Grace Paley and the Clamshell Alliance

Here is the beginning:
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“What the hell are we doing here?” asks an old friend, who was young in years not so long ago, when I was only slightly middle-aged. “For Christ’s sake, we cut right through the fences at the Pentagon.” We were in Seabrook, New Hampshire, sitting in a parking lot outside the site of a proposed nuclear power plant along with 2,000 other protesters organized by the Clamshell Alliance.

“No! No!” says a young listener, full of the joy of common discipline.

“But look, it’s a goddamn parking lot!”

“Things don’t have to go the same,” I say. I am very tearful. “We don’t have to defend our lives by repeating them. Anyhow, the parking lot is the heart of America. You close down the parking lots and industry is wrecked. A decent car wouldn’t have any place to go. Of course, those bubbling asphalt lots will be hard to occupy in summer.”

Here is the Clamshell Alliance link to read the entire piece.


I am grateful to the Clamshell Alliance, and to activists and artists everywhere...