ABOUT US

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I moved to Alameda from Los Angeles in August of 2003.  Once I got settled, and got a job, I started to look for ways to meet compatible people and to use my extra time (I am only working part time) for the things in which I believe.  At a screening of the MoveOn movie “Uncovered”, I met a woman who told me about APN.  I found it on the Internet and contacted Nancy, and came to the next meeting.  I am still here, and still  trying  to end wars and violence, as I did for so many years during the Vietnam era.

Lianne:

Joe:

Joseph Woodard was born in Appalachia at the end of World War II. His mother carried him and his sister out of there when she escaped by marrying a passing draftsman on his way to San Diego. Joe began his social commentary in high school when his advisor defeated his proposal for a campus political journal by explaining that editorials would only upset everyone.

He began to wake up to broader repression when he started college in San Diego. He immersed himself in economics reading Marx, Smith, Ricardo, George, and Keynes. He studied social and personal investigations, including Freud, Menninger, Baran and Sweezy, Marcuse, and Paul Goodman; history including H. G. Wells, Will and Ariel Durant, I.F. Stone, Kolko, Mumford, DuBois, Lundberg; and a host of political and philosophical thought from Socrates to Spinoza to Albert Einstein and Loren Eisley.

Not everything came from books, not then. He learned about civil rights efforts. He met a teacher who became his lifelong friend. A circle of students, under the inspiration of that teacher, created the International Student Journal working with Vietnamese students caught up in the civil war rising in their country. (Incidently, that group stayed together many years, moving ultimately to Berkeley. They actively educated against the Vietnam war and university collaboration.) Joe joined the storm of debate surrounding the Cuban missle crisis. He was stirred, like everyone around him, by the assassinations of President Kennedy, Malcom X, Martin Luther King, and later the president's brother, Bobbie. He followed the promise of reform promoted by the Kennedy legacy and joined the Peace Corps. He almost worked in Tehran as an English teacher for oil engineers until a meeting with the Iranian police convinced him otherwise. He volunteered in a rural Job Corps camp in Estacada, Oregon as a counselor for impoverished teenage boys from the rural South and SouthWest. The world filled with social ferment, far-flung movements from the Situationist strikes in France to the emerging student and worker -led revolutionary efforts bubbling up in Chile.

Just as Joe graduated from UCLA with a degree in Organic Chemistry, he was drafted into the army at the height of the Vietnam War. He resisted and won Conscientious Objector status from his San Diego draft board, one of two draftees that year who were granted such a deferment by that board. During the first year of his alternative service, he became a subject for human experiments conducted by U.C. Berkeley. From his temporary home in the secret apartment on the top of Morgan Hall where the Department of Nutrition force-fed so-called volunteers liquid cocktails and radioactive tracers, he sat front row through the entire Third World Liberation strike. Luckily, he was able to alter his alternative service job and and became a lab technician at UCSF during his second year of service. After taking part in the organization of the original People's Park and subsequent protests, he co-founded the Student Research Facility (SRF) in Berkeley. SRF researched, wrote, and published protest pamphlets for more than 50 organizations actively resisting injustice at home and abroad. Later, he co- founded the Center for the Study of Health Maintenance Practices in Berkeley, one of the first centers devoted to techniques for staying health not based on fee for service. The Center could be organized in neighborhoods and factories by ordinary people. For five years he contributed research, writing, and photography to pamphlets, posters, and books about social issues.

By the mid-70's, social justice movements were harshly repressed. CointelPro action by the Federal government forced many underground, quieted others, and murdered a few, like Fred Hampton of the Black Panther Party. Joe faced a personal dilemma, wondering what he was good for. As alliances disintegrated, he found himself alone. For the following fifteen years that he now remembers with a sense of shame, he withdrew from a civic life, married hastily, and went after money. He worked as an organic chemist, a commercial photographer, computer developer, and then as a writer. He lived and worked for most of the 1980s in Rome, Italy. There he began to rediscover a sense of himself since he had to learn to speak all over again in Italian, German, and English english. The crisis that pressed him into looking for money to buy his way to a better life led him to a life that failed. His marriage fractured. His health collapsed. He lost work. He began to review what was really important to himself and other people.

Returning to the United States, he met his life partner, a level headed woman and a lifetime union member. Together, they chose to buy a house in Alameda they could look forward to as home and as part of an developing activist community.

