Sam Day, on the other side
"As a journalist and political organizer seeking to raise nuclear-weapons issues," writes Madison activist Sam Day in an excerpt from his autobiography, Crossing the Line, "I have been dragged from shopping malls, ejected from courthouse lobbies, led out of corporate boardrooms, ordered at gunpoint from the launch site of an underground nuclear missile. Such behavior has taken me a long way from the path of conventional journalism and liberal politics I walked in Idaho in my middle years - to say nothing of the elite life I enjoyed as a child born into a diplomatic family, raised abroad in colonial splendor, and educated at an exclusive New England boarding school." But Day is grateful for each time he's engaged in civil disobedience: "Always when I have crossed the line the ground on the other side has felt good." Day continues crossing the line until his death in January 2001, at age 74.