Category: activist, resistance, speaking out

Fay “Honey” Knopp: Quaker, Abolitionist, Prison Visitor

And She Was My Friend

I still remember the first time Fay “Honey” Knopp walked into the visiting room at Danbury FCI, carrying this strange little bubble of gentleness into a place built to crush it. Visiting rooms in federal joints all smell the same — burnt coffee, disinfectant, old linoleum, and the quiet hum of resignation — but Honey had a way of making the air feel different, like she’d opened a window nobody else could see. She wasn’t dramatic, wasn’t trying to save anybody in some big cinematic way. She just sat down across from me with her notebook and her Quaker calm, and suddenly the place didn’t feel quite so much like a cage.

Those visits mattered. They still do. They were a lifeline tossed across concrete and razor wire, and I grabbed on like a drowning man. And here’s the thing Honey didn’t just visit me. She visited all of us — the war resisters, the conscientious objectors, the ones who refused to pick up a gun and got locked up for it. She made her rounds like a minister of mercy, and she didn’t care if the world thought we were troublemakers or traitors or fools. She showed up anyway.

And when I came out — when I finally walked out of Danbury with that strange mix of relief and disorientation that hits you the moment the gate clanks shut behind you — Honey threw me a coming‑out party at her home. Imagine that. A party. For a guy just out of federal prison. She did it for all of us, every war resister who stepped back into the world blinking like we’d been underwater too long. Her house became this unofficial harbor, a place where you could breathe again, where you weren’t defined by your inmate number, where you could sit at her table and feel human.

Years later, when I learned more about her life, I realized I’d been sitting with a legend and didn’t even know it. Honey Knopp wasn’t just a kind soul with a notebook. She was born in Bridgeport in 1918, valedictorian, art school, New School, UCLA — a whole life of curiosity before she ever set foot in a prison. She found her calling at a Quaker peace demonstration in ’39 and never stopped walking toward the fire: pacifism, civil rights, nuclear disarmament, all stitched together by this stubborn belief that human beings could be better than the systems we built.

By the mid‑50s she was visiting imprisoned conscientious objectors. By ’62 she was in Geneva telling the world to stop poisoning children with nuclear fallout. And in ’68 — the year the country was tearing itself apart — she co‑founded Prisoner Visitation and Support, the very program that eventually brought her to me. She built a national network so people locked away by the government wouldn’t disappear into silence.

Then came the ’70s, and Honey started talking abolition — real abolition — before it was fashionable or even understandable to most folks. She wrote Instead of Prisons, a handbook that basically said: stop building cages, start building communities. Reduce the population. Replace punishment with something that actually heals. She pushed restorative justice before the term had any traction. She worked with sexual offenders, too — not because it was easy or popular, but because she believed you couldn’t help victims if you pretended offenders were monsters instead of broken people who needed treatment.

Honey didn’t flinch from the hard stuff. She walked straight into it with her notebook and her faith and her unshakeable belief that mercy wasn’t weakness — it was the strongest force on earth.

There’s a school named after her now, and the Safer Society Foundation still carries her torch. But for me, her legacy isn’t in the institutions or the programs. It’s in those quiet afternoons in Danbury, and in that coming‑out party at her home — the one where she welcomed me back into the world like I was a long‑lost nephew instead of a guy fresh out of federal custody.

Honey Knopp walked into prisons with nothing but compassion and walked out leaving seeds behind — seeds she planted in people like me. Seeds that still grow. She showed up when the world said we were disposable. She showed up when it mattered.

And I’ll never forget it.

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Indigenous Peoples Day (Even If the Calendar Lies)

It’s Columbus Day on paper, sure — the same paper that once said the world was flat and men in funny hats “discovered” continents already full of nations, languages, and people who didn’t need discovering.

But out here, in the real world, you can feel the truth humming under the asphalt.
The wind off the harbor doesn’t whisper Columbus. It whispers the names of people who were here long before any European decided he’d found something.

