During My Last Year Of High School, antiwar sentiment in the United States had shifted into high gear, the military draft hung like a dark cloud over 18 year-olds, and Martin Luther King, Jr.—a figure we admired from afar—was gunned down. A friend and I bummed our way up the California coast to a small rural community a few miles inland from Monterey. We'd heard about a little-known school—the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence, as I recall the name—run by folksinger Joan Baez and her husband David Harris. We wanted to attend. Not unlike high school kids today, we looked at the world with concern, were keen on the concept of freedom from oppressive and tyrannical governments, and suspicious of traditional (usually military) paths leading to the overthrow of oppression.
Hence, our trip to the school. It had no entrance requirements, charged no tuition, conferred no degrees. The curriculum was a grab bag of talks, workshops, and freewheeling discussions, interspersed with required periods of silent meditation. We invariably broke the silent meditation rules and pestered the key mentors in an effort to grasp this concept of nonviolent force. No one on the staff bothered enforcing rules, and the easygoing spirit welcomed pretty much anyone in.
A US Marine from a nearby base visited class for a few days, trolling for converts. I don't remember him being thought of or treated as an outcast, although he left without converts—and also without having been converted to the Institute's message.
