Rebuilding America (part two)

"Dear Brothers and Sisters,

This is Dan Berrigan speaking. I want to say whay a very deep sense of gratitude I have that the chance has come to speak to you across the underground. ... How do we get such a message across to others? It seems to me that that is one way of putting the very substance of our task. This determination to keep talking with all who seek a rightful place in this world or all who have not yet awakened to it, this, I think, is the revolution, and the United States perversely and negatively knows it, and this is why we are in trouble. ....

I'm trying to say that when people look about them for lives to run with and when hopeless people look for hope, the gift we can offer others is so simple a thing as hope. As they said about Che, as they say about Jesus, some people, even to this day, he gave us hope. So that my hope is you see your lives in somewhat the same way .... My hope is that affection and compassion and nonviolence are now common resources once more and that we can proceed on that assumption, the assumption that the quality of life within our communities is exactly what we have to offer. ... The mark of inhuman treatment of humans is a mark that also hovers over us. It is the mark of a beast .... When madness is the acceptable public state of mind, we're all in danger, all in danger for we are under the heel of former masters, as under the heel of new ones.

Instead of thinking of the underground as temporary or exotic or abnormal, perhaps we are being called upon to start thinking of its implicationas an entirely self-sufficient, mobile, internal revival community, so that the underground may be the definition of our future. What does it mean literally to have nowhere to go in America or to be kicked out of America? It must mean to us -- let us go somewhere in America, let us stay here and play here and love here and build here, and in this way join not only those who like us are recently kicked out also, but those who have never been inside at all, the blacks and the Indians and Puerto Ricans and Chicanos, whose consciousness has gone far under the rock. ... The question now is what can we create. I feel at your side across the miles, and I hope that sometime, sometime in this mad world,in this mad time, it will be possible for us to sit down face to face, brother to brother, sister to sister, and find that our hopes and our sweat, and the hopes and sweat and death and tears and blood of our brothers and sisters throughout the world, have brought to birth that for which we began

Thank you and shalom."

This letter from the Reverend Daniel Berrigan, S.J., is from the autumn of 1970, to friends living in the underground; Daniel was also in the underground, avoiding charges relating to the disruption of draft board offices in Catonsville, Maryland.