The North Chicago Veterans Affairs Medical Center
lies less than a mile from the headquarters for 52 military processing
centers nationwide. There, at the U.S. Military Entrance Processing
Command, recruits take their final oath of enlistment before becoming
soldiers. The short trip up Green Bay Road from the VA hospital
to MEPCOM served as the last leg of the “Walk for Justice,” a
320-mile march that began last month in Springfield to protest U.S. foreign
policy in the Middle East. At 10:15 a.m. Wednesday, July 5, Springfield’s
Diane Hughes and Chicago activists Ceylon Mooney and Jeff Leys walked
through the MEPCOM gates and started reading names of soldiers and
civilians who have been killed in Iraq. Within five minutes, the three had been placed under
arrest and charged with trespassing, a misdemeanor. Hughes says she knew that they might be arrested,
although it wasn’t necessarily the result she wanted. “I wanted to speak in a stronger voice,”
says Hughes, a registered nurse and social worker who retired earlier this
year to participate in more peace-and-justice activities. After a five-hour booking, Hughes was released on a
personal-recognizance bond of $10,000. Before she and the other activists
left, an officer asked whether they’d accomplished anything. Hughes’ reply: “Yes, I did accomplish
something: a sense of power in resistance to injustice.”
She and fellow justice walkers are scheduled to
appear in a Waukegan circuit court on July 20. They face fines and as much
as six months in prison, if convicted. Hughes, who’s never been arrested before, says
she’s thinking of pleading no contest. She expects, because Lake
County tends to be conservative, that her sentence will include jail time.
But she’d do it again, if given the
opportunity. The threat of being arrested, Hughes says, was a “much
lesser risk than people walking the streets in Iraq every day.”
“I’ve done everything a good citizen
should do,” she says. “I’ve written letters to the
editor, contacted my congressmen, and this war is still going on.”
This article appears in Jul 6-12, 2006.