By the mid-90s, Joe decided he could best return to a life that made sense for him as social activist and writer. He earned a Masters in Writing from USF and now pays the mortgage as a technical writer. He covers social protests as a photojournalist, posting his material on his own web site, an offering to everyone who can use it as source material.

He co-founded the Estuary Park Action Committe in Alameda, seeking to bring to life a vital park the City had promised for ten years. He is currently working with the Alameda Peace Network to build a media group. He hopes to contribute to education about the nature of the social contract, possible alternatives, and to organize antiwar activities. He believes that kind of civic life, cooperatively practiced, will help lead to ways of resisting war and better ways of building and thinking about the business of living.

Joe's most prized possession is the Victorian he owns together with his life partner, Dorothy. She's the better half of Joe. They know they have joined destinies in working for a fundamental change in the social contract, one that will make it possible for people to offer others the most important thing, themselves.

Personal account

Travelers couched together in close quarters on trains or planes exchange life stories they may never reveal to anyone close to them. Wives and husbands can remain ignorant of personal revelations their spouses hang like movie posters for the amusement or seduction of strangers. I've often wondered if I talk about myself as I did on my latest trip. My job required me to spend a week with an company engineer who met me in London.

We'd co-authored a training guide entirely by e-mail, he in Melbourne and I in Walnut Creek. We had to teach computer administrators how our company's software worked. The effort required us to concentrate on a software system that's only just coming to life and is full of problems. For relief after class, we shared a beer and talked frankly, as travelers will.

We face a mutual problem, common in software startup companies, deciding whether we'll risk health and the love of those close to us by working day and night, or turn to more important things every day after five o'clock. What we are and the circumstances we face can lead us to our own answers. But, in order to talk, we had to tell each other what we're about. We had to put it down in plain language. Honesty was vital. It always is, of course, but too much is at stake now for me to shrink from a frank appraisal. Neither of us wanted to waste the week avoiding the answers. I have far fewer days ahead than behind. He has a new family to raise. For both of us, time is precious.

We sized up our company's chances and what possible outcomes might mean for us. To us; who are we? I summarized myself, thinking out loud. I was relieved I didn't have to pretend or impress. I've had enough of that behavior and, in talking frankly, I've long since abandoned my ascent through the corporate food chain. Now I'm a writer, whereever I am, whoever I work for; a plain spoken one, I hope.

I made good use of the week. It was important to talk because it really mattered. It was safe to talk because it didn't matter. I hoped by putting my most earnest foot forward, I could look to see if I really am standing on my own two feet. It's a sort of sanity check I perform frequently, a ten thousand mile emotional checkup. Chasing money, I'd lost sight of myself. I was different before I stared the chase, but for a long time I wasn't sure about that.

When we talked, I unwound. I could enjoy the voyager's insurance policy against harm from intimate confession. For at least one week I could say anything. It mattered to me and probably not to him. Anyway, he can do me no harm, like any fellow traveler who disappears at the end of a journey. He and I will most likely never see each other again. We live eight thousand miles apart, a deep ocean and different destinies in between.

He's a pleasant person and knowledgable about himself and life in ways I envied. At his age I was more impulsive, less thoughtful, more than a little crazy. In our week together we talked about ourselves, cataloging hopes and ambitions. As best I know how, I painted myself truthfully. After the week ended we returned home in opposite directions, I flying westward over Greenland, Canada and down to San Francisco; he across India to Singapore, then onto Australia.

What had I learned in assessing myself out loud?

I confirmed my belief that even if I sacrifice myself to my job, nothing I do will really make any difference in the company's destiny. After all, what we make and what that product does matters far less than how much money can be made quickly with whatever we create. And I don't control the creation of that kind of value. Anyone who's worked a dot-com job knows how wacky and pointless it can be chasing a pot of gold at the end of an IPO. Anyway, if the company goes bust, I still have enough skills and energy that I can probably get some kind of work, even in these hard times. I can choose my poison.

At my co-worker's age I'd been eager, ambitious, full of myself, and newly devoted to the idea that I could put everything right in my life by scoring enough money. If I couldn't alter the world and make it right, I could buy a personal existence, maybe more, that would be the right way, the best way, if only I could make enough money. I could buy my way out. I'd never done that before. I thought I'd spent most of my young adult life and a part of the middle campaigning for justice and knowledge, and done it as the kind of person I thought I should be.

