Waging Peace

To the Editors of the Crimson:

Until the one million-strong peace march in Manhattan in early June, I was rather pessimistic about the possibilities of reversing the nuclear arms race in its headlong flight to doomsday for the Northern Hemisphere, if not the entire planet. Having "free-lanced" the march (I went as a loner and deliberately walked fast in order to take in the panorama of groups coming out for this "big event"). I came away with a much more optimistic feeling about our being able to stop what Helen Caldicott calls Nuclear Madness (the title of her recent book).

Helen Caldicott cannot do the job by herself, as powerful and as charismatic as she is. I particularly respect that she has given up totally her very fine and promising medical career to work on peace full time. Well let me be the second to do this.

I am a licensed clinical psychologist in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and have practiced privately and successfully for a period of 13 years. In addition, I have held academic appointments at Northeastern University, Union College, Stephens College and Boston University. I have been consultant to mental health and intergroup relations programs from here to Oklahoma, and from Detroit to Tallahassee. I am co-director of Reconciliation Enterprises, a small group of peacenik zealots who have sponsored constructive dialogues over the last eight or nine years among Arabs and Israelis, Blacks and Whites as well as Native Americans and foreigners.

I am taking this opportunity to state that I will no longer accept personally any private fees for psychotherapy or counseling to go into my own pocket. I no longer can afford to be connected with any institution doing business as usual. I have to give full time to peace. Not any old kind of peace. Not peace at any price. But peace with justice, a decent life for all, freedom from harrassment, intimidation, and discrimination.

So I am now the former Doctor Doress, Professor Doress and all that jazz. From now on it is going to be plain, ordinary Ivy Doress working in the best way he knows how to preserve spaceship earth, the crew and passengers. I'm not a complete iconoclast. I welcome anyone with a strong commitment toward peace, without this or that hidden agenda, and with a capacity for a very difficult organizing effort to come forward and join me.

For particulars about my fledging, non-capitalized, embryonic lone wolf enterprise, please call me at 491-3935 or my service (Dottie) at 436-5393. Remember, you are volunteering your ideas, intelligence and hard work in behalf of yourselves and of this beautiful experiment called Earth. You are worth it, and Earth is worth it, as well. Iry Derem