Stone Cupid Real

Here is the flashpoint for the resurgence of an anti-war movement. Thank you, Cindy. You are very brave.
Camp Casey updates and videos 24/7 on Truthout.org
"I have a broken heart. And I shouldn't have a broken heart."--Cindy Sheehan to George W. Bush
TODAY (August 17th) IN THE NEW YORK TIMES... Doesn't it seem with all of W's neighbor's complaining, he could just do the neighborly thing and TALK TO CINDY??? No, because he will never be able to look her in the eye.
Here is her letter from California, TODAY, Saturday, August 20th. She's with her mom, who's had a stroke.

This image is not Cindy Sheehan, This is another protester at Camp Casey in Crawford, picking up the pieces from Monday night's attack on Arlington West... And here's a letter up on Truthout TODAY, Saturday, August 20, from a retired Sergeant who lost two soldiers in Iraq to the Texan who mowed those crosses down...
You Mowed Down His Cross
By Perry Jefferies, First Sergeant, USA (retired)
t r u t h o u t | Letter

Thursday 18 August 2005

Mr. Northern:

I am a Veteran of the Iraq war, having served with the 4th Infantry Division on the initial invasion with Force Package One.

While I was in Iraq, a very good friend of mine, Christopher Cutchall, was killed in an un-armored HMMWV outside of Baghdad. He was a cavalry scout serving with the 3d ID. Once he had declined the award of a medal because Soldiers assigned to him did not receive similar awards that he had recommended. He left two sons and a wonderful wife. On Monday night, August 16, you ran down the memorial cross erected for him by Arlington West.

One of my Soldiers in Iraq was Roger Turner. We gave him a hard time because he always wore all of his protective equipment, including three pairs of glasses or goggles. He did this because he wanted to make sure that he returned home to his family. He rode a bicycle to work every day to make sure that he was able to save enough money on his Army salary to send his son to college. At Camp Anaconda, where the squadron briefly stayed, a rocket landed inside a tent, sending a piece of debris or fragment into him and killed him. On Monday night, August 16, you ran down the memorial cross erected for him by Arlington West.

One of my Soldiers was Henry Bacon. He was one of the finest men I ever met. He was in perfect shape for a man over forty, working hard at night. He told me that he did that because he didn't have much money to buy nice things for his wife, who he loved so much, so he had to be in good shape for her. He was like a father to many young men in his section of maintenance mechanics. They fixed our vehicles with almost no support and fabricated parts and made repairs that kept our squadron rolling on the longest, fastest armor advance ever made under fire. He was so very proud of his son-in-law that married the beautiful daughter so well raised by Henry. His son-in-law was a helicopter pilot with the 1st Cavalry Division, who died last year. Henry stopped to rescue a vehicle belonging to another unit on what was to be his last day in Iraq. He could have kept rolling - he was headed to Kuwait after a year's tour. But he stopped. He could have sent others to do the work, but he was on the ground, leading by example, when he was killed. On Monday night, August 16, you took it upon yourself to go out in the country, where a peaceful group was exercising their constitutional rights, and harming no one, and you ran down the memorial cross erected for Henry and for his son-in-law by Arlington West.

Mr. Northern - I know little about Cindy Sheehan except that she is a grieving mother, a gentle soul, and wants to bring harm to no one. I know little about you except that you found your way to Crawford on Monday night in August with chains and a pipe attached to your truck for the sole purpose of dishonoring a memorial erected for my friends and lost Soldiers and hundreds of others that served this nation when they were called. I find it disheartening that good men like these have died so that people like you can threaten a mother who lost a child with your actions. I hope that you are ashamed of yourself.