Every year they trot out the same story: brave explorer, bold voyage, blah blah blah.
But the older I get, the more it sounds like a bad cover band playing a song nobody asked for.

Today isn’t about Columbus.
Today’s about the people who survived him.

It’s about the ones who kept their drums beating even when the government tried to silence them.
It’s about the languages that refused to die.
It’s about the kids growing up now who know damn well their history didn’t start with a ship hitting the wrong shoreline.

And here’s the thing worth saying out loud, even if the calendars and politicians won’t:
Only two states bother to tell the truth today — South Dakota and Wisconsin — calling this day what it should’ve been all along: Native American Day.
Everyone else is still clinging to Columbus like a bad habit they can’t quit.

Call it what you want — the calendar, the politicians, the folks who still cling to the old myth like it’s a security blanket.
But I’m calling it Indigenous Peoples Day, because the truth deserves louder company than the lie.

And if that makes me a rebel?
Good.
Some holidays need rebelling against.

My Book

Good morning everyone

And the rest of the story now available at https://a.co/d/0iCnPaNX

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Joe Hill: The Man They Tried to Kill but Couldn’t Shut Up.

Joe Hill wasn’t just a labor organizer — he was the kind of guy who could walk into a room full of scared, exhausted workers and make them believe they mattered. A Swedish immigrant, a wandering worker, a songwriter with a knife‑sharp tongue, he wrote the songs that turned picket lines into something like church: The Preacher and the Slave, Casey Jones, There Is Power in a Union. Songs you could shout over factory noise or sing under your breath when the boss walked by.

Hill joined the Industrial Workers of the World, the Wobblies — the union that didn’t care about your race, your job, your skill level, or whether you had two nickels to rub together. If you worked, you belonged. That alone made him dangerous to the people who liked their workers quiet and scared.

In 1914, Hill was arrested in Utah for a murder he almost certainly didn’t commit. The trial was a mess — no motive, no real evidence, just a man the state wanted gone. And they got their wish: Hill was executed by firing squad in 1915. But here’s the thing — the man refused to die properly. His last words were basically, “Don’t mourn. Organize.” And that line became a fuse.

His ashes were scattered in every state except Utah, because the Wobblies figured he’d already spent enough time there. And every time workers stood up — miners, factory hands, farm laborers, nurses, teachers — Joe Hill was the ghost in the room, the voice saying, You’re worth more than they tell you.

That’s why Joan Baez could stand on the Woodstock stage in 1969, pregnant, rain coming down, and sing Joe Hill like she was calling him out of the ground. And the crowd — half stoned, half soaked, all alive — felt it. Because Joe Hill isn’t a man anymore. He’s a reminder.

You can kill a person.

You can’t kill an idea.

And Joe Hill was the idea that working people deserve a life.

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Mother Jones

Today’s the birthday of the woman Teddy Roosevelt once called “the most dangerous woman in America.” And she was eighty‑seven. Eighty‑seven.

Mary Harris Jones — Mother Jones — the old Irish battle‑axe who outlived half the men trying to shut her up. She wasn’t dangerous because she carried a gun. She was dangerous because she carried the truth, and she swung it like a pickaxe.

This was a woman who buried four kids, lost her husband, watched her business burn to the ground, and instead of folding up, she turned herself into a one‑woman earthquake. She walked into coal towns where the bosses owned the cops, the judges, the damn air, and she told them she wasn’t leaving until the workers got treated like human beings instead of replaceable parts.

She marched with miners coughing up black dust. She marched with mill kids who should’ve been playing stickball instead of losing fingers in machines. She marched with whoever needed marching — because she understood something America still forgets every other Tuesday: nothing changes unless somebody makes noise.

Roosevelt called her “dangerous.”
Hell yes she was.
Dangerous the way a storm is dangerous when you’ve built your house out of lies.
Dangerous the way a grandmother is dangerous when she’s done being polite.

