Ethical Humanist Tina Busch Nema

Dear Ms. Pacino,

I would like to nominate Tina Busch Nema, 343 Bach Avenue, Kirkwood, MO, for the Ethical Humanist of the Year Award.

I've known Tina for about eight years, but, in a way, I hardly know her at all. She continues to grow toward the kind of loving, compassionate activist that many of us can only imagine becoming.

I will have to limit the examples of her good work because describing her outreach to her fellow human beings is like pulling on a thread of a great quilt. One thing leads to another and there doesn't seem to be an end to the story.

Tina has been active for many years in a group called School of Americas Watch (soawatch.com) headquartered in Washington, DC. The goal of the group is to force the U.S. Congress to close a training camp in Georgia that used to be in Panama until President Noriega fell out of favor with our government. After a lot of bad publicity about the graduates from Latin America using terrorist tactics back in their home countries, the school's name was changed to WHINSEC. But its goal is still to train Latin American soldiers and mercenaries how to control civilian populations through the use of terror and intimidation.

Each fall, on the anniversary of the murder of six Jesuit priests and their housekeeper in El Salvador, SOA members and other peace activists hold a vigil and protest at the gates of the school at Fort Benning, GA. Tina had seen her fellow activists arrested in past years and, at the 2006 protest, made a conscious decision to "cross the line" and accept the consequences. By stepping a few feet into restricted space, she committed a crime and was sentenced by a local judge to two months in prison. (Coincidentally, the judge was running for re-election and needed to brag about being tough on protesters.)

It was spring of 2007 when Tina was told to report to Carswell Federal Women's Prison in Texas. With careful planning, Tina organized her many friends and family to take care of her children and home while she was away. I was privileged to arrange for students from St. Louis University to plant her garden for her. Tina has a close relationship with all living things, and her garden is one of the joys of her life. We wanted it to be growing and producing when she returned in late summer.

Although our goal, as her friends, was to send her letters to keep up her spirits, we had no idea how much we would learn about prison life and the prison-industrial complex in general. I'm sure 99% of the American public knows nothing about how prisoners are used to pad the profits of major U.S. corporations, but that's another story for another day.

Tina was assigned the task of washing tables in the cafeteria from 4:30 a.m. to noon. She got to know many of the women in her cell block and in the hospital wing of the prison. Eventually she felt compelled to help some of the worst cases of injustice. The stories would break the heart of any normal human being. Many women are in prison because of crimes committed by the men in their lives, often their sons who may be living with them and selling drugs. Middle-aged and older women are imprisoned on conspiracy charges when they, themselves, have done nothing wrong.

When her cellmates asked Tina if her action at the protest was worth being in prison, here is how she described her answer in one of her letters to her friends.

"I consistently say yes, and I do not lie. I do mean it. Yes, I do not regret for an instant. But the question that wells up in my heart is...what is the most important thing I can do? Is it closing SOA? Is it standing up to the powers that cause such death and destruction? Is it ending torture or war or poverty?... I think the greatest, most important thing I can do is to simply love. And out of loving comes the rest. The stand I took at Fort Benning was simply an act of love and prison is a consequence of loving people. Here in prison I have come to love some of the women here and listening to them and doing what I can are acts of love...This is not theory or nice words. It is my heart's desire."

"When I see some sisters I share this compound with who are looking at 3,5, 10 years, life sentences, my heart breaks. How can they do it? It is so unjust. Mandatory minimums, conspiracy laws, lack of federal probation. I could not understand the MAGNITUDE of suffering until I see it, live it with my own eyes and life. The US prison system is the dirty little secret of the United States."

One example of Tina's "peace in the world" way of living was to teach her cell mates to make peace cranes using the origami technique. The women made the cranes for the prisoners who were hospitalized on the upper floors and somehow found a way to deliver them. The bedridden and often dying patients expressed gratitude for knowing someone cared about them.

