Activists appreciate nation where everyone has a say

Maybe you’ve run across their names in a photo caption or a newspaper story. Maybe you’ve driven by as they were holding picket signs or marching in demonstrations. And when you saw them, maybe you honked your horn in support, or yelled “Get a job!” or offered them a rude single-digit salute.

Haber and Faso are political activists, he for anti-war and pro-peace causes and she for animal rights. Singly and together, they’re the living embodiment of dissent, the bedrock American value that not only allows us to disagree — with each other, with our government, with mainstream society’s opinions — but encourages us to do so.

Independence Day weekend seems a good time to remember that our nation was founded in dissent, and that, even today, we remain happily, usefully and sometimes uncomfortably awash in it.

And it’s interesting to note how often in our history dissenting voices — over slavery, civil rights and women’s suffrage, to name a few issues — have evolved into mainstream thought, all because a handful of Americans got involved, spoke up and raised some democratic hell.

Faso and Haber certainly find it interesting. They’re even banking on it happening again.

Linda Faso

Faso wasn’t always as committed to, or as outspoken about, animal rights as she is today.

“As a child, I was always compassionate, and I’d bring animals home and stuff,” she says. But, while Faso agreed with the value of spaying and neutering, of not abusing animals and of treating them humanely, that was pretty much as deep as her advocacy went.

Then, about 25 years ago, Faso began volunteering with the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

“I met a girl who worked with some of these issues, and she educated me on it,” Faso says. “I studied and I researched and I was appalled by what I saw, and I knew I had to educate others. There’s so much unnecessary, unspeakable cruelty to animals.”

Today, whether the issue is Mike Tyson’s keeping of racing pigeons, the hunting of black bears in Northern Nevada or the treatment of circus animals, Faso is apt to be on the scene, maybe with a colleague or two, certainly with an opinion, perhaps with a sign, and always with literature for curious passers-by.

She considers that last one particularly important, because, for Faso, dissent serves as a vehicle for educating others.

“I think education is the key to changing people’s ideas as to how they live and what they choose to do,” she says. “That’s where we can make a difference.

“I am who I am today because I got educated by somebody who had the time to talk to me, and I was willing to look at issues that, as painful as they were, I couldn’t turn away from. I knew I had to do something.”

Faso — “let’s say I’m in my 60s,” she offers — acknowledges that the breadth of her knowledge wasn’t wide at first. “I never thought about the meat issue. I never thought about the fur issue. I never thought about the pet store issue.”

While Faso’s highest-profile bit of advocacy may have been associated with allegations in the ’90s that Las Vegas entertainer Bobby Berosini was abusing the orangutans used in his act — “I protested for 10 months in front of the Stardust,” she recalls — her first public protest was picketing a circus at the Thomas & Mack Center.

“At first I was a bit shy, almost to the point of I was hoping no one would drive by that knew me,” she recalls. “I thought: ‘Oh my gosh. What am I doing?’ ”

But, Faso continues, “after the first time, I was totally comfortable with what I was doing and I knew this is what I need to do.”

But is holding a sign and handing out fliers on a sidewalk an effective way of changing others’ minds? “Absolutely,” Faso says. “Many, many times in doing protests, people have come up to us for our literature: ‘Why are you here?’ ‘What’s this about?’ ‘What does that sign mean?’ We hand them literature, and we’ve had people come back.”

Faso doesn’t insist that others believe precisely as she does. For instance, she considers vegetarianism “a personal choice. I think (meat is) the one last thing that people want to give up, and I understand that.

“I tell people, you don’t have to become a vegetarian. Why can’t you just cut down to two or three days? I always encourage people to just do something.”

While Faso works with several animal rights groups, when she hits the streets to protest, it’s usually on her own.

“I do this independently,” Faso says, adding that she’s fortunate in having a husband who “has a good job.”

Of course, not everybody cares to listen. For example, when protesting the treatment of circus animals, some parents don’t want their kids to see the informational materials Faso takes along, “so they say, ‘Oh, go get a job’ or something.

“I do believe that there’s a right and a wrong way to do this,” she notes. “I don’t scream or holler at people or argue with them. When you’re standing out there with signs for animals, you have to be dignified and you have to stand there and not create a problem for the police.”