Mother Jones didn’t ask permission. She didn’t wait for the right moment. She didn’t care if the powerful men in suits thought she was too loud, too old, too stubborn. She fought like hell for the living, and she never apologized for it.

So today, raise a glass — coffee, whiskey, whatever’s handy — to the tiny Irish woman who scared a president and shook the country awake.

Happy birthday, Mother Jones.
Still dangerous. Still needed.

“God almighty made women and the Rockefeller gang of thieves made the ladies.”

Mary Harris Jones Mother Jone

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Hunter S. Thompson

Today is the birthday of Hunter S. Thompson, born in Louisville, Kentucky, 1937 — and I wake up feeling like the sky’s got a little extra static in it. Like the day itself is leaning forward, waiting for somebody to do something reckless and honest.

There’s a certain charge in the air when you think about Thompson. Not the Hollywood cartoon of him — the real man, the one who wrote like he had a live wire jammed straight into his spine. The one who understood that America wasn’t a postcard, it was a fever dream, and the only way to tell the truth about it was to dive in headfirst and come up swinging.

I think about him the way I think about a storm rolling over the harbor — that low, electric rumble, the kind that makes you stand a little straighter because you know something’s about to break loose. He wasn’t tidy. He wasn’t polite. He didn’t sand down the edges. He was the edge.

Louisville boy. Southern heat in his blood. A kid who saw early that the “official version” of anything was usually the biggest lie in the room. So he made his own version — louder, stranger, funnier, truer. He wrote like someone who refused to pretend the country wasn’t half‑mad already.

And maybe that’s why he still hits me so hard.
Because he reminds me that the world doesn’t need more polite little sentences. It needs people willing to say what they actually see. It needs voices that don’t flinch.

On his birthday, I picture him barreling down some Kentucky back road in a beat‑up convertible, sunglasses on, hair flying, muttering about Nixon or the Derby or whatever fresh American absurdity had caught his attention. And he’s laughing — that cracked, dangerous laugh — because he knew the joke was always on the people who thought they were in charge.

Maybe that’s the lesson today.
Live a little louder.
Tell the truth even when it’s ugly.
Write the thing that scares you.
Don’t sand down your voice to make anybody comfortable.

Hunter S. Thompson didn’t just write about America — he wrestled it, bit it, spit it out, and handed us the bones.

Happy birthday, Hunter.
The harbor feels rowdier today, and I’m not fighting it.

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Archibald the Mystical Mouse

I’ve been thinking since March 5th of 2026, when I published my book, that I should rewrite it — not because I expect sales to suddenly skyrocket, but because I left out some things, explanations that would have mattered. Like the fact that I have this mystical mouse named Archibald MacLeish who shows up in the beginning. I just assumed everyone would sort of get it, and then it started occurring to me, over and over again, that no, not everyone does get it. What’s the big deal about the mouse?

So let me say it plainly.

In my book, I talk about this make‑believe mouse named Archibald MacLeish. He’s a small, mystical presence who slips in and out of the story, but the name itself comes from something real in my life. Back in school, my science teacher kept a classroom mouse, and he named that little creature Archibald MacLeish. At the time, I didn’t know much about the man behind the name, but my teacher did — and he believed in giving things names that meant something.

Later, I learned who the real Archibald MacLeish was — an American poet who wrote about democracy as something you do, not something you admire from a distance. He believed in dissent, in thinking for yourself, in the dignity of choosing your own path.

So the mouse in my book is that mouse — the one supporting my dissent. Not just the classroom mouse, and not just the poet, but the whole chain of belief behind it: a teacher who saw something in me, a poet who stood for freedom of thought, and a reminder that even the smallest presence can carry a big idea.

That’s the namesake. That’s the reason. That’s why the mouse is Archibald MacLeish. That’s why he shows up at the induction center.

