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Thank you, Susan. Thanks very much. Thank you. I'm really very, very pleased to be here and I want to thank you for having invited me and thank those of you who are attending. You don't look so conservative. I don't usually read my speeches, but what I discovered was that there are a lot of things I want to say and I know that I'll skip too many of them if I leave my notes for too long. So I will use some notes.

I will speak to you as humanly, as directly, and as intelligently as I can, from my heart, from my brain, and from my personal experiences. I'm here as myself, as a nonviolent activist, as the president of a human rights organization and as a member of what I like to refer to as the new moral necessity. I'd like to tell you about how I and we at Humanitas perceive the colossal job of human survival which confronts the human race in the 1980s; about how we have tried to gain perspective of what things can be done for the betterment of humankind and some other things that we, at Humanitas, have done. In the process I hope, of course, to remind people, without being too obnoxious or too cumbersome, of certain moral necessities that must be taken seriously in the 1980s if we want to see something aside from the current, near total breakdown, moral breakdown, taking place within nations and across national borders.

The foundation for all of our activities comes from an idea, which is certainly not new, but an idea to which there's enormous resistance wherever people have opinions and feelings in this world. This idea, as a part of the new moral necessity, is the idea of learning to see world problems through both eyes, not just the right or just the left, but seeing clearly and fairly through both eyes. It was really the importance of seeing through both eyes which gave Humanitas its beginnings in early 1979. I was conducting a study group in my home for the purpose of keeping up on world affairs. And in February, our group was visited by two Vietnamese, boat people. One, a defrocked monk, the other, a writer. Both had been against the U.S. support of two regimes. One had been jailed in the 60s for his beliefs and actions. By February of 1979, both had been so disillusioned by the new communist regime that they had followed in the historical flow of boat people into the South China Sea. They described to us the Vietnam they had left behind as a gulag of re-education camps, prisons, enforced labor, tremendous repression.

The question to me was, as a person who had shown such concern for the people of Vietnam during the U.S. involvement in that country, was I still concerned about the people of Vietnam? And were any of the others of the 60s, who had been so outspoken on behalf of innocent victims of that war, were they still concerned? At that time, February 1979, Amnesty International claimed 200,000 political prisoners in Vietnam and we began to investigate the situation ourselves. It became clearer and clearer that the question was not whether or not Vietnam had become a totalitarian state or why it had become one, it simply was one. The questions were, to myself and to my friends, could we face up to the fact that though we had tried for 10 years to liberate that tiny country, tried to bring self-determination and democracy to Vietnam, perhaps we had failed. I must say that I do not for a second regret my activities during those 10 years, that I think during the Vietnam War the only civilized way to behave was to deny that that war should exist, and that's what we did. But I realized that five years after the withdrawal of American troops, Vietnam was being run by 17 aging Stalinists, who were making life a hell for the majority of the population, and that the magnitude of the problem was huge and that nobody I knew wanted think about it. And that I was developing a case of visual preference, which was excluding a priority problem, the very real pain and sorrow of the Vietnamese people in massive numbers. In fact, I discovered how widespread that eye disease was when I tried to recruit well-known activists of the 60s to sign an open letter to Hanoi decrying the status of their human rights. There were 81 signers, there could easily have been 500.

What we risk by seeing fairly and justly through both eyes is our attachment to ideology. It's attachment to our country, to our party, to whatever clan in which we feel we have invested our identity, to whatever clan we hold an image of ourselves in, to whatever clan we put our money in, and from whichever clan we derive what we call or feel to be a sense of security. I discovered, once again, through the project of the Open Letter [to Vietnam] how blessed I am to have never been burdened with an ideology. I've now been called both a pinko commie and a CIA rat and a number of other things, I'm sure. I keep waiting for either of those groups to pay up; neither ever does. And I consider the fact of those varying viewpoints and the outrage with which they are expressed to be a compliment to my sanity. My identity is as a member of the human race, certainly a flawed one like everybody else, but it's that and no more and no less. I believe I'm capable of seeing through both eyes, and I'd like to tell you some of the things that I see before me in 1981.

