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RIP Mag Seaman

April 8, 2020 By Bob Kinsey


Magdalene Seaman, active in The Colorado Coalition for the Prevention of War, left this life March 28, 2020. She and her husband Ken served on our Board from the beginning of the Nuclear Freeze Movement until last year when she could no longer drive to the meetings. She was an active organizer and participant in the Raging Grannies in Colorado since its inception. Mag’s first life was spent in the Sisters of Loretto,  a Catholic Religious order and  taught Spanish and French in Denver at St Mary’s Academy.  . In the 1970’s she left the order and then married Ken Seaman. They later moved to Mexico for several years and then back to the US active in protests against Nuclear Weapons in New Mexico. She was arrested several times at the Nevada Test Site. Mag organized many events in Denver  including commemorations of the US Atomic bombing of Hiroshima and public events featuring talks by prominent anti-Nuclear activists such as Sam Day of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and Matthew Rothschild of the Progressive Magazine. Ken and Mag served in the late 1990s as election monitors in Bosnia for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and Mag helped in Ken’s 2002 campaign for Congress as a member of the Green Party.  Presente!

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Obituary submitted to the Denver Post by Kathleen Graham

Magdalen Herman Seaman, was born Joy Herman, March 7th, 1926, in St. Louis, Missouri, and died on March 28th, 2020, in Littleton, Colorado.

Mag received the Bachelor of Arts in French/Spanish from Webster University in St. Louis and the Master of Arts degree in French from the University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana. Additional studies were pursued at Laval University, Quebec, Canada; St. Louis University, St. Louis; and the University of Montpellier, Montpellier, France.

As a Sister of Loretto, she taught for 25 years at St. Mary’s Academy, at Webster University, and Loretto Heights College. She taught English, French, and Spanish. She also instructed in speech, drama and journalism and produced dramas and musicals. Mag worked for civil rights and human rights supporting Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers in the late ’60s. She worked for the National Assessment for Educational Progress (a national student testing program) in Denver, and later as a volunteer conversation partner for English as a Second Language students at the English Language Center at the University of Denver.

With her partner, Ken Seaman, she conducted seminars on environmental topics in the Denver area. She also worked with Ken to educate young and dedicated activists in the principles of nonviolence as practiced by Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi. Between 1997 and 2002, she and Ken traveled to Eastern Europe several times to be election monitors in Bosnia-Herzegovina with the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. They were both involved with the statewide Colorado Coalition Against War with Iraq in the early 2000’s.

Mag founded the Denver Raging Grannies in 2002, a singing group that protested war, injustice and discrimination. She and Ken were also involved in the Colorado Coalition for the Prevention of Nuclear War and The Nuclear Resister, a Tucson-based organization dedicated to anti-nuclear and anti-war resistance.

In 2007, Mag received The Loretto Service Award by Webster University. This award is presented annually to an alumna or alumnus who has given significantly of herself or himself in service to humanity and social justice. The Award is intended to continue the recognition of the community service and social justice values of the Sisters of Loretto who founded Webster College in 1915. [quoting web site]

She is survived by stepchildren Mary Love, Denver, CO, Barbara and Geoff Stauffer, Lansing, MI; Joyce and Thomas Seaman, Oxford, England; Katie and Robert Seaman, Tucson, AZ; seven step-grandchildren, and several step-great-grandchildren.

In lieu of flowers, please make a donation to the Human Rights Institute of the College of Arts & Sciences at Webster University; PO Box 191105; St. Louis, MO 63119-3194.

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Another posted remembrance from Felice Joppa-Cohen

I just heard the very sad news that my dear friend Mag died. Peace, justice & anti-nuclear activist, Raging Granny, former Sister of Loretto (before meeting and marrying her beloved Ken). Jack and I had been trying to phone her for several days to see how she was doing, and the line was always busy. We finally made some calls and found out that she died on March 26.

Starting in 1982, Jack and I (and our first baby) were part of an anti-nuclear affinity group in Phoenix with wonderful people. We could never decide on a name, so were fine to call ourselves “the affinity group”. That is when we met Mag and Ken. They were in their 50s then, nearing 60, which as I recall seemed old to us back then! The affinity group did a lot together, including protesting uranium mining, nuclear power and nuclear weapons at the Palo Verde nuclear power plant, Honeywell and elsewhere. We went to a Sundance at Big Mountain and to actions at the Nevada Test Site. We marched, made leaflets, carried banners, had potlucks and nonviolence trainings, and we went to court with one another after civil resistance actions. Many of us stayed in touch over the years. Ken and Mag moved to Denver, and Jack and I (with our kids, when they were with us) always visited them when we were there to see family. Ken died in 2016 at age 92. Mag missed him terribly. And we will miss them both and remember them with love, grateful that they were part of our lives and part of our anti-nuclear family.

