Hometown Folks
During the months that we worked to contact these prisoners, people all over the country contributed their efforts with startling readiness. We owe thanks especially to Keith Stroup of the National Organization for Reform of the Marijuana Laws, to the American Civil Liberties Union, and to Andrea Wyatt, poet, songwriter and founder of the First National Bail Fund of America.
Refusing to Kill
1. The government shall decide who may lawfully be killed and who may not. 2. Anyone who kills someone the government has not said it is all right to kill is guilty of murder. 3. Anyone who won’t kill someone the government says it is all right to kill is guilty of Refusing to Kill. 4. Anyone who interferes with the government in telling its citizens who to kill is guilty too. 5. Anyone who abets or encourages someone who has Refused to Kill is guilty of Conspiracy to Refuse to Kill. 6. Some offenders may choose certain alternatives to killing, such as helping the sick. Some may not. It shall be determined by a panel of men who think the government is right. 7. Penalty. Offenders are to be locked up for the period of time they would otherwise have spent killing.
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Larry Zink burned his draft cards February 13, 1969 at a student-faculty meeting at the University of Nebraska, where he was studying electrical engineering. He asked others to join him; none did. He refused induction, was arrested for burning his card and sentenced under the Youth Corrections Act to “zip-six’, an indeterminate term of up to six years. Last March he entered prison at Springfield, Mo., was transferred to El Reno, Oklahoma (“the cesspool of the federal prison’s youth division,” says Zink), and finally entered the minimum-security Federal Correctional Institution in Seagoville, Texas, outside Dallas.
“My reasons for becoming involved with resistance and antiwar activity were more philosophical than political. I could find no value higher than life to justify the taking of another human life. For this reason I felt I could not continue to be silent while this country carried out mass slaughter of human life and the destruction of the Vietnamese culture. . . .”
In all three of the prisons I have been in I have found the idea of rehabilitation to be a cruel joke. The libraries are, for all practical purposes, non-existent. The educational facilities at first glance look fair, but few of the teachers have any college education, much less a degree. . . .I can’t think of a single privilege, whether it be liberal mail rules or honor housing, the main purpose of which is not control of the inmate. Even basic things that one on the street would take as a right, like a little privacy, on the inside must be obtained by playing the sick games and trying not to lose one’s self-respect in the process. . . .”
Although my immediate oppressors are the people in the Bureau of Prisons, I can’t lay much of the responsibility on their shoulders, but must place it where it belongs, on American society. It is the citizens of this country who force the prisons to operate on their small budgets, and their attitude of ‘I don’t want to be bothered with it,’ which allows these conditions to continue. ”
As for me personally, I guess it can best be summed up by stating that I don’t regret taking the steps that led me here, and I would probably do it again. . .”
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Karl Meyer has a wife, three children and a 14-year record of resisting federal taxes because their revenue is “overwhelmingly devoted to warfare.” From 1968 to 1970, Meyer paid no tax at all — he filed deduction claims covering all his income — and last April he was sentenced to two years in the Federal Correctional Institution at Sandstone, Minnesota.
“As I was led from the courtroom to begin serving two years. I had only time to wave briefly to my seven-year-old son, William. In the marshal’s lockup I broke down and cried. But this time has not in any way broken down our commitment to respect and defend our life and the lives of others. . .
“I do believe that we should all strive to live in a simpler way. If we work part-time for wages and live on less than taxable incomes, we will have extra time to grow, create and do more things for ourselves, or to offer our work as a gift to people in need of it.
Even if we work full time for taxable wages, but successfully resist collection of the taxes, we should still live simply in order to share our surplus money with others who are in need. I have done this all my adult life and intend to go on with it. “There is one main thing that the government asks of ordinary people to support its military policies: Just go along and pay your taxes. And because that is the main thing asked of us, that’s one thing we will never do.”
