s trembling, but he’s got a gun on her head. She looks at the boy and says, “Do you know why I’m kneeling now? Do you know why I’m here?” He says, “Why, ma’am?” “Because I’m praying for the corn to grow.” Then she looks at him and senses he’s a country boy. She says, “Wouldn’t you like the corn to grow?” “Yes, ma’am.” “Will you pray with me for the corn to grow?” He says, “Yes, ma’am.” And he thought of a prayer for the corn to grow. Then the kid says — he’s still got the gun to her head — “Ma’am, are you thirsty?” “Oh, yes.” It was a broiling hot day. He puts his gun down (which I’m sure is a violation) and he opens his canteen and says, “Ma’am, will you lean your head back a little?” and he pours some of the water into her mouth.

The judge was kind, but she’s not going to recant or say she’s sorry and she’s never going to do it again. Of course not. She got a couple of years in the federal pen. But she saw that boy in court. He was supposed to testify and he was trembling, because he thought she might tell the story. She said no, she just winked at him, and then she said, “If he reads this book, I hope he’ll forgive me for telling you the story.” So that is Kathy Kelly. And there is faith. And there is hope.

Q: Do you have to be an idealist to have hope? Can you be a realist and still be hopeful?

A: I think it’s realistic to have hope. One can be a perverse idealist and say the easiest thing: “I despair. The world’s no good.” That’s a perverse idealist. It’s practical to hope, because the hope is for us to survive as a human species. That’s very realistic. Why are we born? We’re born eventually to die, of course. But what happens between the time we’re born and we die? We’re born to live. One is a realist if one hopes.

Q: How did you grow up in Chicago? What did you grow up believing?

A: My mother ran a rooming house. My family was Jewish but not religious. My mother went through the rituals; my father didn’t. He was a freethinker. What made me was the hotel where I was raised. My father died and my mother ran it. Before that, it was a rooming house. In that hotel, there were these guys arguing. There were the old-time union guys and there were nonunion guys. There were what we called Wobblies, the IWW, and the guys who were anti-them would say, “I Won’t Work, that’s what IWW means.” They argued. That’s what we’re missing. We’re missing argument. We’re missing debate. We’re missing colloquy. We’re missing all sorts of things. Instead, we’re accepting.

Today, more and more, because of the nature of the press and TV and radio, celebrityhood has taken over, and trivia takes over. Way back in 1916, Upton Sinclair wrote THE JUNGLE, a famous book about how terrible conditions were in the stockyards. He was called a muckraker — the phrase used for those who were investigative journalists. He also wrote a book called THE BRASS CHECK. In the early days the brass check was something that someone got at a brothel, a sporting house. When you paid the madam two dollars (this was before inflation), you would receive a brass check. The girl would be given the brass check. At the end of the day, she would cash in all her brass checks. In those days, she’d get half a dollar apiece. Upton Sinclair called the reporters back in those days “brass check” people because they were like the call girls in the brothel. They just followed orders. In a sense, we have a lot of that today. But we have other journalists, and they are the few who come through here and there.

I’ve always felt, in all my books, that there’s a deep decency in the American people and a native intelligence — providing they have the facts, providing they have the information. The September 11 assault was horrendous. But there’s another assault that’s taking place. It’s an assault upon our intelligence. It’s an assault upon our sense of decency as well as upon our faiths too, I believe. We are the most powerful nation in the world, but we’re not the only nation in the world. We are not the only people in the world. We are an important people, the wealthiest, the most powerful and, to a great extent, generous. But we are part of the world.

Q: You have seen a lot and lived through a lot. Are you less hopeful or more hopeful now? Are things any worse today than they’ve ever been?

A: That’s a hard question. I am hopeful. The most amazing thing is that there are so many groups. I don’t understand the Internet real well. I’m very bad technologically. I can’t drive a car. I fall off a bicycle. I goof up the tape recorder. I’m just learning to use an electric typewriter — that’s my big advance. I’m not up on the Internet, but I hear that is a democratic possibility. People can connect with each other. I think people are ready for something, but there is no leadership to offer it to them. People are ready to say, “Yes, we are part of a world.” People are ready to say, “Yes, we are ready for single-payer health insurance.” We are the only industrialized country in the world that does not have national health insurance. We are the richest in wealth and the poorest in health of all the industrial nations. So people are ready. I feel hopeful in that sense.

I feel a little worried because of the nature of technology. Technology works in two ways. I’m ninety-one years old, thanks to technology — a quintuple bypass. It was the skilled hands of a surgeon, but there were also all these medical advances and the machinery that helped me. At the same time, we have the technology of destruction since Hiroshima and beyond — technology that can destroy the world.

So here we are. We have a choice to make. I’m merely paraphrasing Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein. I always love to quote Albert Einstein because nobody dares contradict him. Einstein and Russell together issued a joint statement some time shortly after Hiroshima: “We have a chance right now to live in a new world with so many possibilities. With labor-saving devices, people can learn new ways of earning their living, new ways of following what they want to do. Or we can engage in mutual destruction.” They both spoke of that back in 1945. It’s more than half a century later, and what they said is even more italicized.

That’s why I wrote this book: to show how these people can imbue us with hope. I read somewhere that when a person takes part in community action, his health improves. Something happens to him or to her biologically. It’s like a tonic. When you become part of something, in some way you count. It could be a march; it could be a rally, even a brief one. You’re part of something, and you suddenly realize you count. To count is very important. People say, “I’m helpless.” Of course, if you’re alone. There are so many groups — environmental groups, other groups — but there is no one umbrella.

Q: What do you hope for?

A: I hope for peace and sanity — it’s the same thing. I want a language that speaks the truth. I want people to talk to one another no matter what their difference of opinion might be. I want, of course, peace, grace, and beauty.

How do you do that? You work for it. I want to praise activists through the years. The ones in the book are alive today. But I praise those of the past as well, to have them honored. And I hope that memory is valued — that we do not lose memory.