Left in Andover: The singular steps of Martha Hennessy

She is serving 10 months for her protest against nuclear armaments as a member of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7. In a letter to me post dated Jan. 13, 2021, Martha reflects upon her trial and upon life in prison, including the impact of Covid-19:

Sitting now in the TV room in federal prison I hear reports about Congress being quite nervous over the nuclear codes during the presidential transition.

During our trial in October, 2019, we attempted to bring evidence of the dangers and illegality of our first strike nuclear arsenal but to no avail.

While I was under direct examination the judge at one point stated, ‘Remember, I’ve excluded illegality as a defense. I am afraid you are going to lead this jury to believe that that is somehow a legal defense (her belief, and it can explain the context of her actions) but you’re turning this into a trial regarding nuclear weaponry.’

Imagine that, a federal trial regarding nuclear weapons. I was then sentenced in November, 2020, to ten months in prison and here I sit, dodging the Covid virus that has ravaged the women’s camp, putting the routines here in complete disarray.

In Martha’s witness against nuclear weapons, she is carrying on a long tradition of peaceful protest. In the 1950s her grandmother, Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement and icon of the Catholic Left, went to jail several times for non-compliance with New York’s annual nuclear civil defense drills requiring residents to seek shelter. She and her co-defendants always refused bail, choosing jail instead in order to publicize their protests.

In Dorothy Day’s view these drills were an attempt to create a false feeling of safety in the face of existential threat. There are no winners in a nuclear war. Seventy years later, not much has changed, and her granddaughter Martha continues to sound the alarm:

On January 22, 2021, the latest international Treaty for Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons comes into effect, bearing down on the nuclear weapons states that have refused ratification and participation in nuclear abolition. Radical change is coming, forced upon us out of extremity and squandered opportunity in our lifetimes.

The Kings Bay Plowshares 7. Martha is third from right.

Every day, Martha dreams of a return to her “beloved family and farm in Vermont” but considers her sacrifice “tiny in the scheme of things.” She continues:

Covid is my only concern with being here and it is in this building, the women’s low security camp. I arrived on December 14th and had 23 days in quarantine. Half of the inmates have been sent home so thank goodness we are not wall to wall people. I wear a mask at all times and wash my hands a million times a day and try to stay 6’ apart, not easy.

The women do their best to help one another. One of my neighbors groans in pain. She is made to work in the warehouse and feeling it in her back and right elbow. Apparently the prison labor based factory is now on hold, but work goes on to maintain the plant.

Like the lifelong Vermonter she is, Martha Hennessy rues the food waste in prison, “Oh the compost that could be generated here,” she writes. She is able to consume only half her generous pre-sized meal portions. But, buoyed by the support of her six fellow Plowshares activists, each now passing through the legal system on an individual basis, she holds true to her convictions.

Of course it is not possible to know what impact the Kings Bay Plowshares 7 stand against nuclear weaponry will have upon our government, and the course of human history upon this planet.

But in the view of Dorothy Day, Catholic “Servant of God,” this is no excuse for inaction. Her maxim: “People say, ‘What is the sense of our small effort?’ They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time.”