Best Activist

After September 11, a wide array of local organizations became distressed as the country barreled toward war. Dissent isn't celebrated these days -- it's rebuked, which isn't a comfortable environment for the diverse community of lefties (religious groups, academics and high school kids) that would wonder whether war is wise. They all spontaneously converged at the Quaker meetinghouse near Gillham Park, which also holds the offices of the American Friends Service Committee. There, the mild-mannered Ira Harritt, who has been with the AFSC since 1986, has inherited the unenviable task of chairing what have become regular Thursday-night meetings of a shifting coalition of fifty or sixty people, representing as many groups, with at least that many subagendas and diverse suggestions for how they'd rather wage peace than war. Out of those meetings has come the Justice/Not Revenge network. At least 200 people attended the coalition's first rally on October 7, and another is scheduled for November 7; the Thursday-night meetings, meanwhile, have grown so big that they've moved to the All Souls Unitarian Church at 45th and Warwick, where Harritt continues to be a one-person clearinghouse and gentle taskmaster. "One of the threads is that we don't have to resort to violence and threats and coercion to attain justice," Harritt says. "I frequently think of a quote from Dr. [Martin Luther] King: 'The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live. Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.'"