Despite the occasional heckler, Faso says the “vast majority” of people she encounters are willing to listen to what she has to say.

“I think people are very intelligent today in most cases, and I think a lot of educated people are willing to look at other views,” she says.

“When I do a protest, I welcome people coming up to me and maybe challenging me and asking me questions. Oftentimes, those people listen to what I have to say and they say, ‘Well, I never thought of it that way.’ That’s the power of conversation.”

Does she ever get frustrated? “No, because you always see the spark in someone’s eyes,” Faso answers. “And, there’s no place for frustration when you do this.”

Jim Haber

Haber, 49, estimates that he has been arrested “maybe a dozen times” over the years, and once spent a week in jail during the ’80s in connection with an MX missile protest at Southern California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base.

For the past three years, Haber has been coordinator for the Nevada Desert Experience, which advocates for peace and justice and which most Southern Nevadans associate with protests at the Nevada Test Site (now called the Nevada National Security Site).

“We kind of embody dissent — not for dissent’s sake, and I want to emphasize that — but because there are things to wake up about and to scream about and to talk about,” Haber says.

Haber was born in Oakland, Calif., and grew up in the Bay Area with parents who, he says, “raised us as sort of progressive radicals.”

His first serious brush with political activism came from his protesting tests of the MX missile — an experimental intercontinental ballistic missile system — at Vandenberg.

Haber found the cause, and becoming involved in the process, satisfying. “So I kind of decided to remain something of an activist,” he says, “hopefully for my whole life.”

In the Bay Area, Haber became involved with the Catholic Worker movement and for several years worked with a community in San Francisco that ran a soup kitchen.

“Even though I was Jewish, I found the San Francisco Catholic Worker movement to be a very important part of my life for over 20 years,” Haber says. “Something that struck me about it was their willingness to ask hard questions and to stay true to their principles.”

Haber also had become acquainted with the Nevada Desert Experience and had gotten to know some of its staff members over the years. Three years ago, Haber learned that the organization was searching for a coordinator. “It seemed like a good fit,” he says.

He got the gig. Here, Haber is involved with the valley’s Catholic Worker community, through which he continues to work on behalf of the poor and, beyond that, persists in asking why there even are poor people in America.

One reason, Haber says, is the hefty chunk of the federal budget that goes toward military spending. “When it comes to looking at our national economic situation, (people) won’t look at the military budget. They feel so insecure, that any challenge to that is seen as a serious threat and traitorous. That’s shifting a little bit right now, but not that much.”

Already, holding that viewpoint is enough to qualify Haber as a dissenter from mainstream American thought. Surprisingly, though, it also makes him a dissenter from others on his side of the ideological fence.

“I would say it’s been hard the last couple of years, because progressive people so want to believe that President Obama is a big improvement over President Bush,” Haber says. Yet, Obama has, Haber adds, “extended some of the worst Bush policies” in the areas of, for example, government whistle-blowers, civil liberties and “targeted assassinations.”

“In any of those things, it’s hard to critique President Obama unless you’re, like, a Tea Partyer,” Haber says. “But if you’re a progressive, he will attack you, his press people will attack you, and community members will attack you. It has caused dissenting to be harder than it was when President Bush was in office.”

Haber often can be found protesting or participating in political actions. On such occasions — at locales that include Creech Air Force Base, home of the Air Force’s Predator program, and the federal courthouse in downtown Las Vegas, where Nevada Desert Experience members protest every Thursday morning — reactions from passers-by vary. Some are hostile. Some are dismissive. Some are supportive. Some are condescending.

“Some people give us the one-finger salute,” Haber says. “And, sometimes, it’s like we’re being patronized: ‘Oh, your protesting won’t do anything. Why are you doing this? To get on TV?’

“I do think that, yeah, dissent is not respected like it once was. I mean, dissent is always going to be a challenge. We do need more to put ourselves in other people’s shoes and listen to those you consider the opposition to learn about yourself, and people are less willing to do that now.”

So why keep at it?

“I’ve met amazing, inspirational people in this movement,” Haber answers. “That’s what keeps me going.”

Contact reporter John Przybys at jprzybys@ reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0280.