Perry Jefferies, First Sergeant, USA (retired)

See also another entry about Cindy and her son on this blog, thanks to Will Pitt,
here:
The subject of PTSD is very compelling to me in this war, and in these times. That day in March I had searched PTSD and gotten a few hits. I did another search today on truthout google for PTSD, and got 55 hits.
By the way, the title of that entry was "These Boys Are in Pain". And I wrote a song for my new album called "Boy in Pain", and it began because a friend of my son was struggling. March 20th, I found just now, held
THIS ARTICLE in the Chicago Tribune, reprinted in Truthout, about FEMALE SOLDIERS coming home with TWICE the levels of PTSD. Girls in Pain, too. And it's hard to get sympathy (and treatment) when you wear your pain on the inside...

I found all this great stuff at my daily digest here at truthout.org


Making the Most of Mother's Day
This great piece by Rebecca Ephraim from Alternet includes great reminders about a stellar daughter, Marla Ruzicka, and why Mother's Day (for Peace) was created by Julia Ward Howe in the 1870's after our own Civil War:

Making the Most of Mother's Day
By Rebecca Ephraim AlterNet Saturday 07 May 2005.

This Mother's Day, why not follow in the tradition that Julia Ward Howe set and Marla Ruzicka exemplified.
I grudgingly admit that the big things I wanted when I was a young adult were fame and fortune.
Yes, I can rationalize that I wasn't alone in my youthful lust for more, more, more for me, me, me.
But then there's the audacious northern Californian, Marla Ruzicka, whose stirring death in Iraq last month,
at age 28, was an elegant reminder of how stuck we can be in our boundless self-interests.

It's as if her bigger-than-life role as a long-time advocate for the victims of war was a giant finger poking
at the tightly woven cocoon many of us have spun (consciously or not) that insulates us from acknowledging the ravages of armed struggle on the lives of ordinary people in other lands. Yes, she did the heavy lifting for a lot of us.

Ruzicka, by dint of personality and pluck, sought out politicians (for aid money), U.S. soldiers (for clearing
landmines) and the media (to cover the plight of civilian Iraqis) so she could assist displaced families and orphaned children who were either bombed by mistake or simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Ironically, this woman who had made helping victims of war her life's work was "collateral damage" herself when a car bomb meant for another target, killed her and two others on April 16. She was on her way to help an Iraqi child. I recall I was on my way to the mall.

It was a stunning realization that this smart and pretty blonde -- 20 years my junior -- had done more at her age, as Vermont's U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy put it, "than most people do in a lifetime."

Yes, Marla Ruzicka was a daughter any mom could be proud of. "She cared about people and gave people her love and help," her own mother, Nancy, was quoted as saying following her daughter's death. "I'll remember the love she spread around the world and the good ambassador that she was for her country."

In one sense -- and not as tacky as it sounds -- Marla Ruzicka's death comes just in time for Mother's Day. Her acts of compassion in war-torn countries renew the importance that Julia Ward Howe gave to the act of honoring mothers in the late 1800's. You could say Mother's Day was her brainchild; but flowers and chocolates didn't figure in.

Julia Ward Howe is probably best known for writing the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Yet, like Marla Ruzicka, Howe witnessed first-hand the carnage and suffering of war -- for her, the Civil War, taking place on our own shores. She was shocked by the staggering deaths, injuries and disease among the soldiers, the devastating toll it took upon the widows and orphans she worked with and the ensuing economic crises that followed the war.

It was from this seminal experience that in 1870, Howe composed a Mother's Day Proclamation calling on women to
rise up and "solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace. Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God."

This Mother's Day, why not follow in the tradition that Julia Ward Howe set and Marla Ruzicka exemplified. Both embraced the great human family, drawing no distinctions between "them" and "us." Let's honor the valued women in our lives by making peace a priority, whether it's making peace at home or a half a world away. Even better, as you sit with your family this Mother's Day, read Howe's original Proclamation aloud knowing that we all can't soar with eagles -- but we can carve the turkey and aspire to doing a little more to make the world a better place.

Did you get what you wanted on Mother's Day?
Wow. These women are up to something: www.wand.org
This one came into view after Mother's Day, but it sure fits the bill...

