Bob Aldridge has the knack of paying attention to an urge to do the right thing whenever he feels it. Then he does it – to the discomfort of those who know how the force of his example can change lives. In the almost half-century I’ve known Bob, the trails this nuclear weapons engineer turned peacemaker has blazed, following the whispers of his still small voice, have kept on redirecting my life. Be wary of reading The Goodness Field, if you are not open to meeting a man who could inspire you to climb mountains.
Feeling such an urge when he began the tenth decade of his fife, Bob Aldridge researched thoroughly and wrote what he first described as “A Guidebook for Proactive Nonviolence.” What he saw brilliantly through that process, he identified in his final title as “The Goodness Field.”
In August 1972, my wife Shelley and I met Bob and Janet Aldridge when they came from their home in Santa Clara, California, to Honolulu, Hawaii, to support our catholic Action of Hawaii community in a trial. Three of us were liable to ten years each in prison for doing an act of moral and legal necessity by obeying a greater law. We had poured our blood on top-secret electronic warfare files at Hickam Air Base, Pacific Air Force Headquarters – exposing Hickam, as Bob writes in this book’s last chapter, “as the intelligence and targeting center for the Vietnam air war.”
In a scene Shelley and I have recalled often from that intense week, we watched Bob sitting at a microphone on a stage in a theater at the University of Hawaii. He was flanked by two Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal attorneys, who were assisting us in the trial. They had explained to the audience why our disruption of the electronic warfare office was a legal resistance, if not obligation, to a crime against peace.
When it came time for Bob to speak, as peace representative of the National Catholic Lay Association, he pushed the mic away and remained silent. He was responding to an urge. Shelley and I were unaware of Bob’s occupation as a nuclear missile designer, which he had begun to question. The Nuremberg lawyers’ presentations intensified the questioning. It provoked in Bob a pregnant silence. Taken up by the trial, we simply thought Bob a very shy man.
Two years later, following my resignation from the University of Hawaii faculty, Bob visited us at our house in the little town of Hedley, British Columbia, Canada. He told us of his resignation from his Lockheed job designing a nuclear first-strike weapon, the Trident missile system. Spreading out a map on our kitchen table, he pointed out the chosen site for the first Trident submarine base, on a peninsula across from Seattle, not so far from Hedley.
Bob’s visit became our invitation to co-found Pacific Life Community, which initiated a Gandhian campaign in resistance to Trident, prompting our move into the last house beside the railroad tracks going into the base. Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action, whose site bordered another part of the Trident base fence a mile away, was founded in 1977. The Trident campaign led in 1981 to the tracks campaign to stop Trident weapons shipments to its bases on both the Pacific and the Atlantic. That resulted in our further move in 1989 to another tracks house, along the trains’ southeastern route, in Birmingham, Alabama.
If ever a satyagrahi, a Gandhian practitioner of truth-force, has redirected Shelley’s and my lives, it has been Bob Aldridge through the quiet talk he walks, along with Janet, their children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren, who are a nonviolent wave all their own. We have learned with many others how to walk from the example of Bob, Janet, and their family – all the way from their decision that Bob resign at age 49 from Lockheed (now merged with Marietta as the #1 military industrial contractor), sparking the Trident campaign; through Bob’s groundbreaking books [See The Counterfoorce Syndrome: A Guide to U.S. Nuclear Weapons and Strategic Doctrine (1978) and First Strike! The Pentagon’s Strategy for Nucleaqr War (1983)] on our near extinction from the Pentagon’s nuclear first strike strategy spearheaded by Trident; to this pioneering work on our nonviolent transformation, The Goodness Field. I’ve had the gift, with others he asked to critique his manuscript, of seeing his nonviolence guidebook evolve into its present form. Bob has been mining everyone and everything he could for this work, re-climbing the mountain of his life, seeking a way to enlighten the night. He succeeds. Bob Aldridge’s relentless persistence has broken through finally, at the peak of his life and work, into the fundamental forcefield in the universe, the source of our necessary enlightenment through proactive nonviolence – goodness.
