Between working full time at SUNY Downstate Medical Center and studying for his second doctorate, Mark Hoglund finds the time to spend his valuable lunch hour most days holding up a sign for peace.
It is like a sigh in the noise and clamor outside the cafeteria, where he stands each day.
A member of United University Professions, the NYSUT local representing SUNY faculty and professional staff, Hoglund works in the department of family medicine at the Brooklyn campus. His tasks are the stuff of budgets, personnel issues, grant proposals and scheduling. But he also serves as a one-man peace project.
Hoglund said he was first inspired to get active in the peace movement by faculty member Pamela Sass, who put fliers in employee mailboxes in the fall of 2002, when the United States was threatening to invade Iraq. They helped form a peace group on campus.
For Hoglund, the need to respond was visceral. When he heard the invasion was imminent, he said he was “aghast” at the “horror of being back in war.” And then, when he looked at his two sons — then in junior high and high school — Hoglund thought about them coming of age with a possible draft and it “made me sick to my stomach.”
“A group of us came together … on campus to raise awareness of the dangers of going to war and to marshal opposition,” Hoglund said, recalling that they handed out leaflets, organized educational events and hosted a speaker on military policy.
“I was active in what was then called Brooklyn Parents for Peace right around the time that Mark and I started organizing a group at Downstate,” said Sass, an associate professor in the family practice department. “Mark's outside work to become involved in a local neighborhood peace group inspired me to work with others in my neighborhood to start a small chapter of Brooklyn for Peace in my neighborhood.”
Like any long-term project, finding time and energy to sustain the effort can be daunting. The parent organization is still going, Sass said, but eventually the SUNY Downstate peace activism and some neighborhood efforts began to fade.
Eventually, Hoglund got an idea.
“Kind of spur of the moment, I made a sign: ‘Please do something to help end the war in Iraq.’ I stood outside elevators and the cafeteria,” Hoglund said.
“I suppose for the first few minutes I felt like the proverbial fool on the hill,” he said. His first sign included lyrics from Bob Dylan’s Blowin' in the Wind:
“Yes, how many deaths will it take
before he knows too many people have died?”
When the chair of the department of medicine stopped in front of Hoglund’s sign and copied down the words, Hoglund felt that people were taking him seriously.
So he just kept showing up every day.
That was in 2008. He’s still showing up.
Hoglund asks interested people to contact their congressional representatives with concerns, to keep communicating and to sign pertinent petitions. His signs posit moral questions or float ideas: “Job and Health Care, Not War;” or “Getting Iran to Give Up Nuclear Weapons is a Good Idea, Shouldn’t We Do That Here, Too?”
“I began to see Mark standing in his silent vigil at work by the cafeteria. His standing in witness has been profoundly moving and inspires me to reflect on war and peace each time I see him,” said Sass. “The steadfastness and dignity of his vigil touch many of us and remind us of the need not to forget.”
“To me, the most powerful part of the whole experience was when the chaplain of the hospital told me people were talking to her about how much it meant to them that someone was standing up and bringing it to their attention,” Hoglund said. “It was very humbling for me.”
People would also stop and talk to him about a son or daughter serving in the war.
“I was sort of giving voice to their pain,” he said.
Ellen McTigue, a UUPer from Downstate and a member of NYSUT’s Health Care Professional Council, appreciates her colleague’s efforts:
"Even though we are not feeling it in our everyday lives, our country, our soldiers and our nation have in fact been engaged in continuous war for the last 15 years What a staggering fact!" Yet it is so easy to turn our minds away from such a very unpleasant reality. However, our responsibility as citizens in a democracy is to be aware and to push for the kind of policy we want to see enacted."
Hoglund's signs have enlightened McTigue and others about PTSD, hidden funerals and death tolls.
"Mark's effort keeps peace as a goal on my radar and has prompted me to be more active on the topic,” she added. “Mark keeps the conversation alive.”
There have also been people opposed to the stand he takes; people who argue that the military was protecting this country by going into Iraq. Hoglund discusses the issues with them.
“From time to time, people will come and challenge my assumptions,” he said. “It makes me think about what my message is and if it does make sense. I value that.”
His signs currently contain discourse on issues such as opposing the use of drones: “another evil we do in other countries.”
His sign complains how the U.S. spends more on military than the next 10 countries combined; and how the U.S. has five out of the six largest arms industry corporations in the world.
“Why can’t we reduce military spending and take care of people in need?” he asks.
Hoglund did not serve in Vietnam; he said he had a draft number but it was just high enough that he wasn’t called up.
Sass said her colleague’s daily vigil is a “persistent effort to be our conscience.”
-- Liza Frenette