A Mothers' War

By Cynthia Gorney

The New York Times

Sunday 29 May 2005

    Go to Original

They were talking about military burial benefits as the waitress took the salad plates away, and one of them had come up with something perversely humorous even on this subject, so they had been laughing. Now there was a brief, comfortable silence. They had one of the back rooms at Boone Tavern in downtown Columbia, Mo., where they usually go. It was a Friday night in February, and because one woman had other plans, there were only five of them, which made the big, round table seem too large. Instead of spacing themselves around it, they had taken seats along one side, closer to one another.
    Patricia said, "I had a doorbell moment this week."  Tracy Della Vecchia looked up quickly and watched Patricia's face. Tracy's son had gone to high school with Patricia's son, so Tracy and Patricia knew of each other during the years when all the teenagers would hole up drinking beer in the barn on Tracy's property. But now their sons were 22 and in the same Marine unit in Iraq, and Tracy knows things about Patricia that she has never known about another person before. Tracy knows that clipped to Patricia's refrigerator is a list of things to remember in case the telephone rings in the middle of the night and it's Patricia's son calling from a camp somewhere just to talk. Tracy knows that the grandfather clock in Patricia's house chimes nine times when the other clocks say it's noon because the grandfather clock is set to Baghdad time. Tracy knows that Patricia has figured out how to tell if someone is in her driveway by squinting at the reflection off a certain glass-covered picture in the dining room, so that if it should ever be two men in uniform, Patricia will know they have arrived before they start ringing the bell and before she is obliged to look directly at them and hear what they have come to say.  "It was last night," said Patricia, who asked that her last name not be used. "Around 8 p.m. I was home by myself. I was not expecting the doorbell." Patricia said she finally saw that it was an older gentleman, alone. "Probably canvassing for leukemia or something," she said. She said she never did open the door for him, and the other women said, no, of course not, and Tracy told the story about the blue car at dawn. She was telling it for my benefit; the others nodded as she spoke, like church women hearing a familiar passage of
Scripture. "This was Derrick's first deployment, 2003, right after the war
started," Tracy said. "I was a basket case. Five-thirty in the morning, I'm not sleeping anyway, I go downstairs and make coffee. You've seen my house -- nobody ever comes down my driveway. But a car comes down my driveway. A Lincoln Town Car." "Crown Victoria," Sharon Curry said. "Sorry," Tracy said. "A dark blue Crown Vic. Thank you, Sharon. And it's got these little antennas. And I'm sure someone's coming to tell me my son has died. I'm sure of it. And I literally fall down on my knees. I'm saying to myself, You've got to answer the door, you've got to answer the door. I'm yelling for my husband, but nothing's coming out of my mouth. I'm crawling toward the door. The car turns around the driveway circle. It stops for a minute. I think: O.K.
He's going to get out. He's going to come tell me now. And -- he drives away. I come busting out the door. 'Wait! Wait!' But he didn't. So I call 911: 'There's somebody at my door! My son's in Iraq!' Turns out it's the fire district. There was smoke coming from someplace. They were going up and down driveways trying to find out where it was from."

