Tag: love

Matches and Money: A Sanctuary Strategy for Resistance

Tomorrow, Saturday, October 18th, is the nationwide “No Kings March”. And I’ve been beating myself silly because this time I’ve decided that I can’t go—not that I don’t want to, but that I can’t. The primary reason is that my back has been so bad this week, I’ve spent most of my time in what’s called the non-violent prone position. In this case, that means flat on my bed.

And while I was lying there, writing the great American resistance novel on my ceiling, I kept thinking about an article I’d just read by Brian Huba published in”The Hill” today, October 17th. He was talking about another form of resistance—one I’ve always believed in. The kind that hits them where it hurts: the pocketbook.

Now, I’m not pretending that my low participation in the general ebb and flow of the almighty buying power of the dollar will make much difference. And I’m not saying it can replace the power of demonstration—of people gathering to make our voices heard and to send a signal, both to each other and to the Gestapo in DC: ‘We are not alone.’

But I’ve been thinking about pressure. Not the kind that crushes, but the kind that carves. The type that reshapes stone into sanctuary. And lately, I’ve come to believe that the most potent pressure we can apply—politically, spiritually, economically—is a two-part ritual: matches and money.

Let me explain.

We’ve been taught to march. To chant. To gather in the streets with cardboard signs and aching knees. And yes, there’s power in that, and there’s power in the crowd. But maybe the real revolution isn’t in the march, but in the match? Not the kind that burns buildings. The kind that lights candles. That ignites awareness. That says: ‘I see what you’re doing, and I will not fund it.’

Because the truth is: the system doesn’t fear our voices. It loves our wallets, our money, and it fears losing them. It fears our cancellations, our divestments, our refusal to play along. When we cancel a subscription, we’re not just saving $14.99—we’re pulling a thread from the tapestry of complicity. When we stop feeding the beast, the beast gets hungry.

Brian Huba said it plainly: maybe the most radical thing we can do right now isn’t to protest in the streets, but to unsubscribe, to stop paying for platforms that profit from our pain. To match our outrage with economic consequences.

So, I’m lighting matches. Quiet ones. Symbolic ones. I’m canceling, redirecting, reimagining. I’m spending like a poet—every dollar a stanza, every boycott a verse. I’m building a sanctuary where resistance isn’t just loud, it’s strategic.

Because when matches meet money, we don’t just protest. We pressure. We don’t just speak. We shift.

And yes—I will march again.

But first, I get the MRI.

First, I listen to the good doctors—the ones I trust to tell me how to walk without pain, how to stand without flinching.

Because resistance isn’t just about showing up. It’s about showing up whole.

And when I do march again, and I will return, I’ll be carrying my flag and my banners, not just as protest, but as testimony.

Proof that healing is part of the revolution, too.

—Dan

Rambling Harbor, where even the receipts are revolutionary

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Introduction

I never meant to write a war story. I meant to live a life. Not the kind that ends up in textbooks or on movie screens, but the kind shaped by quiet choices—by sitting down when others stepped forward, by saying no when silence was easier. This book isn’t about the Vietnam War or the peace movement. Those stories already fill libraries. It’s not about my years behind the mic as a radio broadcaster—that came later. Nor is it about the loud ones: the noisemakers, the celebrities, the politicians, or the filmmakers chasing spotlight and legacy.

This book is about quiet defiance. About extraordinary moments tucked inside an otherwise ordinary life. Mine.

During the Vietnam War era, roughly 570,000 young men were labeled draft offenders. Of those, 210,000 were formally charged. Just 8,750 were convicted. And only 3,250 were jailed. Less than one percent. This book is about that final group—the ones history rarely names, Hollywood never casts, and textbooks barely mention. It’s about my friend Kevin, who said, when we reconnected after Daniel Berrigan’s passing in 2016, “Dan, we didn’t go after the government; they came after us. We just wanted to live our lives.” Kevin was right. We wanted to live, and we wanted the boys sent to fight in a war we didn’t choose to live also.

I’m proud to say I was one of the 3,250 who said no. We said it quietly, but loud enough to keep our souls intact while they locked up our bodies. I tell only my part of the story, but I know I’m not so different from the other 3,249. Maybe I can make a little noise for all of us.

I once asked my father what happens when we die. We were walking a dirt road in the Deep South, the heat thick as molasses. I was nine. My dad, a scientist in spirit and mind, told me energy can’t be created or destroyed—it only changes form. Since the human body is mostly energy, it too must become something else. That left me with the unsettling idea that I might not become a mighty oak, but a daffodil on the side of a hill. Maybe my life has been a long attempt to be the oak, not the daffodil. But the jury’s still out.

