Yesterday, my mother was arrested in front of the White House.

It was her first time in cuffs (or thick plastic ties, anyway), newly retired and no longer encumbered with a military security clearance to keep up.  Deborah, an Air Force veteran and former radar operator, has helped run her local Veterans For Peace activist group in Southern California since 2005, the same national group that organized yesterday’s non-violent civil disobedience to protest the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Her timing to be in town for the event was mostly coincidental. She’s here visiting me for the holidays — though for the past few years, she has indeed scheduled her visits here around anti-war demonstrations. Her arrival late on Wednesday meant she missed the organizational meeting at Saint Stephen’s Church, where a decision was made to not, in fact, use handcuffs as planned. (She’s not sure why — though one man did U-lock himself to the fence around his neck.) In the morning, Deborah put on her warmest layers — though a SoCal resident for the last 25 years, she did remote tours for the Air Force in both Alaska and Greenland, so the freezing cold and snow didn’t dampen her spirit, a constitution that was not genetically passed down — and weathered Metro’s rush hour to meet the group at Lafayette Park.

It was to be completely non-violent. “That even means no littering,” she said. Daniel Ellsberg, Ray McGovern, Chris Hedges and other famed anti-war demonstrators spoke, and then they marched peacefully to the White House, took down the barrier gates (in a shining example of security theater, metal barrier gates keep visitors ten feet from the White House fence — a fence to protect the fence), and stood on the cement platform in which the fence posts are secured. Their signs read “How’s the war economy working for you?” and “End these wars. Not tomorrow, not next year. Now,” many featuring the Veterans For Peace logo of a dove on a helmet — which Deborah had tattooed on her back earlier this year.