ustxtxb_obs_1981_10_09_50_00015-00000_000.pdf

.\\,r1 and Associates 502 W. 15th Street Austin, Texas 78701 REALTOR Representing all types of properties in Austin and Central Texas Interesting & unusual property a specialty. 477-3651 Cn ginnys COPYING SERVICE Copying Binding Printing Color Copying Graphics Word Processing Austin Lubbock Son Marcos ats k e DkAbout? Parisian Charm. Omelette & Champagne Breakfast. Beautiful Crepes. Afternoon Cocktails. Gallant Waiters. Delicious Quiche. Evening Romance. Continental Steaks. Mysterious Women. Famous Pastries. Cognac & Midnight Rendezvous. In short, it’s about everything a great European style restaurant is all about. p ec e an 015. Cafe 310 East 6th St. Austin, Texas The question of civil disobedience which the Nobel prize winners raised is a difficult and personal question, and I would not presume to hold forth for anyone other than myself on that subject, except for some obvious things. Let me tell you about some other things that have been happening at Pantex. We’re just finding out about it. There was no publicity outside of Amarillo; why I do not know. Six people, religious protestors, climbed the fence at Pantex and faced the next fence, which was electrified. As the Bishop told me, if anyone had touched it they would have been fried. And they did not, and they were arrested, and they have been sentenced to prison, and they are now serving prison terms. You don’t mind that the Austin American -Statesman hasn’t run a story about that, do you? I do. I mind finding out about it by hearsay six months later. That’s upsetting. What’s wrong with journalism? The Bishop said he did not agree with that action. They asked him to join it, he said, and “I turned it down.” He doesn’t agree with the Berrigans. He thinks such actions result in violent confrontation, and “that’s not what we’re trying to do,” he said. The Bishop of Amarillo has a lot more to do than to get in prison. Obviously he could do something else that was more effective, couldn’t he? Civil disobedience is not an absolute. It is always a relative question. A question of stance, of opportunities that people have, of what they are doing with their lives, and whether they are doing to disable themselves for the rest of their lives, and how ethical the content of their lives is. It is a complex question. Obviously civil disobedience has to be carefully thought out, and as the best practitioners have taught us, you must be prepared to accept the consequences in advance without rancor. So it is a serious and large subject. You can’t even address it until you know what pressure points exist in your community. Church Action If any American institutions can confront nuclear war, it should be churches, because nuclear war is an overwhelmingly ethical issue and the churches are the ethics-conserving institutions that we have. So the churches could do it. Why have a church if you don’t try to stop nuclear war? Nuclear war watch committees are the first idea I should like to present to you as a group. Ari Wright: I think about this all the time myself. I’m thinking that we have an avenue for expressing how we feel. Mayor McClellan has proclamations almost every week. Why couldn’t we make a proclamation and take it to her and put it into the city council meeting where so many people would listen? Dugger: It would be a good thing to do. Ari Wright: I’m not much of a writer, but anybody who wants to get together and put something together. . . . Dugger: What do you say about 12:15 today? David Carson: The Social Action Committee is meeting at 12:30. Dugger: Maybe that’s when to do it, through the Social Action Committee. But, let me pursue the idea of a nuclear war watch committee as a rather specific focus. I would suggest that it would have at least three functions and you have just suggested a fourth. First, relate actively to the congressperson and other relevant officials of whom the church, members are constituents, but especially the congressperson Jake Pickle, here on what they are doing to reduce the likelihood of nuclear war. Secondly, survey and keep watch on all activities in one’s own community and organizations against it like Physicians for Social Responsibility, which has not yet formed an Austin chapter. Finally, generate public programs on nuclear war awareness. Why not start it in Austin? Look what they started in Boston. If just the Unitarian Church in each Texas community where there is a congregation would undertake the one relationship with that congregation’s congressperson, asking, “What are you doing to prevent nuclear war? Come on down and speak to us on this subject. Share your ideas and we’ll share ours.” That would be a very creative contribution. All of a sudden the members of Congress from this state would have to deal with congregations asking them what they are doing to keep this from happening. They don’t have to do that now, you leave them alone. Just think if Rev. Jimmy Allen, who in my opinion is a great person and one of the nation’s leading Baptists, would get on to this program, and I think he would if there were a program to get on to. If Rev. Jerry Falwell would just stop messing in people’s private lives and start worrying about people starving abroad. . . . The church is a natural institution to address these questions. And in that connection, I would think the subject of world hunger is something that should be taken on ecumenically by the churches. This, too, is preeminently an ethical subject, it is distant from us, it is difficult to deal with people in public life about, and only the churches can do it. The church is expected to be ethical. In the United States other people being ethical is regarded as dangerously suspect and perhaps Un-American. I think the model for a world hunger function out of the churches should be Amnesty International, which works, of course, in the realm of civil liberties everywhere. What AI does is, they choose a particular victim in a particular prison whom a particular AI chapter adopts. And they bug the government to get that person out. Similarly, a specific world hunger committee could choose a community’s water-pump, for example, or a family, or alternate sources of energy for a little village in India where they’ve used up all the wood on the hillside. Why not start it in Austin? Jose Alves: As a matter of fact, two Baptist churches in Austin are doing exactly that they have adopted communities in Mexico. Dugger: Well, that leads me to the last THE TEXAS OBSERVER 15