And here in New York,  some 29 people were arrested yesterday at the US Army’s recruiting center in Times Square after they blockaded the entrance. The civil disobedience was part of a weekend commemoration of legendary peace activist Phil Berrigan. Yesterday was the second anniversary of his death. Berrigan rose to international prominence as an antiwar activist in May of 1968 after he and his brother Father Daniel Berrigan, along with 7 others carried out an action known as the Catonsville 9. At the height of the Vietnam war, they raided a draft board in Maryland and burned hundreds of A-1 Draft files with homemade napalm, an action that would land all of them in prison for years. Along with his wife, Liz McAlister, Berrigan founded the Jonah House Resistance Community in 1973, where they organized the Plowshares movement. From 1980 to the present, activists have carried out dozens of these resistance actions where they symbolically damage nuclear weapons. Berrigan spent more than a decade behind bars for his activism. Berrigan wrote a final statement in the days before his death. His final comments included this: “I die with the conviction, held since 1968 and Catonsville, that nuclear weapons are the scourge of the earth; to mine for them, manufacture them, deploy them, use them, is a curse against God, the human family, and the earth itself.”