I see a world of such intense beauty that it's quite incomprehensible to me. I see races of enormously beautiful and handsome people walking the earth, full of inborn pride. I see the magnificence of the human mind at work. I see the glory of art and of music. I see the wingéd victory carved in marble, as smooth as soap. I see the human potential, which literally takes us to the moon. Clearly, the rest of my speech today could be an accounting of the gifts, both manmade and of nature, which surround us daily. But then, of course, I see the dark forces of our weaknesses, our greed, and our myopia gaining momentum at a breakneck speed. I see starving children. I see 15 million refugees. I see pain and sorrow absolutely beyond our comprehension, from El Salvador and Guatemala where torture and murder are institutionalized to Sakharov's miserable exile in Gorky. From Vietnamese prison camps to the thousands of disappeared citizens in Argentina. From the dead Haitians on the Florida shores, to South Africa's apartheid. From the daily executions in Iran to our own ghettos. All of these holocausts, from the immense to the moderate, emanate from the fact that power politics, whether right-wing or left-wing, that national interests coming from a right-wing or left-wing government and that ideas and ideologies, right-wing or left wing, are more important than the people they are supposed to serve. Perhaps this is becoming a trend.

Also, there's no ideological safeguard for misery. Hunger is hunger, torture is torture, and dead is dead. I live in a country which I fear, at this point, is mixed up. I believe much of the population here prefers to be lulled to sleep. This makes me afraid. Lulled to sleep by reassuring advertisements on television, which give us a range of options from the fastest acting headache pill to the reassurance that we have a government we can count on for a change. The Americans are known throughout the world, certainly in the places that I've ever traveled, for being a very, very warm people. We're also known for our apathy. I have an English friend who tells me: "With all due respect," she says, "Americans will never understand anything, my dear, until their central heating goes out." Which, of course, may not be that far away.

The danger of this apathy is that it reinforces our sense of powerlessness. And when a general population feels powerless, it is willing to follow the dictates of whomever currently sits in power, no matter how visually impaired that leader might be. I criticize the apathy in this country partly out of a tremendous sense of waste. We have so much freedom to speak out, to act, to move, to care, and to really count in the international picture, in the greater scheme of things. Our privileges cry out to be made use of. I, for one, do not like the imposition of powerlessness put upon me. Nor do I think it necessary for me or for anyone else, certainly in this room. An aversion to powerlessness became another reason for the existence of Humanitas in my life. We are now a small, but determined staff, a nonviolent army, if you will, of five people with representatives in 10 countries and a membership of 6,000 people. We hope to soon have a working office in Washington D.C. and we have one already in London. We work to address the issues that we see as crucial and attempting to create a slightly more sane, slightly more humane world. We are dreamers and we are, no doubt, fools, but we know our limitations. We aim high, we work like hell, and we feel a deep sense of satisfaction when somebody says to us, "You have made a difference in my life; thank you."

A brief history of things that we've done with Amnesty since the Open Letter to Vietnam - and some were mentioned - the Bay Area Cambodian Emergency Relief Fund, in which everybody in the Bay Area should really take a pride because that million and a quarter dollars was raised from junior high schools, high schools, elementary schools, benefit concerts, small donations. And those donations are very, very carefully looked after, taken to the border of Cambodia and Thailand by Humanitas' executive director. And if the project did not already exist with which we were comfortable, she would create one. An example would be that CARE (Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere, Inc.) volunteered to go in with us to set up programs for feeding lactating mothers, pregnant mothers, and children under five. And this way we felt we could keep ourselves as clean as possible in what was not a very clean situation. The CERF has gone on to do other refugee work and Humanitas simply stretches our boundaries whenever we feel it necessary. If refugees are not traditional human rights, we will make them so for ourselves or we will simply make them fit Humanitas. It was a need that we saw, we wanted to have a part in filling, and so we did so.