Tracy has a wide, beautiful face, with pale skin and thick black hair that curls down her back, and her expression was complicated, at once anguished and amused, in a way I was beginning to recognize. She lives and works on 15 acres outside town in a two-story house, where she runs a Web site called marineparents.com, which she built after she understood that her 19-year-old son, who enlisted two years earlier in the Marines, was going to be sent to war. The Web site has sprouted message boards, chat rooms and multiple layers of explanatory information, turning it into a national gathering place for adults whose sole connection is their role as parents of marines. Tracy tries to devote part of each day to her Web-design business, but most of her waking hours are now spent attending to marineparents.com, hunched in a silent office before a computer in which pride and grief and bewilderment and rage seem to be crashing around all the time, so that sometimes Tracy just pushes back from the desk and walks outside to smoke a cigarette and look at her pond. She signs her e-mail messages "semper fi." She is 43 and once thought she would become a hippie. When her son was small and received toy guns as presents, she threw them into the trash.
    That son, Derrick Jensen, has spent three birthdays in a row deployed in Iraq. There are about 140,000 American troops stationed in Iraq; 23,000 of them are marines. As this article appears, Corporal Jensen should be somewhere near Falluja. He is an infantry radio operator, which sounded to Tracy like a good, safe job until she found out that radio operators carry big antennas, which make them easier targets. She let me stay at her house for a while this winter partly because I am a reporter and happen to have a 22-year-old son who is not in the military. Tracy thought people like me might want to know something about what it's like to live all the time with that kind of information about your child, to go to sleep knowing it and wake up knowing it and drive around town knowing it, which makes it possible to be standing in the Wal-Mart dog-food aisle on
an ordinary afternoon and without reason or warning be knocked breathless again by the sudden imagining of sniper fire or an explosion beneath a Humvee. Still. Derrick has been shipped home twice since President Bush delivered his May 2003 speech in front of the "Mission Accomplished" banner on the deck of an aircraft carrier, and shipped back twice. He has had one occasion of near death that Tracy knows about in some detail; there are others, she assumes, that Derrick has so far kept to himself. "During the first deployment," Tracy said to me
once as we were sitting in her car, a lipstick-red PT Cruiser with a yellow "Keep My Son Safe" ribbon magnet on the back, "the only emotion I could imagine him having was fear." Tracy's closest friends in the world right now are other parents whose sons and daughters have served in Iraq or are serving there now.
Some of these parents think the war is righteous, some think it was wrongheaded from the outset and some, like Tracy, have made fierce internal bargains with themselves about what they will and will not think about as long as their children and their children's comrades remain in uniform and in harm's way.

The women Tracy meets every week for dinner, each of whom has a son in the Marines or the Army, have a "no politics" rule around their table; this was one of two things I remember Tracy telling me the first time she took me to a gathering of the mothers. The other thing was that draped over a banister in Tracy's house was an unwashed T-shirt Derrick had dropped during his last visit home. I thought Tracy was apologizing for her housekeeping, which I had already seen was much better than mine, but she cleared her throat and said that what I needed to understand was that she hadn't washed the T-shirt because if the Marine Corps has to send you your deceased child's personal effects, it launders the clothing first. "That means there's no smell," Tracy said. She let this hover between us for a minute. "I've heard from so many parents who were crushed when they opened that bag, because they had thought they'd be able to smell their son," Tracy said.
    
One morning in February, Tracy got up at 4:30, made coffee, filled a commuter mug and climbed into her car with a suitcase to drive east to St. Louis. The highway was nearly deserted, an occasional McDonald's or Super 8 Motel sign looming in the darkness. Tracy hadn't slept well; she had been brooding for days about what she was on her way to do. "Luigi keeps telling me, 'Breathe,"' she said. Luigi is Tracy's husband. He is Italian and moved to Missouri from Naples four years ago, after he and Tracy met while teamed up on a Web-design project. Tracy divorced Derrick's father a couple of years before that and had been raising Derrick and his younger sister by herself, on the Columbia property, when Derrick marked his 17th birthday by signing up for the Marines.
    He left for boot camp in the summer of 2001, two months after his high-school graduation....Read the rest HERE

Link to Code Pink's Mother's Day
Proclamation for Peace

codepink.org

And finally,
a magnificent treatise on HOW TO BE AN ACTIVIST MOM and why it is so important NOW,
by Dolores Huerta, co-founder with Cesar Chavez of the United Farm Workers. She is the mother of 11 children.