I never planned to oppose a war, and I certainly never intended to write a book. If I had, maybe I would’ve kept a diary—or at least some decent notes. What few I scribbled on barroom napkins or in stray notebooks are long gone, buried in some landfill. Hopefully, raising a mighty oak. But I do remember a few things.

I’ll tell you about growing up on Staten Island—football, beaches, music, and radio. A middle-class kid with few worldly cares and a head full of books. My first dream was to be a radio star. That dream shifted when friends started coming home in body bags—boys who could run, jump, and catch with the best of us, now still forever.

I’ll try to explain how a painfully shy kid found the courage to sit down instead of stepping forward at Whitehall Station—the military induction center in New York City where young men were processed for the draft. The routine was simple: They underwent a written aptitude test and a physical examination to determine fitness for service.

Based on these evaluations, they were classified (e.g., 1-A for fit, 4-F for unfit). When your name was called, you stepped forward to begin your journey into military service. But I didn’t. I sat down. I don’t know if fear buckled my knees or if I’d read somewhere that sitting was the perfect nonviolent act. Maybe it was both. Either way, that quiet refusal marked the beginning of my resistance.

I’ll take you from New York to the mountains of West Virginia, to a woman named Emily who taught me how to live off the land. Then, to a woman older than I was, with three children, about her, and the court fight for custody of her kids and one of mine. I’ll tell you about my arrest in Hollywood and the cross-country ride back to New York, escorted by U.S. marshals. And the old judge who nearly begged me to take one of his get-out-of-jail-free cards.

I’ll talk about meeting Daniel and Phillip Berrigan in prison. And how resistance didn’t end behind bars, as shown by my trips to solitary confinement for refusing to walk the prison lines. I’ll tell you about fellow inmates like Howard Hunt, G. Gordon Liddy, and Clifford Irving—and the handful of other draft and war resisters. I’ll finish with life after prison.

3,249 other stories may or may not be told. This one is mine.

Dan Sanders

July 2025

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Rating: 1 out of 5.

Chapter 1: Ties, Offices, and Draft Cards

I need to revisit something I said in the introduction. I called my life ordinary. That was a misfire. Looking back, it’s been anything but. What I should’ve said is that there were ordinary moments scattered through an otherwise extraordinary life. I grew up alongside kids who mapped out their futures with surgical precision—future CEOs, most likely. Me? I had a plan too, though it felt more like a whispered plea to the universe: Please, God, don’t let my life be beige. No cubicle coma. No death by fluorescent light. I’ll tell you soon how close I came to that fate—until I tossed my tie into the Hudson River like a message in a bottle. Still the best decision I ever made.

As I started writing about my life, one emotion kept erupting like a brainquake—volcanic, relentless. It left me slack-jawed, arms limp, staring at the screen like I’d just seen a ghost. If you’ve ever tried writing in that state, you know it’s like trying to type underwater. And that emotion? The gut-punch realization that, holy hell, this is ancient history. Am I really that old? Who was she? Who was he? Did I actually do that? A Ulyssean train wreck of memory and feeling, barreling through time.

From the moment we’re born, we’re shaped by sound, sight, touch, and experience.

I was sixteen in 1962 when the Cuban Missile Crisis hit—a high-stakes staring contest between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, triggered by Soviet missiles in Cuba. It was the closest we ever came to turning the Cold War into a full-blown nuclear nightmare. But in my corner of Staten Island, the “wonder years” of the 1950s still lingered like the scent of summer on a football jersey. My friends and I spent our days at the beach, dreaming of October and kickoff season. But that October was different. For thirteen days, the whole country held its breath. I did too, hoping the football field would still be there when morning came.

My dad had worked on the Manhattan Project. He didn’t talk much about it, but I knew he carried the weight. He once said the first bomb should’ve been dropped on Mt. Fuji as a warning, not on Hiroshima. That act, he believed, was revenge—rage disguised as strategy. And now, just seventeen years later, we were back on the brink, flirting with annihilation.

Three books helped shape me in those early years. First was Elie Wiesel’s Night—a raw, haunting account of surviving Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Years later, I’d sit at the dinner table with a Tufts professor who’d lived through it. His stories etched themselves into my memory like carvings in stone. The second was Black Like Me, where John Howard Griffin darkened his skin and walked through the segregated South to see what it meant to be Black in America. I couldn’t have known then that I’d one day I’d call Phil Berrigan—a white priest who rode with the Freedom Riders—a friend. The third was Fail-Safe, serialized during the Cuban Missile Crisis itself. It imagined a nuclear war sparked by a glitch. Fiction, yes—but terrifyingly plausible.

