BURLINGTON - Twenty years ago this spring, more than 1,000 marchers gathered in Los Angeles to begin a historic nine-month march for peace to the nation’s capital. Eli Clare, a local queer activist and writer, was one of them.
     Clare talked about his experience recently at a lunch at UVM’s Allen House.
     At the time of the march in 1986, Ronald Reagan had been in office for six years and the U.S. was testing nuclear weapons every six weeks, Clare explained. Missile silos dotted the Great Plains, and peace camps organized in several countries to protest the threat of nuclear war.
     The “doomsday clock,” set up by nuclear scientists, was at 3 minutes to midnight, indicating the looming threat of nuclear war. The Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament was organized to draw attention to the real possibility of such a war and to encourage others to join their efforts.
     Clare, who turned 23 on the walk, said that “who I am as an activist” was shaped by the experience. He learned, among other things, to use poetry as activism. He also learned about community through the experience of living with the approximately 400 other marchers who walked the entire way.
     “We walked 3,700 miles, which I can hardly believe today,” Clare said, pointing to Utah on a map where he was with the peace march 20 years ago in April. The group would walk 15, or 22, or 17 miles and pitch their tents in fields, factory parking lots or city parks, he said.
      There was a truck for a kitchen and a bus for an office, complete with generators for power.
      There were also many rules, such as having to have permission to camp wherever the group landed for the night. The march received heavy criticism from more radical members of the peace movement for its adherence to rules, Clare said. But when the march went bankrupt two weeks into the march, the larger peace movement helped take up donations and kept it going.
      About six weeks into the march which was now in Utah, two of the marchers, who had hitchhiked to nearby Zion Park, were killed in a car crash. The news plunged the marchers into mourning as they held big circles to remember the two who were killed.
     “That was intense enough,” Clare remembered. “We’re (now) also at the 20th anniversary of the fire at Chernobyl.”
     The following day, the saddened marchers heard from radio reports about the fire at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, the worst nuclear reactor accident in history.
     As they continued to walk, the marchers met “downwinders,” people who lived downwind from the Nevada nuclear test site and who experienced unusually high rates of leukemia and breast cancer.
      “We had this visceral sense of what Chernobyl might mean,” Clare said.
      Many of the marchers, Clare included, felt that they might make a difference and that nuclear weapons might someday be banned. Instead, our country now uses depleted uranium shells in the war against Iraq, in effect waging a nuclear war there, Clare pointed out.
      “We’re living in a time when I feel completely hopeless,” Clare said. “I need to remember the hope I had 20 years ago.”
     While walking across the plains states, marchers talked to people who were then losing their farms at a rapid rate. Many farmers allowed missile silos to be planted on their farms as a way of sustaining their farms, Clare said. The people who walked for peace and human rights experienced “being connected to the land and not being in denial,” he said. “They were real, live, on-the-ground connections.”
      But now, “We don’t have the mass movement, the network of activists who walk and organize and educate others,” Clare said.
     Asked by a student what people can do now to make a difference, Clare said “Do everything you can to foster community ... and I don’t mean the internet.”
      Find the way to not numb yourself, Clare suggested. He said people seem to be numbed by the protracted war in Iraq. While he was walking across the country with the Great Peace March, Clare said he was open to whatever was going on at the moment and he felt everything with a rawness that people don’t seem to feel today.
       “Find out how to use that rawness,” he said.