Nicholas Kristof in the NY Times talks about fighting fire with fire. If we are going to get into it with these self-righteous wing nut Christians, we have to get our ammo together. There ARE good things about what Christ had to say as a teacher, so that's why they always throw that back in the liberals' / progressives' faces, managing to hobble and demonize us no matter or spiritual path. Some good reference material for which I plan to provide linkage is Thich Nhat Hanh's Living Buddha Living Christ (also available on audio tape read by Ben Kingsley.) And The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ, as well as all sorts of literature that the right wingnuts would ban that they've never read...JC

Even aside from his arguments that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and that St. Paul was a self-hating gay, the new book by a former Episcopal bishop of Newark is explosive.
John Shelby Spong, the former bishop, tosses a hand grenade into the cultural wars with "The Sins of Scripture," which examines why the Bible - for all its message of love and charity - has often been used through history to oppose democracy and women's rights, to justify slavery and even mass murder.
It's a provocative question, and Bishop Spong approaches it with gusto. His mission, he says, is "to force the Christian Church to face its own terrifying history that so often has been justified by quotations from 'the Scriptures.' "
This book is long overdue, because one of the biggest mistakes liberals have made has been to forfeit battles in which faith plays a crucial role. Religion has always been a central current of American life, and it is becoming more important in politics because of the new Great Awakening unfolding across the United States.
Yet liberals have tended to stay apart from the fray rather than engaging in it. In fact, when conservatives quote from the Bible to make moral points, they tend to quote very selectively. After all, while Leviticus bans gay sex, it also forbids touching anything made of pigskin (is playing football banned?) - and some biblical passages seem not so much morally uplifting as genocidal.
"Can we really worship the God found in the Bible who sent the angel of death across the land of Egypt to murder the firstborn males in every Egyptian household?" Bishop Spong asks. Or what about 1 Samuel 15, in which God is quoted as issuing orders to wipe out all the Amalekites: "Kill both man and woman, child and infant." Hmmm. Tough love, or war crimes? As for the New Testament, Revelation 19:17 has an angel handing out invitations to a divine dinner of "the flesh of all people."
Bishop Spong, who has also taught at Harvard Divinity School, argues that while Christianity historically tried to block advances by women, Jesus himself treated women with unusual dignity and was probably married to Mary Magdalene.
Christianity may have become unfriendly to women's rights partly because, in its early years, it absorbed an antipathy for sexuality from the Neoplatonists. That led to an emphasis on the perpetual virginity of Mary, with some early Christian thinkers even trying to preserve the Virgin Mary's honor by raising the possibility that Jesus had been born through her ear.
The squeamishness about sexuality led the church into such absurdities as a debate about "prelapsarian sex": the question of whether Adam and Eve might have slept together in the Garden of Eden, at least if they had stayed longer. St. Augustine's dour answer was: Maybe, but they wouldn't have enjoyed it. In modern times, this same discomfort with sex has led some conservative Christians to a hatred of gays and a hostility toward condoms, even to fight AIDS.
Bishop Spong particularly denounces preachers who selectively quote Scripture against homosexuality. He also cites various textual reasons for concluding (not very persuasively) that St. Paul was "a frightened gay man condemning other gay people so that he can keep his own homosexuality inside the rigid discipline of his faith."
The bishop also tries to cast doubt on the idea that Judas betrayed Jesus. He notes that the earliest New Testament writings, of Paul and the source known as Q, don't mention a betrayal by Judas. Bishop Spong contends that after the destruction of Jewish Jerusalem in A.D. 70, early Christians curried favor with Roman gentiles by blaming the Crucifixion on Jewish authorities - nurturing two millennia of anti-Semitism that bigots insisted was biblically sanctioned.
Some of the bishop's ideas strike me as more provocative than persuasive, but at least he's engaged in the debate. When liberals take on conservative Christians, it tends to be with insults - by deriding them as jihadists and fleeing the field. That's a mistake. It's entirely possible to honor Christian conservatives for their first-rate humanitarian work treating the sick in Africa or fighting sex trafficking in Asia, and still do battle with them over issues like gay rights.
Liberals can and should confront Bible-thumping preachers on their own terms, for the scriptural emphasis on justice and compassion gives the left plenty of ammunition. After all, the Bible depicts Jesus as healing lepers, not slashing Medicaid.

