How has the experience of the Vietnam War transformed American culture and identity?
Again, the behavior, I think, of thousands and thousands of young Americans who gave everything they had nonviolently to oppose a wrongful war was a precedent that was very valuable to us. It came after the civil rights movement and a long tradition of American nonviolent direct action going back to Thoreau and Martin Luther King Jr., but also the growth of the union movement and women’s suffrage. But it was very much reaffirmed by this antiwar activity, which changed my life. I wouldn’t have thought of doing what I did — which threatened me with 115 years in prison — without the immediate face-to-face example of young Americans, some of the 5,000 who were choosing prison [instead of military service] to send the starkest message they could. That example lives in the very idealistic and conscientious actions we saw taken in Seattle and recently in Washington. I risked arrest [earlier this month] with a lot of young men and women who looked very, very familiar to me from 25 years ago.