I'd like to mention that Humanitas is used partially as a vehicle to follow-up on the actions of Joan Baez, the entertainer and public personality. We labored for three months over the subject of how to build an organization. Certainly, it should not be based around a personality such as myself. After we'd wasted three months time during which we could have been involved in any other project, we agreed that my uniqueness should be used. In fact, since anyone in the public eye is bound to be used by any faction of people, at any time, I prefer to have as much control as possible over how I'm used. I would like to be used by Humanitas for the betterment of humankind. Something like Martin Luther King saying: "If If I'm going to be a drum major, let me be a drum major for justice. Let me be a drum major for peace." So Humanitas has built its own perimeters, stretching as far as we can as a nonprofit, educational human rights organization.

We've continued to raise money for Somalia, for East Timor. We began to see the necessity that what we felt building a bridge between human rights and disarmament. Disarmament we looked upon as an issue absolutely included in human rights because the right to remain alive is a basic human right. And the largest threat to that human right, at this point, in our opinion, is the arms race. We ran a consultation of human rights and disarmament in Madrid with Nobel Peace Prize winner, Adolfo Perez Esquivel from Argentina and Mairead Corrigan, also a Nobel Peace Prize winner, from Ireland, and ex-Swedish ambassador to a number of places Harald Edelstam. The event was co-sponsored by International Fellowship of Reconciliation. We have begun that bridge. We have had policy consultations on disarmament at Stanford, where we've had speakers who are experts in the field of arms control. We've had expert pacifists and we've had expert people who didn't believe a word we were saying. We tried to include them all in the evening. We have had policy consultations on Latin America, during which time I became very interested in trying to go to Latin America. Also at the invitation of Perez Esquivel. So, I attempted to have a concert tour. If the concert tour had come off commercially, half of that money would have gone to support the nonviolent groups that we were meeting and the human rights groups that we were affiliated with in Latin America.

As some of you may know, I was prohibited from singing publicly in Argentina and Brazil, and Chile never gave me a work permit. So all three of the countries' promoters had originally expressed great interest in putting on my concerts. In fact, by the time we left on tour, Brazil had a line up of five concerts in large venues. Argentina was still a strong possibility and Chile had not yet issue a work permit, but we were innocent enough to think I might still get one. The other countries included on the tour, as were mentioned earlier, were Mexico, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Argentina greeted me with no possibilities for a concert, no promoters available, no halls, tear gas lobbed into the meeting of the Permanent Assembly on Human Rights in which I was speaking. On the second night, we were followed 24 hours a day by two cars filled with people who referred to themselves as my security, but who, when there was a bomb threat, my press conference suggested that I go on ahead and they'd keep an eye out. I was kicked out of my hotel and the bomb threats turned out to be quite real bombs.

The beauty of what happened for me in Argentina was, of course, meeting the mothers of the disappeared people, young people and the families of the detained. Probably there is no stronger group of people I've met anywhere on the face of the earth than these mothers. And we should know, those of us here who are parents, is what absolute torture it must be for a parent to go to bed every night, say for, most of the kidnappings took place between 5 and 7 years ago in Argentina, wondering whether your child is alive or dead. Whether your child was violated, whether your child was beaten, raped, before they were killed and most of them, it does not look very rosy that they will return. The women go silently and in a very dignified way every Thursday to the center of town and they march and they're requesting of the government only one thing: a list of where the children are, which, of course, presents an enormous problem for the government, but this is their request. And they say that they will do that forever and they probably will.

In Chile, they were much craftier with me. They did not prohibit me from singing an underground concert at which 5,000 people showed up. The sadness for me in Chile was that the entertainers with whom I shared an evening were terribly brave and beautiful musicians and magnificent people, and they were all scared. Because they were afraid that if repression tightened again in Chile, that they would be vulnerable. They would be put on the spot simply because of the evening spent together as entertainers and with Joan Baez, etcetera. But they are so brave; I mean, we really have no idea. And, I think what I tasted in the three countries was some kind of idea of what it would be like to really be censored. That I couldn't go out and do what I do best, what's God's gift to me is my voice, I wouldn't be allowed to go out and sing my songs to people and I had the tiniest taste of that. Although I knew that I would leave the country and I could come home and I would be able to sing.

