Lake County woman part of group to relaunch famed peace boat Golden Rule

Some days, Helen Jaccard says she wakes feeling hopeless. The task before her, protesting against nuclear weapons and war, can feel Herculean.

There is too much to do, too much to tell people, too many stories to share. She calls nuclear weapons “an existential threat to humanity.”

So, where to begin?

Jaccard has found that it’s easiest to start with the boat.

The Golden Rule is 34-foot ketch — two masts, three sails, one of which is emblazoned with a giant peace sign.

“We reach thousands of people wherever we go,” she said. “She’s very photogenic ... . It’s, ‘The ‘Peace Boat’ is here.”

The “Peace Boat” is the Golden Rule, the very boat that was sailed to some level of fame in 1958 when peace activists were stopped and arrested in Hawaii as they attempted to sail to the Marshall Islands to disrupt U.S. atmospheric nuclear testing.

That journey aboard the Golden Rule, and the arrests and publicity, is often credited with inspiring the creation of Greenpeace and other activist organizations.

Jaccard, who lives in Lake County but spends a good deal of her time traveling wherever the Golden Rule sails, is the project manager for The Golden Rule Project. She spent a couple of days last week in Santa Rosa, speaking to groups about the Golden Rule and their mission for world peace.

Owned by Veterans For Peace, the Golden Rule had a rough go after her early fame.

By Jaccard’s telling, after the high profile arrests in Hawaii, the boat was sold and lost to time for decades until she was identified in 2010 when she sank in a gale while docked in Humboldt Bay.

Alerted to her identity, a group of activists set to work rebuilding her. It took five years. She was relaunched June 15, 2015, with the intention of being an eye-catching way into weighty discussion about the world’s future and the possibility for peace.

“We want the general public to get educated on nuclear weapons,” Jaccard said.

The coronavirus pandemic has not surprisingly cut down on the Golden Rule’s travels. Plans for sailing to international waters have been postponed. Still, in her latest incarnation, she’s sailed to British Columbia, Ensenada, Hawaii and the Sacramento River among other jaunts, Jaccard said.

The boat has just made her way from Hawaii, where she spent more than year because of the pandemic. She stopped in San Francisco Bay and before prepping to head to her home port of Humboldt Bay.

Wherever she sails and wherever she stops, the idea is to talk and educate. It’s a simple idea that is not so easily made good upon.

“In the 1980s, people were fairly educated on nuclear policy,” Jaccard said.

It was front of mind stuff. Think of the stir that the release of the TV movie “The Day After” in 1983 caused. I recall sitting in the multipurpose room of Hidden Valley Elementary School finding out which of my friends were allowed to watch it and whose parents steered them away.

“No Nukes” stickers dotted car bumpers all over Sonoma County. As I recall, it didn’t feel particularly divisive to come down against nuclear annihilation.

“First the Reagan-Gorbachev agreement that took us from 80,000 nuclear weapons down to 15,000 nuclear weapons, that was a huge success,” she said.

But that win took the spotlight off the issue to a degree — and shifted wind from activists’ proverbial sails.

“And then the Soviet Union collapsed and the threat of nuclear war was apparently reduced, if not over," Jaccard said. ”So, the whole nuclear abolition movement decreased dramatically and then, of course, the climate change issue came to the forefront and our youth really got involved in that.“

In a twist, Jaccard said that the volatility of former President Donald Trump may have inadvertently renewed concern around nuclear weapons.

“President Trump actually sparked the new rise of the nuclear abolition movement when he was threatening Kim Jong Un and vice versa with nuclear exchanges,” she said.

That worry has been in the news in recent days after release of excerpts of a new book from Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa that reports Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was fielding and making calls about safeguards to prevent Trump from starting a nuclear war in his final days inside the White House.

According to Woodward and Costa’s book, Milley ordered nuclear control officers to check with him first regardless of what they heard from the president.

That scene points to the frightening nature of anything to do with a nuclear arsenal, Jaccard said.

“People became aware of that recently — that one person can start a nuclear war,“ she said.

Nuclear weapons, Jaccard said, remain an existential threat to human existence in much the same way as climate change. And the Golden Rule is a perfect vessel to educate folks, she said.

“The Golden Rule is so much more than the nuclear issue,” Jaccard said. “It encompasses the whole peace and justice community.”

“Most people, most countries don’t want nuclear weapons to exist, but how organized are we?” she said.

Backers of the Golden Rule want their voyages, their stops, their visits to light a spark that will keep burning in people after the boat sets sail. So, they arrange events and meals and talks — all to keep the conversation going.

In the next year Veterans for Peace hope to sail the Golden Rule down the Mississippi River starting near its headwaters in Minnesota, into the Gulf of Mexico, up the Atlantic Coast to Maine. And of course, they expect to have stops and talks all along the way.

“Arranging that in 100 different places, it’s not easy,” she said

“There are some days I feel hopeless,” she said. “But the way I feel hopeful is through action...If we all believe that peace is possible, peace is more likely to happen. So, start with that.”

You can reach Staff Columnist Kerry Benefield at 707-526-8671 or kerry.benefield@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @benefield.