Jody Williams shares what life was like growing up on the 'shaggy side of the middle class' in Brattleboro, Vermont and early experiences there that shaped her strong sense of social justice. She discusses the work that went into passing an international treaty to ban landmines and how it felt to receive a Nobel Peace Prize. She touches upon current work on the campaign to stop killer robots and the critical importance of civics education and social action. Narrator opens with a bit of history on Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, and the origins of the Peace Prize.
This episode was produced by Reggie Martell with Nancy Olson and Lissa Weinmann. Editing and narration by Reggie Martell. Original mix and master Guilford Sound; Podcast mastering by Jack Pombriant. Brattleboro Words Trail theme music Ty Gibbons. Photograph of Jody Williams is by Annie Leibovitz. For further reading on Jody Williams, see her book: My Name is Jody Williams: A Vermont Girl's Winding Path to the Nobel Peace Prize, published in 2013, University of California Press. Also see current work Jody supports at https://www.stopkillerrobots.org
Jody Williams - Transcript for Brattleboro Words Trail Podcast (See Jody's book: A Vermont Girl’s Winding Path to the Nobel Peace Prize)
Speaker 1 : Welcome to the Brattleboro Words Trail Podcast.
JODY WILLIAMS: We knew that we were on the short list, if you will. We were the last round of negotiations of the Mine Ban Treaty. We were in Oslo, Norway. The Peace Prize is in Norway. All the others are in Sweden. I didn't know that
NARRATOR REG MARTELL: By 1996, the Nobel Peace Prize had been awarded to 84 people. Six of those recipients were women.
JODY: So we were doing the final bits of the negotiating, and the Norwegians kept saying the campaign is on the short list….
NARRATOR: The Nobel Awards were created in the last will of Alfred Nobel, wherein his eponymous foundation would award the interest accrued by his sizable fortune to those who had conferred the greatest benefit to humankind in five specific areas during the preceding year.
JODY: His will says that it should go to any organization or individual in any given year that has done something that changes how militaries interact or changes the equation about war and peace. And we certainly did that with landmines. There is no question about it. We had gone from nothing to a treaty.
NARRATOR: The Nobel Prizes and the Nobel Peace Prize was created by the man who invented dynamite, the most potent weapon of war the world had ever known to that point. He encouraged all militaries to arm themselves with dynamite, but not as an instrument of war, as an instrument of peace through deterrence. He believed that when armies had the means to destroy each other in a few short moments, it would deter fighting and bring an end to all conflict. He was super wrong about that. At the end of his life, having recognized his misjudgment, Nobel set about the task of rescuing his legacy from certain ignominy. The Nobel Prizes are the result of that effort.
JODY: The media was very interested in landmines through much of the campaign. Near the end, when Clinton refused to sign the treaty, and here I am, an American woman calling him a weenie and stuff, I think that put more focus on it than it might have been if it hadn't been Clinton and me.
NARRATOR: The other voice you're hearing is, of course, Jody Williams. Jody grew up in Brattleboro, was a student at Green Street School and was a member of the Brattleboro Union High School class of 1968. In 1992, Jody founded the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. In 1997, she was the 85th person and seventh woman awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
JODY: It made sense to me. The work of the campaign, in my view, deserved the recognition of the Peace Prize. So I wasn't surprised about that. What surprised me was when I was personally named as well. I founded it and I was thrilled for the campaign. My parents, you can imagine, were thrilled since neither had finished high school. I knew, as I said, we deserved it, but suddenly you also are called upon to be wise about everything else in the world, you know. And I knew everything about landmines and had no problem talking about tha.t All of a sudden, I'm asked about peace in general and I would opine, but I'd come home and feel, you know, you don't know any more or less than anybody else, like, who the hell are you?
