The Sunnyvale Sun

Cover Story

Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer

Sing It: Members of both the San Jose Raging Grannies and the Women's League for Peace and Freedom (from left) Lois Fiedler, Darline Krause and Joanne Peyton laugh while practicing protest songs at Shirley Lin KinoshitaÕs home.

Raging Grannies

Protesting doesn't get old for these women

By Cody Kraatz

'I shouldn't be a Raging Granny. I'm too calm. I'm not raging enough," says Shirley Lin Kinoshita, 65, who started the San Jose Raging Grannies chapter in 2005.

It's true--she doesn't look very angry. But she is. Get her talking about President Bush's aims to update the United States' nuclear arsenal, and she gets downright nettled.

"He would like to replace our whole nuclear arsenal with new nuclear weapons. But that's sending the wrong message to countries like Iran and North Korea,'' she says, pointing out that the United States has the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world.

"We don't need weapons of mass destruction; we need the massive destruction of weapons."

The Raging Grannies is a unique organization of older women activists who gather in local gaggles to spread progressive messages, using street theater and adaptations of well-known songs. The Grannies formed in 1986 in Victoria, British Columbia, and there are now more than 60 gaggles, mostly in Canada and the United States .

"We have to be pretty knowledgeable about a lot of issues," says Kinoshita, who is Hawaiian-born of Chinese descent. They are, and their passion runs deep.

About 15 Grannies came to Kinoshita's "Disarming Tea Party" at her home in Cupertino on May 19. They snacked, chatted and eventually rehearsed songs for an upcoming anti-nuclear weapons protest at Lockheed Martin in Sunnyvale.

"We've given up knitting, and quietly sitting. The Grannies are coming, hurrah, hurrah," they sing to the tune of an old Scottish military marching song. The Grannies appeal to the public and the press, in part, because there is nothing else quite like it.

"We're not threatening to people. People enjoy the colorfulness of our costumes. They smile and are amused by our outfits and our words, the cleverness and the wittiness of it," says Lois Fiedler, 68, who joined the Grannies on top of her long-standing activism through the Women's League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF).

"Hey look us over, women proud and strong. Time to hear our voices, time to hear our song. ...Let's work together, build not destroy. Let's teach kindness to every girl and boy," they sing.

"Have you noticed that none of us are trained musicians?" says Kinoshita to laughs from the gaggle, whose harmony falters when the notes get too high or the lyrics too complex.

"We don't make any claims to be singers," she says. There is no pressure to perform like a professional, and the rustiness only heightens the Grannies' effect.

Fielder adds, "We get better as we go along sometimes."

The women's motivations seem to rise from deep maternal instincts and compassion. Their politics focus on protecting and guiding the world to make it safe for children and all living things.

After the rehearsal, Kinoshita takes the time to tell the group about a nephew who volunteered to go to Afghanistan with the Canadian military. He liked war-based video games and wanted to try the real thing, but now fears a second deployment after seeing his best friend die in combat.

"The video game is not the same. The fear [his parents] had of their son being out there in a war is just unimaginable," she says, adding that her nephew's parents split up in part because of that anxiety. One Granny saw the destructive effect of war on families as ironic, given the Bush administration's rhetoric about family values.

"I'm not anti-soldier. I'm anti-war. Soldiers can also serve in the National Guard and protect our country in a natural disaster," says Kinoshita.

Fiedler told the Grannies about the U.S. military's hesitancy in buying armor for its soldiers that it eagerly bought for visiting dignitaries.

"They need to be brought home. That's the best armor," says Joan Bazar, who chairs the San Jose WILPF chapter. Many have warned that chaos will erupt in Iraq if U.S. troops are withdrawn, but she points out the occupation has not improved conditions in Iraq so far.

"No one in the whole world can tell you exactly what will happen. You've got to listen to the Iraqis. The only way they can begin to work out making a stable society is for the United States to move out."

Bazar says the United States is pressuring the Iraqi parliament to open up the country to full ownership of its oil resources by private oil companies. This would be unusual in the Middle East, where governments generally control their oil resources and their profits. Bazar sees this as evidence that U.S. involvement cannot help Iraq, only hurt it.

The Grannies wear thrift-store dresses and aprons, don wild hats and carry banners and signs. They schedule their street theater and singing gigs where they know they will be seen, drumming pots and pans and blowing whistles with some songs.

"We represent a very small opposition group. I think you gotta be loud and gotta be different to make a point," says Kinoshita. For the Grannies, song is the answer.

"It's a way to get the message across in a unique way. Most of our lyrics are pretty clever, I think."

Granny gaggles share songs through songbooks and the Internet, often creating their own or adapting existing ones to suit their particular protests or tastes.

Seeing Kinoshita in action with the Grannies is to see the end of a long evolution of activism. She got her first taste of protest as a student in 1964 at the University of California-Berkeley.

"I went there at the height of the student revolution. I said, 'What's going on here? I'm just trying to get to my class.' I was pretty apolitical, but then they started to send in the National Guard to quell the students and it created even worse problems."

Kinoshita marched several years later with her infant son, Jim, and other parents to protest the use of the National Guard--the first time she had ever protested anything. She did not participate in other protests and has never been arrested.

"It's hard to arrest a granny, especially real grannies," she says. She considers herself a relatively conservative protester.

Her 13-year career at the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center's medical library, part of that time as director, influenced her attitudes. Operated by Santa Clara County, the SCVMC treats people who cannot afford medical services or do not have insurance.

"My career at the county hospital made me more of a public interest-type person. Health care is a huge issue," she says, rattling off an explanation of the flaws and loopholes that make Medicare Part D a bad deal for retired people.

"She's our instigator," says Fiedler, a San Jose resident who serves as membership chair and treasurer of the San Jose WILPF chapter. The league was founded in 1915, in the midst of World War I, at a gathering in The Hague, Netherlands. The organizers were prominent in the international women's suffrage movement.

The San Jose gaggle has used WILPF as a base for contacts and recruits and the groups' membership overlaps considerably.

"It was easy for her to get support and start something sort of under the umbrella of WILPF," says Fiedler, a former psychology teacher at the University of Minnesota. She started a pioneering class there about women's identity in the early 1970s.

Not every Granny is actually a grandmother, but Kinoshita happens to be a proud one.

"She got inspired by the idea of the Grannies, especially because she had just become a grandmother herself," says Bazar, who is taking classes at De Anza College to rework her 15-minute documentary Destination Havana about a group supplying medical technology to support doctors in Cuba.

"I don't push my politics on my relatives," says Kinoshita. But apparently she doesn't need to.

"Her husband Kim is absolutely amazing. He supports the Grannies almost as much as Shirley. He goes to most of the gigs. He takes wonderful photos and he's been very supportive," says Fiedler. Kim, who is Japanese-Canadian, is a fuel cell scientist.

Kinoshita's daughter Sally, 35, and son-in-law, Ted Lewis, chose careers with tinges of activism. Her daughter is an attorney for the Immigrant Legal Resource Center and Lewis is the human rights and Mexico programs director for the San Francisco-based nonprofit Global Exchange.

Kinoshita frequently takes care of her granddaughter Kira, or Ziggy as the family calls her. And wherever PoPo goes, as Ziggy calls her, Ziggy is sure to go. Even to counter-protest the anti-illegal immigrant group the Minuteman Project.