http://snipurl.com/9nwl What Martha Stewart, Nelson Mandela, and radical nuns have in common by Stephen Kobasa
When reflecting on her imminent imprisonment during a recent interview, Martha Stewart declared that "good people go to jail," offering Nelson Mandela, a man who was given a life sentence for his anti-apartheid leadership and who spent most of his 27 years of imprisonment in solitary confinement, as a case in point. Aside from her outrageous implication that she should be included in this category, her basic contention is indeed true: there are many good people imprisoned in this country, some of them for having acted morally. When Stewart arrives at the federal prison camp in Alderson, West Virginia, to serve her five-month sentence, she will not have to look far for confirmation of this. Among the women there is Carol Gilbert, a Dominican nun who last year began her 33 months of imprisonment. Along with Sisters Ardeth Platte (sentenced to 41 months) and Jackie Hudson (30 months), Gilbert cut through the fence surrounding a Minuteman III missile silo in Colorado. The three then poured blood on the massive concrete lid that covered the nuclear warhead. This provoked charges of "sabotage" from the federal government, and the attendant excessive punishments. As Gilbert said at her sentencing, "We know something is very wrong with a system that can incarcerate us for years in prison for inspecting, exposing, and symbolically disarming America's weapons of mass destruction." Perhaps Stewart will learn from Sister Carol that the "good life" she is anxious to return to at her New York estate will be lived under the threat of annihilation posed by the 49 Minuteman III sites in northeastern Colorado, 84 in southwestern Nebraska, and 17 in southeastern Wyoming. Perhaps she will ask why the willingness of any presidential candidate to authorize nuclear war is never questioned or subject to debate as part of the current election campaign. Perhaps she will be be moved by news of the Adopt-a-Missile Silo action by Citizen Weapon Inspection Teams in Colorado on October 2 to mark the second anniversary of the three nuns' witness of conscience. And perhaps she will come to use her notoriety as an instrument for making public the injustice committed in their case. That might put her closer to that category of a good person in jail. Stephen Vincent Kobasa is a member of the Atlantic Life Community.