The need to cover up myself was based on fear of rage hidden from myself, rage born in the breast of a small boy angered by callous treatment heaped on him during improverished, terrifying years in the heart of a poor region still reeling from the legacy of the Civil War. Plucking that rage out took many years and, until I did that I imagined no one could accept me. I papered over myself. But that's phony and a phony can't be a revolutionary with endurance. It's too hard to keep faking it. While I'd played a role in campaigns that extended from the end of the Fifties through the exciting aspirations of the Sixties and early Seventies, the rewards weren't personal. By the end of the Seventies, it was as though I never existed. I tried to solve my utter loneliness by reinventing my invented self. I never counted on what I'd genuinely grown into and stopped pursuing what was most vital to me, justice and knowledge.

I married a woman I barely knew and launched myself into the new realm of computers. I did make money after I decided to go after it, a million dollars more or less, then wasted it all, living as if the windfall would continue forever. I tried to get by like a bigshot, a showoff, by acting self-righteous, by hiding myself from public view and replacing that person with someone else. I know the seductions of money and power and the shallow life that can result. Money rewards the pursuit of money, not any other human quality. Any rewards I achieved by pursuing money were for the someone I wasn't. That wasn't anyone there, so neither was I.

I believed that the universe recognized my value and funneled fat paychecks to me. My first computer startup landed me and my young family in Rome, Italy. I captained a software development crew. I sat at the right hand of the parent company's CEO and pronounced judgements on technological potentials. I designed solutions and set about building them. I was the quintessential geek-on-a-lead for the head man. I was the favored son. I was the American Dreamer. I was no longer alone and big checks dropped in my lap twice a month. I drove a hot car. I lived in a condominium most Italians could not afford. I flitted around on jets to meetings where people waited for me. I could tell people what to do.

In the process, I broke my marriage by alienating my wife, rubbed raw any affection my sons may have felt for me, lived high, worked hard, had an income twice my age and a girl friend half. I regularly piloted my brand new Audi along European highways at 110 miles an hour. I gleefully startled passengers by careening over Italian cobblestones at suicidal speed. I was full of myself and heedless. Instead of growing older and wiser, I was only growing older.

Near the end of it, I couldn't count friends higher than one, and then only the man who had taught me what's important. I'd met him when I was 17. He taught me economics, history, and psychology. He steered me through a lot of radical action. He taught me real writing and a sense of care. In putting up with me, he taught me patience and kindness. When I cared about most about money, I discovered no one cared about me except my teacher, and he didn't approve of what I'd become.

With all the money I made, I didn't save a nickle. That didn't help much when I needed a doctor. One day not long before my company sent me back to the United States and then canned me, I found I couldn't breathe. It was hot and I felt cold. I found myself lying face down on my tiled balcony under a burning sun wondering how I'd got there. Two years of regular visits to psychoanalysts in Rome and Berkeley helped. My one friend, my teacher and the man I regard as my father, saved me from a miserable end after I announced by intention to do myself in. The imagined path, the American myth, and my need to succeed at all costs had nearly cost me more than money can buy. When it was all about money, nothing had any value otherwise. What changed? My teacher asked if I was going sit and wait for life to come to me -- or go live it.

The only alternative I can imagine now is the choice of life, not death. But I can't do that alone. If the capacity for living isn't somewhere in me, of course, I can't invent or pretend to it. I can't live by pretending liveliness. But neither is my capacity for living really separate from others. I have remembered that I only matter if we matter. That attitude isn't a commodity I can acquire. As a capitalist-styled competitor I'd discovered the guilty, solitary life of a hunter. I might have survived by eating what I killed, but I can't kill for life, and I can't have it by cutting someone else off from it. The best part of struggle is exactly what I'd achieved as a younger man. I found I'd been something when I'd put myself on the line for myself and everyone around me. But I'd felt they wouldn't do that with me if they knew me. Now I'm not afraid of people anymore. I remember that I like them.

The spirit of community and the solidarity it promises is welling up where I live. I can see that we, I mean my neighbors and the citizens of this town, have a chance to live together and -- by collaborating -- really live. That synthesis isn't won or captured or conquered by force of arms or purchased. It's different. If we invent that difference together, we will have created the future, our future, the future our children will see. If we don't collaborate, I believe that the alternative will be as though we never existed. Why? We are not a form of life created to survive by killing and monopolizing the universe, but to flourish by threading through the music of evolution our applause.