E-mail: nicholas@nytimes.com


Copyright 2005
The New York Times Company

www.CourageToResist.org

Call for a National Day of Action for GI Resisters on May 10, 2005

May 2, 2005

We urge you to join us in a "National Day of Action for GI Resisters" on Tuesday May 10, 2005. This is the day before the US military is planning to bring sailor Pablo Paredes and soldier Kevin Benderman before military court martial tribunals for their opposition to the Iraq War. They face forfeiture of pay and benefits, and military jail time.

On December 6, 2004, Navy Petty Officer Pablo Paredes refused to board his ship as it left the San Diego Naval Station in support of the Iraq War and occupation. At the time of his refusal, Pablo said he hoped his protest might inspire other GI's to refuse to take part in the war.

On January 5, 2005, Army Sgt Kevin Benderman refused to deploy for a second tour of duty in Iraq with the Army's Third Infantry Division. At the same time seventeen other soldiers from his unit went AWOL, two tried to kill themselves and one had a relative shoot him in the leg to avoid deploying.

Both men applied for discharge from the US military as conscientious objectors. The military has wrongly rejected both claims.

It's time for us to escalate public pressure and action in support of Pablo, Kevin and the thousands of other courageous men and women who have followed their conscience to uphold international law and to take a principled stand against the unjust, illegal war and occupation of Iraq. It's time we had their backs.

Objection and resistance by military servicepersons is a healthy and important assertion of Democracy in a country where the decisions to invade Iraq, to maintain an occupation, and engage in widespread human right violations and torture were made undemocratically in violation of international law and based on continuing lies and disinformation.

Please join us by organizing a public demonstration, vigil or rally of support on May 10. Every action, no matter how large or small is important.

Also,

• Send letters of support and donations to cover legal fees to Pablo and Kevin via their websites listed below.

• Come to San Diego, California (Pablo) or Fort Stewart, Georgia (Kevin) to show your support during their trials.

• Write letters to the editor, and help educate your organization, church, union, school, co-workers and community.

Resisting illegal occupation and war is not a crime! The right to conscientious objection is being systematically violated by the military. Those objectors who are publicly asserting their rights are being singled out for punishment. We demand that military personnel retain their right to follow their conscience, publicly dissent and that their basic democratic rights be respected.

A better world is possible.

More info about Pablo Paredes:
www.SwiftSmartVeterans.com
More info about Kevin Benderman:
www.BendermanDefense.org

Left: Pablo Paredes refuses to ship out in support of the Iraq War at the San Deigo Naval Station pier. Right: Monica and Kevin Benderman outside of Fort Stewart, Georgia.

Initial signatures

Monica Benderman - spouse of Kevin Benderman

Victor Paredes - brother of Pablo Paredes

Aimee Allison - Gulf War CO; Oakland City Council Candidate

Medea Benjamin - CodePink, Co-Founder; Global Exchange, Founding Director

Andrea Buffa - CodePink; Global Exchange, Peace Campaign Coordinator

Leslie Cagan - United for Peace and Justice, Nat'l Coordinator

Todd Chretien - Int'l Socialist Organization

Gerry Condon - Right To Resist / Project Safe Haven (Canada), Director

Stephen Funk - former Marine and first public Iraq War resister

Susan Galleymore - MotherSpeak; military mother; Courage to Resist

Stan Goff - Bring Them Home Now!, Coor Cmte; retired Special Forces Master Sgt; military father

Lynn Gonzalez - San Diego Military Counseling Project

Jack Heyman - Int'l Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 10, Exec Board

George Johnson - Veterans for Peace, Nat'l Exec Board

Ragina Johnson - College Not Combat

Naomi Klein - activist; writer

National Youth Student Peace Coaltion

Sharon Lee Kufeldt - Veterans for Peace, Nat'l Exec Board VP

Barbara Lubin - Middle East Children's Alliance, Director; ANSWER, Nat'l Steering Cmte

