She said what pushed her to join Veterans for Peace was her colleagues on the front lines. Veteran and organizer Mary Beth Knowles spent twenty years in the United States army. “You’ll get a vigorous debate of ‘Oh we had to because in Hawaii, it’s much more like no, that’s not okay, that was a war crime.’” “Whereas in most parts of America, when you say that maybe that shouldn’t have been done, to bomb civilians,” he said. Modern-day Hawaii still feels the sting of nuclear weapons, he said, which made it easy for him as a professional boat to join the Golden Rule. Other people took good guesses, but Hawaii people knew,” he said. “Very early on, Hawaii people knew the horrors. When the area was sealed off to all members of the public, information on the bomb’s effects was slow to reach the American public. In Hawaii, Johnston-Kitazawa said that many families have ties to Japan – and the province of Hiroshima, an area decimated by World War II’s atomic bombs. “The Golden Rule is kind of a symbolic and effective conversation opener,” he said. Captain Kiko Johnston-Kitazawa joined the crew when the Golden Rule sailed into his hometown in Hawaii. In this current trip, the boat’s mission is to hit 100 ports, educating locals on the destruction of nuclear war. “Over five years of rebuilding and getting it back in shape to start the mission - of what the original mission was,” he said. The international nonprofit acquired the historic vessel in 2010. Schwarts is the president of Veterans for Peace’s Rochester Chapter. “It was originally launched in 1958 with four Quakers who tried to stop the above-ground nuclear bomb testing in the Marshall Islands,” James Schwarts said. While this is the Golden Rule’s first stop on the east coast, the small sailboat has decades of activist history. Locals at each port are welcomed aboard, given a tour, and are taught about the dangers of nuclear weapons and nuclear war. For the past eight years, a small boat with a peace sign on its sails has been making stops at ports up and down the west coast.
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