In Brazil, it was a little more dramatic and a little more shocking because Brazil somehow now has a picture of being much more liberalized and open and democratization etc. And in Brazil, the police came to the door before one of these unofficial concerts and, with a lot of hemming and hawing, finally made it clear that if I tried to sing in public in Brazil, I'd be arrested. So, I went to the microphone and explained to everybody what had happened and everybody had a good laugh. I guess they're used to it. It was sad, in each case, there would be individuals who'd come up to me on the street, upper middle class mother or father or family. They'd say, we're very, very embarrassed at the behavior of our government and I was saying, So am I, plus which I'd really like to sing. But in each country, I probably sang more than I would have on a regular concert tour. We went from churches to family groups to mothers of disappeared. And the routine was simply in those countries my gift to them, my gift to the families, was to sing and to let them weep. I'd bring out my guitar, they'd bring out their hankies. I would sing and they would weep. And we actually joked about it. But that was all that I had to offer and I think it's a part of their lives and an important part and so I shared that with them.

We went to Nicaragua and Venezuela before coming home. When we returned, I did a number of talk shows, radio, newspapers, etc., talking about what had happened in Latin America, questioning who the Americans choose as their friends and why. We went to Washington because we felt we owed it to the mothers left behind in Argentina to go everywhere that we could. And in Washington, to our dismay, we discovered that human rights were in even worse shape, as far as national priorities go, than we had imagined.

One State Department comment was to a congressman: "If you want human rights programs, you're going to have to make it each time you want it." And a high ranking member of the State Department with whom Jeannie Murphy and I met, who deals specifically with Latin America, told us that he didn't feel El Salvadoran refugees should be given any temporary asylum here because he didn't feel that El Salvador was a particularly unsafe place to live. Well, we kind of staggered out of that meeting wondering really where to begin and was there a death of human rights in Washington or what.

It is my opinion that a very basic moral fiber of this country, if it's to exist at all, is dependent upon our treatment of people in need. Our willingness as the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth to share with people who have nothing, to feel and express compassion. Compassion and caring are a part of a new moral necessity. They may save us from international disgrace. Speaking of compassion and caring, my last subject in the subject of current great interest to Humanitas is the nuclear freeze. We want desperately to find a way to express that we see the threat of nuclear holocaust as eminent, that we see it through both eyes. We feel that by introducing the freeze as a way of decelerating the arms race, we may make it clear that we see the threat as a bilateral or multilateral. The fact is that the real threat to human life is probably not coming from either camp so much as it exists 24 hours a day in the form of a possible accident. Although I must say that I find, I'm absolutely terrified by the current rhetoric in the U.S. administration. I feel we must not continue the path of such light consideration of Europe. We must somehow include Europe in our own backyard. How would we feel if a major power stronger than ourselves toyed with the idea of a small nuclear explosion in Fresno Valley just to show some other major power, also stronger than us, that they must be taken seriously?

Perhaps here we have come full circle. We're discussing a million dollars a minute spent on armaments worldwide. And we are discussing underdeveloped countries and hunger, refugees, and the general imbalance of everything. I believe that by opening both eyes, we have half a chance of getting things in perspective if not in focus. I believe that compassion and caring are wonderful things that can enrich our lives. Harald Edelstam was a Swedish ambassador to Chile during the coup. He was known for various acts of bravery. And one night, when the Mexican Embassy was being fired upon by oncoming tanks and the Mexicans were firing out of their windows with their rather useless rifles, Harald Edelstam took the Swedish flag in his hand and walked in front of the tanks and between the bullets and got the Mexicans out of the Mexican Embassy, took them to the Swedish Embassy and eventually got them out of the country.

When I asked him, through very teary eyes, what made him do that, he said very simply, "I cannot tolerate injustice." I'd like to think that none of us, if we see that injustice clearly, can tolerate it. I'd like to think that all of us have compassion and have caring. I would like to see that enrich all of our lives and I welcome you to join. Many of our activities are surely any activity that you see as needed and I thank you very, very much for being here today.

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