The far end of the waxy, hardwood basketball court is in shadows. A rock ‘n’ roll band, Paul Cebar and the Milwaukeeans, is positioned at midcourt, a few dozen revelers gyrating before them. Nearer the entrance, a couple of sections of bleachers hold most of the onlookers. With pennants of victories long gone hanging from its ceiling, the cavernous Loyola University Alumni Gym has taken on the aspect of a high school mixer gone sour.
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Healey and some 1,500 Amnesty members from around the country were in town for a weekend-long membership meeting, headquartered at Loyola’s Rogers Park campus. During their stay, they held silent vigils outside the Chilean, Chinese, South African, Turkish, and Yugoslavian consulates and the office of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service; they also rallied at the Daley Center Plaza for the abolishment of the death penalty. After all that and a full day of seminars on women’s rights, torture, and other grim reminders of human failing, most of them skipped the dance.
In 1988, Healey orchestrated Amnesty International’s Human Rights Now! tour, featuring such rock luminaries as Bruce Springsteen, Tracy Chapman, Peter Gabriel, and Sting. The tour raised millions of dollars and the profile of what had been a rather staid organization working in the trenches of human rights abuses.
Earlier in the evening, an Amnesty member from Kentucky had offered the opinion that freedom in the world is on the wane. Increasingly, she said, people are divided from their own governments. Which is getting stronger, I now asked Healey, the forces of freedom or the forces of repression?
So Bush is OK then? “Not at all. I’m very, very critical of him. But I’m saying you gotta take the good when you get it. So, on Namibia, OK. So, you talk to Gorbachev a lot, that’s good. He’s not going to toe the line to the Israelis on human rights abuses of the Palestinians, good. You take what you get. And there are some things to take. He’s not a scoundrel. He’s not an idiot. But, on the other hand, there’s a hell of a lot more he could do.”