Heavy reading for a sixteen-year-old. I don’t know what other kids were reading, but those books rewired my brain. The wonder years ended in 1962. I graduated from high school in ’64, skipped the ceremony, and refused the yearbook photo. Some of my teammates had gone off to war. Some came back in boxes. I didn’t want the pomp. I wanted silence. My mom was quietly heartbroken. My dad understood, though he never said so.

In ’63 and ’64, I had a summer gig at WSLT Radio in Ocean City, New Jersey. Two hours each way from Staten Island, but I had a license and a dream. Sunday mornings were mine—I was king of the airwaves. The worst part was driving through Newark, where the air tasted like burnt rubber and my gum absorbed the pollution. I think of that now, as climate change becomes the new crisis.

I was supposed to start at Pace University in September ’64. Tuition paid. The catch? A lifetime at Cunard Steamship Company. I lasted six weeks. One hot day, I walked into Battery Park and threw my tie into the Hudson. That was my declaration of independence. My boss called. My mom worried. My dad? Not surprised.

I kept the Sunday radio gig.

Meanwhile, the world was shifting. In December ’63, Eugene Keyes burned his draft card on Christmas Day. In May ’64, I got mine—and joined a protest in Union Square. Fifty of us. My mom thought I was with my girlfriend. My dad probably knew better. Burning that card was symbolic. I had a deferment, and I wasn’t headed to Vietnam. But I broke two laws: failing to carry the card and destroying government property. I kept the ashes in my pocket.

I haven’t been back to New York since 1968. But one day, I’ll return to Battery Park. And remember.

________________________________________

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Rating: 1 out of 5.

Chapter 3:Whitehall Station Army Induction Center

My father died in December 1967. Cancer. A slow, cruel thief that stole him piece by piece until all that remained was silence. I was twenty-one, and the world was already loud with war.

The night before my induction, sleep refused to visit. I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling like it owed me answers. My heart was a metronome gone rogue—too fast, too loud, too erratic. I tried counting breaths, replaying old football games, pretending I was anywhere but here. But dread crept under the door and settled in my bones. I wasn’t afraid of dying. I was scared of disappearing—of becoming a number, a uniform, a cog in a machine I didn’t believe in.

The draft lottery, America’s twisted game show of fate, didn’t begin until December 1, 1969. But in 1964, the draft was still operating under a local board system, where deferments (for college, hardship, etc.) and classifications were manually reviewed. In 1964, when I was eighteen, I burned my college deferment draft card, thinking I was making a statement. At the same time, I began writing letters to the President of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson, expressing my opposition to the war and to my draft board on Staten Island, requesting reclassification to 1-A. You can’t refuse what you haven’t been offered. And I was tired of, if not exactly hiding behind loopholes, then at least I was tired of accepting them.

I was writing the first line of a much longer story. By ’69, they changed my deferment and reclassified me 1A—fit for service, next in line to toe the line, or not. I was on the verge of something, though I couldn’t name it. It had taken me 5 years between business schools and seminaries to get here. I think of that time as going from the gridiron to leg irons.

And then the morning came. I was up and gone by 6 am. I wasn’t sleeping anyway, leaving a note for my mother, telling her I had gone to visit friends. I wondered how long I really would be gone. I took the bus to the Staten Island Ferry, which crosses the Hudson River. Whitehall Station was about two blocks from the Ferry terminal. It must have been the longest two blocks I have ever walked, and the slowest. I was in no hurry. Just writing about that morning, I can still feel that god-awful, sinking, sick feeling in my stomach; I can’t do this.

You’ve heard of the fight-or-flight response. Mine was freeze and fall. No exit. Just a heart pounding like a drumline on speed, and a cliff edge I couldn’t see the bottom of. I was about to dive into the dark. Compared to this, the Coney Island Parachute Jump was a kiddie ride.

Whitehall Station sat in lower Manhattan like a bureaucratic bunker—the Army’s induction center where boys became soldiers, or tried not to. It shut down on May 18, 1972, two days before my birthday, while I was sitting in the Danbury Federal Correctional Institution, partly because I wanted it torn down and had done my best to see that happen.

As I walked up the last few steps to enter the building, I found Mr. Harold Jones waiting outside Whitehall Station. My eighth-grade science teacher, yes—but more than that, over my high school years, and not really having anyone else to talk to who seemed to understand what I was feeling, Mr. Jones became my confidant and my co-conspirator in resistance. He had made science feel like storytelling, helped along by a fictional mouse named Archibald MacLeish who lived in his coat closet. Archibald, named after the poet and war veteran, wore a French beret, a red bandana, and carried a cane. No one ever saw him, but I did. I still do. He walks proudly, head high, like he knows something the rest of us don’t. We said very little to each other that morning. I thank him for being there. He said something about me staying me, it was something to be proud of.