The goodness field, as Bob explains in an intriguing introduction and astounding appendix, is the pervasive force field of not only Earth but the entire universe. Goodness is the singular force needed to modulate the four fundamental forces of nature to support life. As our own creations of nuclear war and climate change remain on track to end our species after destroying countless others, goodness is coming right back at us, through billions of years in the evolution of the universe. The power of goodness is arising from the subconscious of humanity, as Bob suggests from C. G. Jung. We have been propagandized into fatal sleepwalking by our entertainment culture and the invisible government of egothink, a term Bob coined via Sigmund Freud and George Orwell. Yet we can still awaken to a volcanic energy in our collective unconscious, formed from the beginning of time. We can discern at the current crux of history a power erupting from the depths of our origin, if we only remove its obstacles through proactive nonviolence. Goodness is the transformative force of human existence.
Goodness can be our cosmic companion, as we walk the Earth and talk the truth. Goodness is in the stardust empowering our every action concentrated nonviolently on the dark matter of this world, down to the jail cell of my own ego. Goodness is here, as we awaken, walk the Earth, and speak the truth of a universal force that has brought us this far so far. Goodness is the truth in proactive nonviolence that will set us free. Seed a Gandhian constructive program in the goodness field of this Earth, and it will grow.
Our crucial task in letting goodness work, Bob suggests with Gandhi, is taking on experiments with truth as near as our fingertips, pushing away obstacles to goodness. Washing our dishes to wash the dishes, in Nhat Hanh’s image of mindful practice, will free us to be where we need to be, catching a wave of proactive nonviolence just in time. Converging drops of goodness and courage, becoming an ocean of waves of nonviolent movements, will prevail. Ours is the goodness story told all the way from its origin in the creative urge behind the Big Bang of the universe.
Maybe it does take a rocket scientist turned satyagrahi to see humanity’s redemptive truth of goodness. Is that Gandhi grinning through his microscope?
“Truth,” as Mohandas Gandhi said from his experiments with truth, “is God.” Or as Bob Aldridge has put it in a further step through his experiments, “Truth is goodness.” The ultimate truth of goodness, it turns out, is confirmed by the story of the universe. Our humanity’s radical goodness is seen, step by step, through our experience, in the discoveries of proactive nonviolence. We learn to walk truly in the dust of a million galaxies of goodness. Test and see.
An empire began to give way when a little man, with 78 committed friends from his ashram, marched to the sea to pick up a grain of salt. Our way into nonviolent transformation may be no more than our willingness to say yes to an urge of goodness at inconvenient moments in our lives, leading us to ashram disciplines and nonviolence training in the fire of goodness that can nurture a new way of life. Turn, turn, turn. Faith in goodness, acting through newly forged lives in a nonviolent community, is hope for our world.
Bob Aldridge is a nonviolent warrior for our time. The Goodness Field: A Guidebook for Proactive Nonviolence is the testament of his life. Its practical, nonviolent truths are carved out, hammer to chisel, with the help of Gandhi, King, and their disciplined disciples; the Standing Rock Sioux and the new paradigm of Sarvodaya via Wopida; a host of young people standing on their own feet, encircling the globe in resistance to gun violence and climate change; Bob and Janet Aldridge with their children, grandchildren, and great-great grands walking the way of proactive nonviolence before us.
We know we dwell in a time of deepening darkness. We are at two minutes to midnight—the nearest the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists Doomsday Clock has ever been. The question before us, as Dr. King put it, is: Nonviolence or nonexistence? Transformation or annihilation? Stated starkly, how can we transform a cultural dogma of inevitable evil, implanted by the invisible government of one’s ego, into the prophetic truth of proactive nonviolence? How can we turn our lives around in time toward the hope of the universe?
However, if we pay attention to the lessons from proactive nonviolent movements more powerful than war, we know we can live out the truth that we are on a planet in a universe grounded in goodness. Cosmic experiments with truth, turning our own lives around first, are one step away from us. They are no big deal. Yet through them we can know, as real as the Earth on which we stand, the power of goodness at our fingertips at two minutes to midnight. Goodness has our back from way back. Goodness is our given. We can allow its power from the collective unconscious to emerge in a globally transforming proactive nonviolence.
It can be done here and now by living out our first truth of goodness, older than the hills, written with the ink of love in the words on these pages.
Read them, rejoice, and be good.
Jim Douglass
Author, The Nonviolent Cross, JFK and the Unspeakable, Gandhi and the Unspeakable