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GLOBAL MOVEMENT FOR A CULTURE OF PEACE

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Her Name Is Jody Williams, a Book Review
an article by David Swanson

Jody Williams' new book is called My Name Is Jody Williams: A Vermont Girl's Winding Path to the Nobel Peace Prize, and it's a remarkable story by a remarkable person. It's also a very well-told autobiography, including in the early childhood chapters in which there are few hints of the activism to come.


photo of Jody Williams from nobelprize.org

click on photo to enlarge

One could read this book and come away thinking "Anyone really could win the Nobel Peace Prize," if people in fact told their children they could do that instead of telling them they could be president, and if one was thinking of Nobel peace laureates as saintly beings. In a certain sense, of course, anyone can win the Nobel Peace Prize, as it's often given to good people who have nothing to do with peace, and at other times it's given to warmongers. To win the Nobel Peace Prize and deserve it, as Williams did -- that's another story. That requires, not saintliness, but activism.

Activism is usually 99% perspiration and the dedication that drives it, just like genius. But in the case of the Nobel Peace Prize, and of the sort of rapid success it honors when applied in accordance with Alfred Nobel's will, the perspiration is 49%. The other 50% is timing. The activists who recruited Williams to lead the campaign to ban landmines had the timing perfect. Williams tapped into something powerful. She orchestrated some initial successes, communicated the viability and importance of the project, worked night and day, and watched many other people, in many countries, throw themselves into the campaign in a manner that people only do when they believe something will dramatically and rapidly improve the world.

How does one pick the right issue at the right time? Following the example of the land mine campaign, one must pick a topic on which the rest of the world can do some good without the participation of the U.S. government, and in fact succeed despite fierce opposition from the U.S. government, and then drag the U.S. government along, kicking and screaming, once the rest of the world has moved forward.

What strikes me most about the first half or so of Williams' book is how hard we always make it for anyone who wants to work for a better world to find appropriate employment. We dump billions into recruiting young people into the military or into business careers. Imagine if young people had to find those paths on their own. Imagine if television ads and video games and movies and spectacles at big sporting events were all used to recruit young people into nonviolent activism for peace or justice. Williams and many others could have found their way more quickly.

Williams argued with her father over the U.S. war on Vietnam. He began to come around with the exposure of the Gulf of Tonkin incident as fictional, and with the looming threat of a son being drafted -- and no doubt also as a result of Williams' persuasiveness.

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What got Williams into full-time paid activism, years later, was a flyer handed to her at a Washington, D.C., metro stop.  The headline read: "El Salvador: Another Vietnam?"  Eventually, Williams found herself engaged in activist work that "didn't feel like work."  I take this to mean that for something to "feel like work" it needed to be a waste of time.  Activism, of course, is
not.  Think about what sort of society we have constructed in which the norm is uselessness.

Finding activism does not, of course, mean finding an easy life.  It means sacrifice and risk, but fulfilling sacrifice and risk.  Williams risked death and injury in Central America and suffered, among other things, rape.  Years later she publicly told that story before an audience of 2,000 as part of The Vagina Monologues.  "I felt it was time to use the example to tell women they didn't have to let horrible experiences ruin their lives. . ...more.


This report was posted on August 12, 2013.