And we were undoubtedly receiving special treatment-I doubt whether anyone actually considered us criminals.

I remember thinking about my childhood TV image of the good guys and the bad guys. At least in Washington, D. C.- and I doubt whether this is true only there-the marshals did not live up to my childhood images. They seemed bored and trapped. In their own ways, they were victims. Their condition differed only slightly from those of the prison regulars, the "bad guys." It was a sad spectacle. They sat, six to a desk, listening to the Senators' opener, waiting for someone to tell them what to do next. I began to feel we were witnessing one of the most significant rituals of their lives.

My thoughts were interrupted by the final cell transfer before our arraignment. Everything had been cleared up in the judge's chambers. The court procedure was mere formality-we would stay in jail until we could each post the necessary ten dollars for our releases.

Three cells and about eight hours later, nearly all the men had been moved to their particular sections of the D.C. jail. The women returned to the Women's Detention Center. Both places are appalling topics by themselves. I can't say much about them, though. I wasn't there.

Back in the bullpen, I became incredibly sick. Thanks to money from a cellmate, as well as the help of a sympathetic marshal, I was bailed out.

I spent the rest of the week making "pastoral" visits to inmates, hassling with the large court bureaucracy, dreaming occasionally of solid food, and helping to prepare for everyone's release.

A test case for two of our group was set for Good Friday. Photographs taken at our worship service were used as evidence at the trial and revealed that, contrary to police testimony, we had neither prevented pedestrian traffic nor posed a substantial threat to the peace and tranquility of the nation's capital. The two defendants were acquitted.

Nearly everyone held the fast until Easter, and the next week the charge of incommoding the sidewalk was dropped against the rest of us.

There would be time to reflect ret respectively on what it had all meant. There would be time to examine again our own motivations. There would be time to look ahead to the next action we would take.

This particular protest was over.

VI

IT HAD gone almost too smoothly. Now it all seemed nearly as unreal as had that crowded bullpen a few days before. I was not sure why it had been so difficult to decide to spend Holy Week fasting and protesting against a nation's policies which seem so ludicrous as to be figments of my imagination.

But each of us had, in a small way, been again confronted with the reality of these policies and some of their most obvious effects. It is horrifying and sad, but they are not figments of any imagination.

In protesting against foreign manifestations of a national sickness, we glimpsed at some of what that sickness means in this country-appropriately enough, in the nation's policy-making center. We were shamed at the realization of what unseen horrors this society has created, and what traps it has produced for men whom it insists on labeling as criminals. And we were confronted with policemen-so often chosen to symbolize all that is rotten in America-who too are frightened by the rapidity of incomprehensible change, the size of a "system" they can't understand but which they obediently serve, and their own rejection by others for what they must believe to be a genuine service to society.

I am trying, with great difficulty, to convey the ludicrous juxtaposition we saw. The almost farcical nature of our system of "justice," which confines both inmates and guards for almost incomprehensible reasons having to do with preservation of the myth of good order, and the government protected by that myth. A myth that kills and destroys in numbers and quantities which I fear the sane mind dares not grasp. In a new and penetratingly significant way, this experience led again to the realization that if "criminal" is associated with guilt, and if it bespeaks of injustice, then criminal can describe only those who promote our war in Indochina. And those who insist on the bars in the jails. And those who create the invisible bars in the heads of the people who keep the jails.

There is still an ambivalence within me about our particular action. It was primarily symbolic, and our use of a fast and jail depended in part for its impact upon the far greater sacrifices of others whose sacrifices are connected with those "symbols." And there is a recurring fear that my own motivation was partially narcissistic rather than a pure "other-directed" concern.

The struggle to know oneself and one's own motivation is always both difficult and important, whether its impetus comes from the admonitions of the Bible, Freud, or Fritz Perls. Perhaps for those of us who attempt by our own actions to change the perception and reactions of others, it is even more so. But despite the disadvantages of imperfect resistance tactics and despite the confusion I suspect many of us feel within ourselves, we must continue to protest against the outrageous. The war and the injustice continue. And while they do, only the most dexterous among us can successfully wash his own hands and afford the luxury of turning inward in isolation.

Dan Berrigan, both in his action and in his Germantown sermon, has indicated the necessity of resistance and some of the numerous means of carrying it out. "There are a hundred ways of non-violent resistance up to now untried or half-tried, or badly tried, but the peace will not be won without such serious and constant and sacrificial and courageous action on the part of a large number of good men and women. The peace will not be won without the moral equivalent of the loss and suffering and separation that the war itself is exacting."

Whether the specific kind of action which we undertook can be most effective in promoting the needed major changes, either in others or in the policy of this country, is a debatable point. What is not debatable, it seems to me, is whether only debating that point will itself be effective.

We will do nothing to change policy, to affect the thoughts and feelings of others, or to overcome our own sense of powerlessness, if we become paralyzed in the non-participatory search for the perfect solution to our ills. It seems that only in action can we promote renewed hope for better heads and sane policy.