writing this memoir

Open Borders, A personal story of love, loss and anti-war activism.

Writing this memoir served two aims. Through the examination of a period of intense political activity in my life, I have been able to trace my passage to independence. Mine is the story of many women born during World War II and raised at a time when the prevailing expectation of women in America was that they’d marry, raise children, and be a supportive wife. This conflicted with the beliefs my parents had instilled in me. They’d sent me off on teenage adventures and challenged me to do anything I wanted in life. These messages fought for expression in my own development and early marriage to a man five and a half years my senior.

The second aim is political. During the 1980s a group of citizens in Seattle organized around a belief that ordinary people could influence governments to settle conflict through diplomacy rather than war. I took up one small piece of this peace-making effort and charged forward. Open Borders chronicles those efforts. Hundreds of other Seattleites and ordinary citizens across the country have stories to tell about their friendships across the Iron Curtain, all of which may have contributed to its fall in 1989. Four friends who were involved in such efforts have granted me permission to include an essay by each of them documenting how their life and work were affected by the anti-nuclear war efforts.

Writing Open Borders made me realize how proud I am of the many people who worked so hard in the 1980s to prevent nuclear war. We embraced our so-called enemies with curiosity, compassion, respect, and the firm belief that we all shared the common values of love of place and love of family. Nuclear war was not an option for us ordinary people. It would destroy all we hold dear.

Today, I am more frightened by the possibility of nuclear war than I was in 1982. I also feel alone. If there are others trembling before the “fire and fury” rhetoric and the repeating rocket and hydrogen tests, I hope this story of our activism will stir others to find ways to organize and seek peace through cross-border understandings of our common humanity and the love we each have for our homeland.

Why does it seem so few are alarmed at the threat of nuclear war today? Are we in denial or overwhelmed by the enormity of so many doomsday crises at once? Or have we, as I worry, left behind as antiquated that practice humans have engaged in for millennia of gathering in groups to work things out with minds firmly connected to hearts? Eye to eye conversations are much more effective than thumbs tapping through electronic devices. Through the latter half of the 20th century, as much as the Kremlin and the White House disagreed with how our world should be organized, one felt the leaders grasped their sober responsibility for the future of the whole world and genuinely did not want to put all that fire power to use. Today, I am not so sure. Putting words on paper is my way of taking up arms again. Action gives me hope.