Revived Peace Movement Thrives Alongside Military in S.D. : Resource Center Says 92 Groups in County Now Spreading the Word

There was a time just a few years ago when the Peace Resource Center near San Diego State University limped along on a shoestring budget, its members never quite sure how long the organization would survive.

“We always had times where we didn’t know where the next month’s budget was coming from,” said Allen Stern, operations coordinator for the center, which describes itself as a clearinghouse for information on peace and social justice activities. “I wouldn’t say we were on the verge of closing down. But we were on the verge of not being able to pay the staff.”

Those days are over. The center’s two employees are making modest full-time salaries, its library of books and videotapes is expanding and the number of names on the mailing list has grown from 600 to about 1,000, Stern said. The center’s budget is now a stable $55,000 per year.

While that figure doesn’t rival U.S. defense spending, it is one of many signs to longtime peace activists that their movement is beginning to take hold even in San Diego, home of what the Greater San Diego Chamber of Commerce calls the free world’s largest concentration of military personnel and equipment.

“I think (the peace movement) is growing,” said Jim Jacobson, a steering committee member for the 10-year-old Alliance for Survival. “I think there really is a proliferation of organizations in town. It shows that people really want to do something and they’re trying. It may be small, little church groups, but at least they’re trying.”

“You’re finding that, at a real institutional level, people are beginning to look at these issues and integrate them,” said Carol Jahnkow, peace education coordinator for the Peace Resource Center. “I think it’s giving the peace movement some depth.”

In recent years, the number of peace and social justice organizations in the county has blossomed to 92, according to the Peace Resource Center’s mailing list. One of them, San Diego’s dormant nuclear freeze organization, has been revived under the direction of a retired career Navy officer, Beth Coye. The membership of many peace groups is climbing.

Others are encouraged by last year’s decision by the San Diego Unified School District to adopt a nuclear age education curriculum, by a newly established coordinating council of peace group leaders, and by the participation of 43 San Diegans in the protest at the Nevada Nuclear Test Site on Feb. 4 and 5.

But most significant, peace workers say, is the fact that dedicated activists who have kept the movement alive for two decades are being joined by an entirely new clientele, as groups like Mothers Embracing Nuclear Disarmament (MEND), Physicians for Social Responsibility and Beyond War attract middle-class and upscale converts to anti-nuclear activism.

That development, perhaps more than any other, sparks optimism among some activists who believe that, until self-interested and powerful people join the movement, it will not have the strength or credibility to accomplish its goals of total or partial nuclear disarmament.

Joann Lundgren, coordinator of the Beyond War chapter in San Diego, describes the targets of her group’s organizing effort as “the educated middle class. We’re after those people who are able to respond to an educational program.”

“We feel we’ve got to get the opinion leaders in the city or in the country because they have such a tremendous influence and because we don’t have much time,” said Lundgren, whose organization promotes the belief that war has become an obsolete method of settling conflict.

“I believe we are at a turning point in our world,” said Coye, who took over San Diego’s nuclear freeze organization after 21 years as a Navy officer and who is also the daughter of a highly decorated Navy war hero. “We will go one way or another. The two symbols are the mushroom cloud and the planet. The citizens must wake up and push us in favor of the planet.”

Though Coye, who retired with the rank of commander, was familiar with nuclear armaments during her career--which included three tours as an intelligence officer--it wasn’t until after her retirement that she went through something of an awakening of her own. After hearing a presentation by a Beyond War lecturer, she decided to get involved.

“You close your eyes and you listen to that and say, ‘That’s enough, I’ve got to turn it around,’ ” she said.

The 2-year-old MEND organization has become the local symbol of the peace movement’s new participants. While the Peace Resource Center operates out of two cramped rooms lined with books and bumper-stickers in a church-sponsored cooperative, MEND is based in a spacious, pastel-colored La Jolla office formerly occupied by a physician.

Launched with a $1-million gift from the family of founder Linda Smith--daughter of Joan Kroc, a major stockholder in the McDonald’s restaurant chain and owner of the San Diego Padres baseball team--MEND has a full-time staff of seven people, including one in Washington, and a $400,000 annual budget. The image is professional, down to the cut of staff members’ clothes.

Executive Director Jonna Faulkner notes that MEND’s La Jolla office is the base of a national organization that has a budget and headquarters much the same size as other groups located in Washington or New York. MEND’s first local chapter, also in San Diego, has no office, is run entirely by volunteers and has raised $2,600, she said.

Still, San Diego chapter President Kay Rose acknowledges that there is “a real professionalism in the peace movement now . . . (a) business-like way that the work is being carried out.”

Both women believe that their organization, which appeals to “mothers and other nurturers,” was formed at the right time to reach people who had never before become directly involved in disarmament work--either out of ignorance of the issues or fear. MEND is attracting “people who have a very centered, not extreme, view,” Faulkner said. “Family people. Normal people.”

Such people have realized that “there may not be a future. There may not be a world for our children to inherit. There may not be children,” she said.

Others trace the growth of the peace movement’s new branch to fear of what some see as bellicosity by President Reagan, the proliferation of nuclear weapons (there are about 60,000 in the world now), the ground broken by the national Nuclear Freeze movement of the early 1980s, and the glimmer of hope for progress offered by the recent talks between Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

MEND is credited with organizing the largest San Diego protest march since the Vietnam War on Aug. 6, 1985, when 10,000 people gathered for a “walk for peace” in Balboa Park on the 40th anniversary of the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima. It claims a local membership of 300, a national paid membership of 1,000 and a mailing list of 10,000.

But even taken together, the peace movement’s accomplishments are dwarfed by the impact of the county’s most dominant institution, the military. Activists agree that the county’s economic and political ties to the Navy and Marines make their task a gargantuan one.

“You would think from the outside looking in that this was going to be difficult. Our experience, in fact, is that it wasn’t,” she said.

However, MEND and San Diegans for a Bilateral Nuclear Weapons Freeze are two groups that pledge a commitment to a strong national defense, a position that divides them from leftist and religious peace activists. Their reluctance to address the relationship between nuclear arms and, for example, U.S. military activity in Central America also causes some disagreement within the county’s peace movement.

The new activists “gradually are going to have their eyes opened to how different issues are related and linked, and how it’s necessary to think about a broader range of issues, not just how we can get a comprehensive test ban treaty,” said Rick Jahnkow, co-founder of the Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft.

Jahnkow’s group recently devoted an issue of its newsletter, “Draft Notices,” to the obstacles interfering with peace organizing in San Diego, which the committee calls “America’s Finest Militarized Zone.”

Organizers cited small turnouts at events, the lack of resources and publicity, the failure of groups to work closely together and present a more unified image, the public’s failure to see the urgency of issues and burnout as their greatest frustrations.

Many activists believe they are saddled with a totally unsympathetic local media, led by the San Diego Union and Tribune. Plus, the generally comfortable life style in San Diego makes it difficult to politicize residents until issues affect them personally, they said.

Even success has had its drawbacks, because the growing number of groups has fragmented the movement and cluttered the calendar with fund-raising and education events, they said.

But such factors only highlight San Diego’s special need for the kind of work these peace groups do, organizers said. It may be easier to organize in more liberal towns, but not quite as important, they said.

“It’s the whole reason why we’re involved in the first place,” Jahnkow said. “If it weren’t difficult, if there weren’t a concentration of defense spending, we wouldn’t have a reason to exist. That’s the challenge and I accept it. That’s why we’re here.”