The induction ceremony began. The room smelled of sweat and floor wax. The air was thick with the breath of boys pretending not to shake. The recruiter’s voice was flat, rehearsed, like he’d stopped listening after the first hundred times. Repeat after me, he began.

“I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution…”

He barked it out. Repeat? Hell, I could barely breathe. I needed time. I needed space. I needed something other than this.

“…that I will bear true faith…”

And suddenly I wasn’t in Whitehall anymore. I was back on the football field, hearing my coach yell, “Go in hell-bent for leather, Little Sandy!” My dad was Big Sandy. The coach used that nickname to rile me up. Hell-bent for leather. Hell-bent for leather. My heart picked up the chant, louder and louder, until it drowned out everything else.

Then came the words: “Step forward.”

I sat down.

The recruiter blinked, confused. Thought I was sick. I stood up, then sat again.

“I’m not moving,” I said, though I wasn’t sure I could if I wanted to. The sergeant’s face seemed to turn fire-engine red with anger.

My heart was a jackhammer. I was frozen in defiance—or maybe just fear. Either way, I wasn’t going forward.

Two MPs grabbed me like a sack of potatoes and hauled me to a holding cell. I was questioned by some army lawyer type who wanted me to be sure I knew what I was doing, and I asked him if he was sure if he knew what he was doing. Then came the police car, the ride to Staten Island, and my first night in jail. From the gridiron to the county jail—five miles apart, a lifetime between.

As I was carried out of Whitehall Station, I had started refusing to walk. Part of my plan was total non-cooperation. Mr. Jones stood on the grimy New York sidewalk. He smiled. Gave me a thumbs-up. And from between some cop’s gun holster and his arm, I flashed him a peace sign.

And just behind him, in the blur of sirens and sidewalk noise, I saw Archibald MacLeish.

Not in a coat closet this time—but strutting down the curb in his beret and red bandana, cane tapping a rhythm only I could hear. He paused, tipped his hat, and whispered, “Courage isn’t loud, Sandy. It’s the quiet refusal.”

Then he vanished into the crowd.

That image is etched deeper than any classroom memory.

Mr. Jones arranged to bail me out, or hoped I’d be released on my own recognizance. I was up the next morning with a trial date set. I ended up at his home for the rest of the day—resting, recovering, trying to make more sense of what had just happened. But more importantly, what would happen next?

To my mother, I was simply visiting Mr. Jones. I was old enough to say, “Don’t call my parents,” and the authorities obliged.

A trial date was set for April. The lead-up was a blur of paperwork, legal advice, and quiet panic. I walked the streets of Manhattan like a ghost, memorizing the cracks in the sidewalk, the rhythm of subway trains, the smell of roasted peanuts from corner carts—anything to anchor me. I had oddly always found the Financial District of Manhattan relaxing on a Sunday morning. The insanity of Wall Street gave way to peace and silence. I walked Wall Street a few times in those last days in New York, and of course, Times Square, the lights of Broadway were not going to shine on me, but they do shine inside of me in my heart and memory. Just as the beaches of Staten Island still call to me.. I didn’t know what I was looking for, only that it wasn’t in New York anymore.

I got a message to Emily at a Post Office Box in Alderson, and I asked if her mountain was still standing. In a week, she answered. She said yes, with directions at least for the ones that were for the roads.. So I packed up and headed south, winding through the back roads past Alderson, deep into the West Virginia woods. I wasn’t running. I was regrouping. The mountain had always been there—quiet, steady, like Emily herself. And in that silence, I could breathe again.

The last stretch to Emily’s cabin was a two-mile hike up a narrow trail—no road, no signs, just the hush of the woods and the crunch of my boots on leaves. Each step peeled away the noise of the city, the courtroom, the cell. I carried no map, but the mountain knew the way. By the time I reached the clearing, my breath had steadied, and something in me had begun to loosen.

The mountain didn’t ask for explanations. It didn’t care about draft classifications, courtroom dates, or the ache behind my eyes. It just stood there—solid, indifferent, eternal. Emily met me at the porch with a mug of hot cider and a silence that felt like a gift of grace. I sat down, let the steam rise, and listened to the wind move through the trees like a hymn. Somewhere in that hush, I heard the tap of a cane on stone. Archibald MacLeish, beret tilted just so, stepped out from behind an old oak tree and said, “You made it, Sandy. Not by marching, not by hiding—but by listening.” He tipped his hat, winked, and vanished again

And for the first time in months, that night I slept.

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Rating: 1 out of 5.