And I should have explained that as an introduction to the little guy — why he’s there and given him the honor and the dues he deserved. I think folks would have felt the depth of his presence.

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Dan Sanders — Born May 20

I write about people’s birthdays, so I figured I’d give this guy a try.

Dan Sanders was born on May 20 in Knoxville, Tennessee, and before he knew much of anything he was hauled into the strange hum of Oak Ridge — the Atomic City, where the sidewalks were clean, the secrets were thick, and the grown‑ups talked in half‑sentences. He spent his first ten years there, learning early that the world doesn’t always tell you the truth straight on.

Then came the moves, one after another, the kind of drifting that teaches a kid to keep his eyes open and his back to the wall. Eventually he landed in New York City with his parents, a place loud enough to either swallow you whole or teach you how to stand your ground. He chose standing.

When the Vietnam War came calling, he not only didn’t answer — he sent a resounding NO echoing through the induction center, loud enough that the walls probably still remember it. And the country made him pay for that honesty. He spent time in federal prison for refusing the war, learning a different kind of geography: steel bars, long nights, and the strange brotherhood of men who wouldn’t bend. It didn’t break him. It sharpened him.

He made his way from New York to Boston, where he built a quieter life without ever losing the grit of where he came from. Over the years he became a broadcaster, a writer, a guy who pays attention to the small moments most people walk right past. His work — whether memoir, poetry, or the stories he tells out loud — carries that mix of blunt honesty and dry wit that only comes from a life actually lived, not imagined.

Born on this day, May 20, Dan Sanders grew up between the secrets of Oak Ridge, the chaos of New York, the hard lessons of prison, and the hard‑earned calm of Boston — carrying all of it in the way he writes, remembers, and tells the truth as he sees it.

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Me and Watergate

May 17th 1973, the Senate Watergate Committee opened its hearings.

On May 17, 1973, most Americans first heard the names E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy—the men behind the Democratic National Committee headquarters break-in that would topple a presidency.

Those names meant something different to me; they weren’t just headlines, but men I actually encountered in the same prison.

Arrested in 1971, I moved through The Tombs and several transfers, arriving at Danbury in 1972—before Watergate gripped the nation. When Hunt and Liddy were convicted in early 1973 and already federal inmates, they entered my world.

I played chess with E. Howard Hunt, the former CIA man, whose calm, almost courtly manner made him a polite opponent. That year, G. Gordon Liddy and I were both in solitary, not for the same reasons or in the same cell, but in the same block.

And here’s the strange truth:

Liddy and I shared one thing — an absolute refusal to cooperate with the authorities.  

His refusal came from ideology and bravado; mine, from conscience. But to the Bureau of Prisons, defiance is defiance, and it lands you in the same concrete box.

It was surreal: America watched Watergate on TV while I shared a prison with the men who set it in motion. History unfolded in Washington, but some of them sat across from me at chess or were locked in solitary confinement down the tier.

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Wavy Gravy Was Born Today

Some people arrive in this world like a whisper. Wavy Gravy showed up like a marching band that took a wrong turn and decided to stay.

Born on this day in 1936, back when the world was still in black‑and‑white, he somehow grew into one of the most colorful human beings to ever wander through the American story. Hugh Romney was the name on the paperwork, but the universe had other plans. It needed a jester. A peacekeeper. A clown with a conscience. A man who could talk down a crowd of 400,000 hungry, muddy, half‑mad festival‑goers at Woodstock with nothing but a microphone and a grin.

He fed people. He calmed people. He made them laugh when they were ready to break. He turned compassion into a kind of performance art, and he never stopped believing that humor could be a tool for survival. The Hog Farm, the Seva Foundation, the endless parade of red noses and tie‑dye — it was all part of the same mission: make the world a little lighter, a little kinder, a little more human.