Efia Nwangaza - Afrikan Am Institute for Policy Studies; Not in Our Name Nat'l Steering Cmte

Siri Margerin - United for Peace and Justice, Bay Area Steering Cmte; Iraq Peace Panel Project

Steve Morse - GI Rights Program Coor, Central Cmte for Conscientious Objectors

Jeff Paterson - Not in Our Name; former Marine and 1991 Gulf War resister

David Solnit - People Powered Strategy Project; Courage to Resist

Vida Shahamat and Brain Barry - South Bay Mobilization Against the War

Aryeh Shell - Courage to Resist; Popular Education and Action CollectivE

Samina Faheem Sundas - American Muslim Voice

School of the Americas Watch, staff members

Fernando Suarez del Solar - Gold Star Families for Peace, father of Marine Jesus Suarez killed in Iraq

Fr. Louie Vitale, O.F.M., St Boniface Church; Korea War veteran

Liat Weingart - Jewish Voice for Peace, Co-Director

Bob Wing - War Times; United for Peace and Justice, Nat'l Steering Cmte

Howard Zinn - historian; author

(organizations listed for identification purposes only)

Organizational endorsers include

Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors

College Not Combat

Courage to Resist

MotherSpeak

National Youth Student Peace Coaltion

Not in Our Name

Jewish Voice for Peace

National Leaflet (PDF)

San Diego, California
BETTER LINKS FOR ALL THESE EVENTS WILL BE ON THE COURAGE TO RESIST.COM SITE. CLICK THE BIG BLUE LINK AT THE BOTTOM OF TODAY'S ENTRY! or download the pdf and write in the info for your hood and post. Tuesday, May 10 ~ 7 PM
"Vocies of Resistance" featuring Pablo Paredes, Adian Delgado, and Camilo Mejia at the Bayview Babtist Church, 6134 Benson Ave (at 61st St, between Imperial Ave and Skyline Dr)
Contact: solidaritywithpablo@yahoo.com
Event info: graphic

New York City, New York
Tuesday, May 10 ~ Evening
Details coming soon.

Orlando, Florida
Tuesday, May 10 ~ 11 AM-1 PM
Military Recruiting Center, Herndon Shopping Plaza at Colonial and Maguire Streets
Contact: orlando@notinourname.net

San Francisco, California
Tuesday, May 10 ~ 12 Noon
War Memorial Veterans Building
401 Van Ness (across from City Hall, near Civic Center BART)
Contact: courage@riseup.net
Event info: leaflet (PDF)
Also, a car caravan is being organized to leave from the protest to travel directly to San Diego for Pablo's court martial May 11-13. Contact the email above for more info.

Ventura, California
Tuesday, May 10 ~ 12 Noon
Ventura Government Center, corner of Victoria and Telephone
Contact: nionvtc@riseup.net

Please send us a note letting us know of what you have planned: courage@riseup.net

 

COURAGE TO RESIST is a new group of concerned community members, veterans and military families organizing support for military objectors to illegal war and occupation and the underlying policies of empire. We have adopted a people power strategy to weaken the pillars that support the Iraq war and occupation by supporting GI resistance, which together with counter-recruitment and draft resistance work can remove the supply of obedient troops.

www.CourageToResist.org

I awoke today depressed. Jesus didn't die and rise for MY sins. I haven't believed that since I left Iowa 30 years ago. I study zen, and I practice compassion and service, but living in a beautiful valley full of smug SUV-driving homeowners who, despite recent cuts in arts education, are finding it in their pocketbooks to fund it anyway, often gets me feeling guilty... Like, "don't get too complacent, because there's always some issue to distract us from the fact that the world's a mess because WE'VE BEEN TAKEN OVER A CULT." Click on this site: Mission NOT Accomplished and you may feel more relaxed, too.

Save the Arctic Wildlife Refuge!

