THE OLD VERMONTER

Political protester John Nirenberg walks the walk for 500 miles from Boston to D.C.

By Freda Moon / New Haven Advocate

Early in life, John Nirenberg dwelled on the dangers of groupthink. “With a name like mine…” he says, his sentence trailing off as he stands beside a strip mall on Route 1 in Guilford, holding a yellow sign that reads, “Save the Constitution: Impeach Bush/Cheney.”

His name is not, in fact, spelled like the German city which hosted the Nazi trials. But as a child, it was close enough. Nirenberg grew up reflecting on Nuremberg, with the wicked history of the Holocaust at his heels.

He graduated from high school in Old Lyme, grew into a student of organizational behavior (complete with a PhD from UConn), a professor and a traveler. At 60, he’s visited some 120 countries and spent his life trying to understand and explain why people do what people do.

Now Nirenberg’s walking from Boston to Washington, DC—nearly 500 miles along the old Post Road, a symbolic 40-day trip—to ask Congress to do something big. He wants Nancy Pelosi to push for the impeachment of the President of the United States.

Nirenberg, a self-described “dorky old professor,” believes that if this country doesn’t oust George Bush, we will be judged for our inaction—like Eichmann in Jerusalem, ours would be a statement on the banality of evil. He uses an anecdote to illustrate the point: He doesn’t usually watch network news, but recently found himself in a motel room taking in a 10-minute segment on the potential addictiveness of lip balm. With an uncountable number of dead civilians in Iraq, with government-sanctioned torture, with the suspension of habeus corpus and an impending conflict with Iran, Nirenberg thinks there’s more important news. He not worrying over moisture-dependent lips at a time like this.

On Thursday, Nirenberg was walking from Guilford to New Haven. As the snow and ice fell hard and anyone who could hunkered inside, Nirenberg put in 14.2 miles.

Nirenberg’s is the kind of grand gesture that evokes a response. Jackie Ballance, a retired nurse from Northampton, Mass., borrowed a friend’s minivan and drove to the Connecticut shoreline to meet Nirenberg, walk with him and shuttle him to his motel in North Haven, where he’d spend the night. Another Northampton man came just for the walk, toting a large American flag along the way. Two Guilford residents, Camille and Lois, met Nirenberg in East Madison.

As Nirenberg proceeds on his impeachment mission, he blogs his trip. From last Thursday’s entry:

Today’s Democratic debate revealed that each candidate clearly knows how this administration has violated the Constitution and each vowed to turn back many of this administration’s more egregious behaviors such as using signing statements instead of the veto, denying the right of habeas corpus, using extraordinary rendition and torture camps, and domestic spying. But there are no guarantees that this will be so. And there was no mention of returning to Congress its sole right to declare war.

The snows came, the ponchos were pulled on, and we marched into the wind toward New Haven.