Even after Tina was released and came home, she kept track of some of the women. She asked some of us to write to the warden about one woman in particular, and those letters were successful in getting that woman the medical treatment she needed. Tina has also recruited us to write letters to Congress members about various bills dealing with the U. S. prison system. A small delegation of us visited Sen. Claire McCaskill's chief of staff in St. Louis about one problem in particular. When people are sentenced to prison in the federal system, there is no attempt to assign them to a prison near their homes. Despite all the evidence that people in prison have a much better chance of succeeding after their release if they have contact with family and friends, people are sent to whatever prison comes up next on the list.

I could go on about what we've learned because of Tina about the prison system and School of the Americas, but that's probably enough for now.


In the spring of 2008, Tina joined a short-term peace delegation going to Columbia, South America. They visited with human rights workers there, listened to the stories and concerns of the local people. The area she visited is in the southern part of the country where gold mining is big business. From one of Tina's email messages, "Strip mining techniques used by
multinational gold mining companies are polluting and destroying the
mountains. Land slides are common, displacing entire villages. Government
troops use harsh techniques to win 'control' of the area as the President
of Columbia wants Columbia to be 'business friendly' for multinational
corporations."

Tina was asking us to help her raise the funds she needed to join this mission. We had no trouble filling that request because there are so many of us who are in awe of Tina's courage.

Last winter, I received an email from Tina asking me to help her collect blankets and sweaters for people living outside during that awful bitter cold spell we had. One of the first men she and her group helped was a Native American construction worker from South Dakota. After the work he was doing dried up, he migrated east to Nebraska, then Iowa, then Missouri looking for construction work. Sadly, he ended up homeless in St. Louis. Tina asked us for enough money to buy him a bus ticket home, which we gladly offered. She not only took him to a place where he could shower and change into some clean clothes, she found out he made beautiful dream catchers (those round frames with feathers, etc. that people hang in windows.) She asked him to teach her how to do it which gave him a sense of worth, and she gave me the first one she made all by herself.

For several weeks last winter many of us collected blankets, sweaters, mittens, etc. from our friends, churches, political groups, and got them to Tina's house in Kirkwood. I made one delivery trip with her down to the Methodist Church in St. Louis that offers three meals a day to people in need. They have storage space for clothing and other supplies. Tina's group located people sleeping outside and gave them hot soup, cocoa and tried to get them into shelters. When the shelters were full, Tina convinced the City of St. Louis to use Americorps volunteers to staff two temporary shelters. Most of the shelters will not take anyone with alcohol on his breath or who doesn't have an ID. Since theft of personal belongings is a common occurrence, some people do not have ID cards or drivers' licenses. Tina sees all these fellow human beings through the eyes of one who doesn't judge or criticize. That's an amazing quality in a world full of anger, hatred and fear.

Tina's most recent request to me has to do with trying to get municipalities to become "sweat free" by convincing them not to buy uniforms and other articles of clothing from companies using what amounts to slave labor in Latin American countries. This a project of the Interfaith Committee on Latin America of which Tina is a part. She is looking for groups that might invite a speaker on this topic. Of course, I'll help her find venues to get out the information.

I end with another quote from one of Tina's letters from prison:

"It was suggested to me before I began my prison time, to keep my heart soft. I've thought about that often during these two months. It is easy to harden your heart here. There is so much pain, too much pain. It would be reasonable to protect your heart here by hardening up. But when people are involved, people whose sorrow is written on their faces, in their tears, when I read Pema Chodron's book and she suggests to lean into the pain, well, how can I harden up my heart? How can I not be touched? How can I not feel the pain and despair? ... I face the fact every day that I am not God, that I am just a person, but I see that loving people bears consequences. I don't know what exactly that is other than feeling their pain and listening, but it is not a cause. It is about a way of living and seeing and I am trying, with a lot of questions and errors, to find where all this leads, if it leads anywhere."

I would be more than happy to supply more documentation to support this nomination of Tina Busch Nema for Ethical Humanist of the Year. Thank you for recognizing the many good people in the St. Louis area who serve as examples to all of us.