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Disarmament Quotes

“Everything I did at Kings Bay was a result of my faith and my commitment to challenge the idols whose only purpose is to destroy human life on an unimaginable scale. I went to Kings Bay to use my body to refuse to bow down to these idols. I went to try to bring attention to the idolatry that it is requiring of our nation and its people. I went in a spirit of prayer and repentance. I went in hope that this witness might invite other people to reflect on the obscenity and on the idolatry that it is before God.”

Liz McAlister Kings Bay Protestor 2019

Elimination of nuclear weapons, so naive, so simplistic, and so idealistic as to be quixotic? Some may think so. But as human beings, citizens of nations with power to influence events in the world, can we be at peace with ourselves if we strive for less? I think not. 

Robert McNamara Former U.S. Secretary of Defense

[T]he use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender. . . . [I]n being the first to use it, we . . . adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.

5-Star Admiral William D. Leahy Chief of Staff to President's Roosevelt and Truman, leader of Combined US-UK Chiefs of Staff during WWII

Now, understand, this matters to people everywhere. One nuclear weapon exploded in one city -– be it New York or Moscow, Islamabad or Mumbai, Tokyo or Tel Aviv, Paris or Prague –- could kill hundreds of thousands of people. And no matter where it happens, there is no end to what the consequences might be -– for our global safety, our security, our society, our economy, to our ultimate survival. 

Former President Barack Obama, April 5, 2009

Viewing Trinity Test July 16,1945: "Now we are all Sons of Bitches"

Kenneth Bainbridge Deputy Director

It is my firm belief that the infinite and uncontrollable fury of nuclear weapons should never be held in the hands of any mere mortal ever again, for any reason. 

Mikhail Gorbachev, 1995

Over the past 15 years, the goal of elimination of nuclear weapons has been so much on the back burner that it will take a true political breakthrough and a major intellectual effort to achieve success in this endeavor.

Mikhail Gorbachev, January 31, 2007

So far as I can see, the atomic bomb has deadened the finest feeling that has sustained for ages. There used to be so-called laws of war, which made it tolerable. Now we know the truth. War knows no law except that of might. The atomic bomb brought an empty victory but it resulted for the time being in destroying the soul of Japan. What has happened to the soul of the destroying nation is yet too early to see... 

Mahatma Gandhi from The Essential Gandhi, Louis Fisher, ed.

We are prone to self-righteousness if we call ourselves peacemakers, and yet do not perceive how the peace issue cuts through all the economic and social issues that we often try to keep separate. If the race for nuclear arms is encouraged by our fear of losing the affluent ways of life that we have taken for granted, then we must see how our fears and desires have left so many other human beings naked and hungry.

Malsolm Warford "The Church's Role in a Nuclear Age

We seek the elimination one day of nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth. 

Ronald Reagan, Inaugural Address, January 21, 1985

It is my fervent goal and hope…that we will some day no longer have to rely on nuclear weapons to deter aggression and assure world peace. To that end the United States is now engaged in a serious and sustained effort to negotiate major reductions in levels of offensive nuclear weapons with the ultimate goal of eliminating these weapons from the face of the earth. 

Ronald Reagan, October 20, 1986

We endorse setting the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons and working energetically on the actions required to achieve that goal ... 

George P. Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger and Sam Nunn, January 4, 2007

Through the release of atomic energy, our generation has brought into the world the most revolutionary force since prehistoric man's discovery of fire. This basic force of the universe cannot be fitted into the outmoded concept of narrow nationalisms. For there is no secret and there is no defense; there is no possibility of control except through the aroused understanding and insistence of the peoples of the world. We scientists recognise our inescapable responsibility to carry to our fellow citizens an understanding of atomic energy and its implication for society. In this lies our only security and our only hope - we believe that an informed citizenry will act for life and not for death. 

Albert Einstein, January 22, 1947

A world free of the threat of nuclear weapons is necessarily a world devoid of nuclear weapons…. Nuclear weapons pose an intolerable threat to humanity and our habitat…. Others subscribe to Churchill’s assertion ‘Peace is the sturdy child of terror.’ For me, such a peace is a wretched offspring, a peace that condemns us to live under a dark cloud of perpetual anxiety, a peace that codifies mankind’s most murderous instincts….The beast must be chained, its soul expunged, its lair laid waste.

General Lee Butler Former Commander, Strategic Air Command, April 28, 1996

There are still thousands of warheads loaded on operational systems and standing on high states of alert on virtually hair-trigger posture. And you have to ask yourself: Why is that? Who is the enemy? What is the threat? 

U.S. General Lee Butler Former Commander in Chief, U.S. Strategic Air Command in 1991-92

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending he sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children...This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron." --spoken to the American Society of Newspaper Editors 1953

Dwight Eisenhower US President 1953-1961

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