Wavy Gravy reminds us that you can take the work seriously without taking yourself seriously. That mischief can be mercy. That joy can be a form of resistance. And that sometimes the best way to keep the peace is to show up dressed like a psychedelic Santa Claus and tell everyone it’s going to be okay.

On the day he was born, the universe clearly decided it needed more color. And all these years later, we’re still living in the glow.

From Rambling Harbor, where the tide rolls in with its own kind of cosmic joke, I tip my hat to the man who proved you can change the world with a laugh and a ladle.

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Some Thoughts and a Poem

I was just remembering the old Trump slogan “Drill, Baby, Drill,” and while I know a lot of folks are hurting because of the price of oil, I still think this: if there’s no earth left to drive on, the price of gas doesn’t matter.

Oil drilling harms the Earth in multiple, well‑documented ways, affecting land, water, air, wildlife, and the climate. The damage begins long before the first drop of oil is pumped and continues through extraction, transport, and burning.

Oil drilling isn’t just a technical process or an economic talking point. It tears open land that never asked to be touched, poisons water that once ran clear and leaves behind a kind of silence that feels heavier than sound. Every spill, every leak, every plume of smoke is another reminder that the earth absorbs more than we ever admit — and it remembers longer than we ever will.

That’s the ground my poem “The Scorched Land” stands on. It came from the moment I realized the planet isn’t just a stage for our mistakes — it’s a witness. A witness to the forests scraped away for access roads, the oceans slicked with oil, the air thickened by what we pull from below. These aren’t abstract harms. They’re wounds. And the earth carries them the way a body carries scars.

The poem lives in that uneasy space where anger and grief meet the stubborn belief that we can still do better. It’s not political. It’s personal. It’s the voice you hear when the world goes quiet enough for you to notice what’s been lost and what’s still worth saving.

If you’ve ever felt that shift under your feet — that sense that the ground itself is keeping score — then “The Scorched Land” is the part of this post meant for you.

And if you want the part of this story that doesn’t fit neatly into facts or headlines, it’s in the poem that grew out of all this.

The Scorched Land

When the last of us remain on this scorched land,
We will watch the ancient footage of our folly—
How we spurned the cries of nature and her hand,
How we slowly drained the lifeblood of this planet.

We will see the glaciers melt, and oceans rise,
We will see the forests burn, and deserts spread,
We will see storms, floods, droughts, and fires,
We will see the mass extinction of the living dead.

We will wonder how we could have been so blind—
How could we have let our greed destroy our home?
How could we have ignored the signs of our decline?
How could we have sealed our fate with a catacomb?

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Fashion or Conspicuous Consumption on Display

Maybe it’s just me—many times in cases like this it is at least mostly me—and before I go any further, I want to say I did not watch it. Instead, I watched the New York Knicks get some Boston Celtics revenge against the Philadelphia 76ers. But this morning the news is all over the event like bugs on a bumper, and the event I’m referring to is the Met Gala. An evening where individual costumes commonly range from $50,000 to $200,000, the Met Gala is officially known as the Costume Institute Benefit. It exists to financially support the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Unlike other Met departments, the Costume Institute is self‑funded. According to reporting summarized by The New Republic, the Met Gala has raised approximately $166.5 million over the past decade—an average of about $16–17 million per year. What makes this arrangement striking is not simply the sum raised, but the structure behind it: the museum collects the revenue while the immense aesthetic costs are absorbed by designers and luxury brands. The result is an event framed as philanthropy but sustained by a logic that more closely resembles high‑end advertising.

In the end, watching the Met Gala felt less like witnessing fashion and more like staring straight into the neon heart of conspicuous consumption. All that glitter, all that theater, all that money draped over people who can barely walk in it — it hits me like a scream I can’t quite swallow. Maybe it’s just the guy in clean jeans and a sweatshirt talking, but there’s something grounding about clothes meant to be lived in, not displayed like trophies. And standing in the shadow of all that gaudiness, I’m reminded how far spectacle can drift from anything that feels real.

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