David was the stud of fourth grade, if you will. He was blond haired, blue eyed, smart, athletic, whatever that means for a fourth grader. But he was bossy and a bully. And we would go outside for recess and he would always be a captain of whatever game you were playing. And he was being particularly mean to a new boy in town who was also geeky with, you know, crooked glasses and inarticulate. And he couldn't play kickball properly. And so David was mean to him and told them to get out of the kickball circle.
I remember looking at all of us in the kickball circle and thinking, how many of us are standing here and we're letting this one kid be mean to another kid? And for whatever reason, I challenged David and said, “You're only doing this because you can, because Michael is, you know, wimpy and doesn't know how to speak back. And that's not fair.” And he let him back in and wasn't mean to him again.
It's a small example, but it's an example of if you don't do anything, you're complicit. Right? If you stand there and let one boy be mean to another boy and you're silent, you are in some ways as bad as the boy who is being mean. And somehow the beginning of that kind of realization happened then. I'm sure I was quaking on the inside in the outside, you know, because I was afraid of everything. And then every time you believe in the idea you want to speak enough to dare say it, it becomes easier.
You know, I say now we were on the ragged edges of the middle class. My father worked several jobs at the same time, often to make ends meet. We were five kids, but we couldn't afford new school clothes. So when I thought about money, I wanted it not so I could have matching outfits for school but so we could have a bomb shelter where we could hide if we were nuked.
I remember having to get under the desk and roll up in a ball and wait there having to practice how you'd save yourself if a nuclear bomb smashed into your school. And when I think of it as an adult, how they could trick children into believing that doing that would save you from a freaking nuclear bomb? That's a horrible way to grow up. And it was just terror. It was terrifying. Absolutely terrifying. I imagine that has something to do with how I feel about weapons and war and the absurdity of it all.
I don't even know when I started reading, but from the moment I could really read, I have read nonstop, and I still do. I am obsessed with reading. I think the most important thing in my learning was a teacher I had either in my sophomore or junior year. His name was Chip Porter and he came in a dashiki or, you know, he was kind of cute and he asked us questions and just made us think critically. And I credit Chip with opening my mind to not just accepting that I'm supposed to memorize and shoot back what the teacher wants to hear because I had a good memory then and so I could do well in school because it was easy. But he was the beginning of helping me learn how to think, so that by the time of university and Vietnam, my brain was open to things that it might not have been as open to if it weren't for him.
I was at university from 68 to 72. Of course it was Vietnam, it was civil rights, it was the integration of the University of Vermont, for God's sake. I did not see a black person until I was 17 years of age. I'm not kidding, I'm not exaggerating, I was 17, I had never seen a black person. The first protest I remember was the big university moratorium across the US and schools were actually closed early, there weren't final exams. It was around the time when the unrest was not just protesting, it was getting more violent and schools were afraid that if people were protesting, it could turn unpleasant. So schools were closed early and I went to a protest at some green park at the University of Vermont. But I also went with other students down to the state capital, and we went into the state legislature and protested and went into the visitor's gallery and held up signs. Those were my first experiences in the world of protest.
And I was strident and thought I knew everything like every person who ever finds their righteous indignation. I remember coming home for Thanksgiving, I was living in D.C. at the time, coming home for Thanksgiving, and my parents and my siblings were like, ‘Please, let's just hope she shuts up. Let's just hope we can, you know, enjoy the turkey’ or whatever. But of course, I would launch into ‘What's wrong with you?’ You don't understand what's happening to these poor people. I was tedious and overbearing, but it takes a long time to understand why everybody else isn't tedious and overbearing like you are. But you have five children. Your oldest son is born deaf and turns into a paranoid schizophrenic. You're trying to get by to deal with the pain and turmoil of another country, as it's big. And it took me a long time.
Some people actually bought the theory that when the Soviet Union collapsed, the world would be a better place. Money wouldn't be spent on weapons. Some would be diverted to the greater good. I never believed that for a second. And of course, the U.S., instead of trying to make the world a better place, worked for full spectrum dominance of the military arena.
