War & Peace Quote by Tom Hayden

Hayden’s line is a dare to liberal conscience: if your “peace and justice” politics stops at the edge of respectable suffering, it’s not a movement, it’s a club. The key verb isn’t “help” but “expand.” He frames solidarity as a political technology, something that has to grow or it calcifies into moral comfort. And he names the group that many reformers would rather treat as disposable or purely criminal: gang members, the people easiest to exile from the story of innocence.

The subtext is a critique of selective empathy. Hayden is pushing back on the reflex that says the movement can stay pure by disowning messy, compromised lives. “Not run away” signals how predictable that reflex is: when violence, drugs, and public fear enter the frame, even progressive coalitions retreat into safer targets and tidier victims. He’s arguing that abandonment isn’t neutral; it actively feeds the cycles of policing, incarceration, and retaliatory violence that then justify further crackdowns.

Context matters: Hayden came out of the New Left and later worked inside electoral politics, watching idealism collide with the punitive turn in American governance. By the late 20th century, “gang member” had become a political shorthand for menace, used to sell tougher sentencing and militarized policing. Hayden’s intent is to puncture that shorthand without romanticizing it, insisting that justice can’t be built on scapegoats. If peace is the goal, the movement has to engage the people most entangled with street conflict, not just the people easiest to defend on a poster.