My book is a memoir and a manifesto: it tells of my experiences during the Vietnam years, when I refused to fight and went to Canada instead. I became a leader of the movement for unconditional amnesty. Then it covers my struggles from 1975 to the present, focusing on anti-imperialism, and on the Green New Deal - a program to save the planet.
I describe the challenges of forging a new life in Canada, explaining the differing challenges faced by middle class draft resisters, and working class military resisters. I describe the long campaign for universal, unconditional amnesty, culminating in the nomination of a war resister for vice president at the 1976 Democratic National Convention in New York - reaching about 60 million people on live TV.
Part 2 begins with a bottle of champagne I bought on April 30, 1975, when Vietnam's liberation forces marched triumphantly into Saigon. I explain how I figured it would stimulate more revolutions across the globe. I tell about my visit to witness Portugal's 1975 revolution, and of my three-year sojourn with the Sandinistas, personalizing it with my own experiences and perceptions.
I relate my experience with the South Bronx Community Congress during the Obama years: a coalition that held annual People's Assemblies and mounted struggles against workplace racism, poverty and violence. I tell how these campaigns in 2011 became part of a citywide movement against budget cuts in New York, with large labor marches downtown and an occupation of the state capitol in Albany, leading to the "Bloombergville" encampment near NYC City Hall, which in turn stimulated Occupy Wall Street: a mass outpouring of "the 99%" that spread across the country.
Part 3 is a celebration of the Green New Deal: an answer to the threat of extinction posed by the climate change emergency. The beauty of the Green New Deal is its resolution to change everything. To transform our economy to renewable energy we must harness and mobilize people power, determined to transform government itself. Working people will need to take over.

I lived in Toronto, Canada, from August 1968 until August 1974. The first half of my book is the story of those years. All of it is original, although some brief sections rely on the Amex Archives, at the University of Wisconsin. I have lived in New York City since 1974, except 1987 to 1990, when I lived and worked with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. From 1965 to '68 I studied, first at University of San Francisco and then San Francisco State College. I left SF State in January 1968, and went to Canada in August of that year. I was born in Cottonwood, Idaho, and grew up in Pendleton, Oregon. I graduated from high school in 1964, with a scholarship to study at the University of Oregon in Eugene, but instead I went to a Jesuit seminary in Los Gatos, California, where I lasted just four months - didn't much like silent penitence or the prospect of lifelong celibacy!
While in Canada I completed a BA in English at York University. I returned to the USA in 1974, first to work as a full-time organizer for the National Council for Universal Unconditional Amnesty. I then got "an honest job" as a typesetter, then moved to desktop publishing. I took this skill to Nicaragua, where I worked as a volunteer consultant for the Sandinista newspaper Barricada, and later for several other progressive publishers there.
As detailed in my book, I have been a dedicated activist for social change ever since 1968.