But in that context, people were seeing parts of the world that had been closed off because of the Cold War and the two sides and all that and then some of the countries where proxy wars had been fought. Cambodia, Angola in Africa, Mozambique, you would see tons of landmines had been used in those wars. And of course, the war ends. The soldiers go home and the landmines don't. And to me, when I was asked if I wanted to create a campaign, it was a no brainer, in a sense, it took nothing to understand why landmines were different, why they should be illegal, because they do kill people forever after the end of war, and they're all civilian. So I accepted and we were successful.
The landline work was amazing, we went from like nothing to a treaty within five years. In diplomatic treaty terms, it was like snapping your fingers and getting the job done. It was really fast. It was mostly fun. Everybody brought their own talent and everybody's talent was appreciated. I was good at coordinating and making sure that all the campaigns knew what was happening, because as we all know, knowledge is power. And if I had decided to keep the most important information to myself, I would have been the most powerful. But if you want the entire campaign to be able to move as one to deal with this issue of landmines, everybody has to know who's doing what, where, why, what’s successful, what isn't. So I was good at that. We also had de-miners. You know, the men who take the minds out of the ground, they created a fake minefield. That was awesome. That was something like plywood, and they had sensors in the plywood and hay and grass and stones, and they put it at the door of the conference room and you'd have to walk across it to get into the conference room. And if you stepped on a sensor, it would make the sound of a landmine blowing up. And it was scary. Even though you knew it was not a landmine, walking across that thing and having it explode was quite unsettling. And there were some delegates who would not go across the minefield. They went in the back door. So it was brought to their face and they couldn't make us go away. (sound of bomb)
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Peace is not just the interregnum between wars, it is all of the things that you have to do to provide for a different way of living on this planet, and that includes
not spending $1.9 trillion globally on weapons. In the US budget that Trump has proposed for 2020, 57% of the disposable budget goes to the military. 57%. Seven percent goes to Veterans, which it should. But if you look at the pie chart, it blows my mind because it’s so clear and so you look at the Pentagon with 57% and you look at the Department of State and International aid, I think it’s about five percent. At one point it was three percent. It might have gone up to five. What does that tell you about the focus of the government? It’s that the focus is on military might to get what you want. It’s not about multilateralism. It’s not about diplomacy. It’s not about living together in the world. It’s about ‘We got all this mean stuff and if you don’t do what we want, you’ll pay.’ And that is mind boggling.
You know, we could do free education worthy of the name for everybody in this country.We could have health care worthy of the name for everybody in this country. And instead, we do 57% of the budget to the military. It’s obscene.
The most recent weapon that I’m working on is killer robots, which are called the ‘third revolution in warfare’ — the first being, of course, gunpowder, the second being nukes. And this is killer robots, which are not drones, but are fully autonomous weapons systems. Weapons that on their own can be programmed, and then you let them loose, and on their own, they target and kill humans. No human being in the kill decision. And I want to know what kind of human being thinks it is OK to create weapons that on their own can be set loose to go and target and kill humans. Think about that.
And of course, the U.S. is one of the leaders in the movement for killer robots. So I worked with others to start an effort to try to stop them. It’s not easy. There are billions and billions of dollars in killer robots. Landmines were chump change, as they say, worth nothing.
I think part of what has happened is when we were in school, there used to be civics classes, right? There were classes like social studies and civics and various ways that you were taught what it meant to be a citizen of a country. Right? I can imagine that many people today don’t even know how many branches of government there are or why there are different branches of government and what their functions are and why that’s important. Those kinds of things need to be taught again in school. How can you be an active citizen if you don’t know what that even means? How can you be an active citizen when people like the Trump administration in particular, go out of their way to make you disbelieve anything the government says, make you disbelieve media, make you disbelieve science.
People have to understand why the government is the way it is and what’s their place in it. I get so sick of people talking about their human rights, my human rights, my human rights. Yes, you have them. You also have responsibilities to take action to make sure that those rights have any significance at all.
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