Now, I'm a student of zen, and in the aftermath of this election I have to think of the old zen saying,"Even the painted cakes are real" but there is action, non-action, and NON-VIOLENT action. This is a sermon at election time from Father John Dear, an activist Jesuit priest...

November 6, 2004

"Getting Into Trouble for Peace and Justice:
The Next Step on the Path of Discipleship to the Nonviolent Jesus"
Milwaukee, Wisconsin

A Talk by John Dear at the Call to Action Conference, November 6, 2004.

Click here or here to order tapes or cds of this talk or Phone 1-800-776-5454,

audiotapes of the talk are item# CTA/04071/411
cd disks of the talk are item # CTA/04071/cd411

Good morning and thank you all for all you do for peace and justice and the church and Jesus. Last month, I spoke at a Baptist College in Pennsylvania to 2,500 college students about the Beatitudes, and I said to them, “Now, let me get this straight: Jesus says, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ which means he does not bless the warmakers, which means we are cursed if we make war, which means that to follow Jesus we have to be
about making peace, which means we cannot support this awful evil war on Iraq.”

With that, the place exploded and 500 people stormed out and the rest started chanting “Bush, Bush, Bush.” That was the end of my talk. So I’m not at all surprised about the recent election. Like you, I’m deeply concerned about the church, the country and the world.

When I was invited to speak, I didn’t know where to begin or what I might offer, but I thought I could speak about the one thing I’m good at: getting into trouble for peace and justice. So I want to do three things 1) tell you some stories; 2) look at the Gospel, and 3) offer some suggestions about the next step on the path of discipleship to the nonviolent Jesus.

I’m 45, and have been at this for 25 years now, and my whole life experience in the church, in the Jesuits, in America is about causing trouble, getting into trouble for Jesus. When I was an altar boy and lector, after many years, we got a new pastor and he called a meeting of all the servers in the parish, but I couldn’t make it that afternoon, so a few days later, I received a letter in the mail which said, “Dear John, I regret to inform you. You’re services are no longer needed by the church.”

I was 13 when I was first fired by the church. When I entered the Jesuits in the early 1980s, I was told that if I participated in a civil disobedience demonstration, I would be dismissed. After 2 years of discussions, I was arrested at the Pentagon for a peace protest and the novice master told me I was dismissed, but then later the provincial told me I could stay, on the one condition that I would never tell anyone about this episode for the rest of my life. I felt like Thomas Merton, getting silenced for peacemaking, so I thought I must be doing something right.

When I went to Fordham for graduate studies in philosophy in the mid-80s, during Reagan’s contra war, we found out that the CIA would be holding a recruiting session. So we organized 100 students to protest the event, and 9 of them sat in at the Dean’s office, and the CIA recruiter left and said the CIA would never return to Fordham again! We were thrilled because we saw the power of organized nonviolence at work. But the provincial called and told me that the Jesuit provincials had discussed this crisis at their meeting, and instead of sending me to Chile as I had hoped, he said they were sending me “to a place that had never heard of peace or justice: to teach sophomore religion in Scranton, Pennsylvania.”

After September 11th , 2001, I worked in New York as a chaplain and as a Red Cross coordinator of chaplains at the main Family Assistance Center, and at the same time, I was helping to organize protests against the U.S. war on Afghanistan, and after the bishops voted to support the bombing of Afghanistan, I wrote that this too was a scandal, that supporting the murder of children in Afghanistan was child abuse. The next thing you know, I got called in by both the New York and Maryland provincials and ordered to leave New York. I had 3 months to go anywhere, or they would send me back to teaching sophomore religion, this time in Philadelphia.

So two and a half years ago, I moved to New Mexico, the poorest state in the country, number one in military spending and number one in nuclear weapons, and I’ve been serving poor parishes and starting Pax Christi groups and calling for the closing of the nuclear weapons labs at Los Alamos. Last year I planned a peace vigil on August 6th, the anniversary of Hiroshima, at Los Alamos, but the archbishop called me in and told me I was forbidden to pray publicly for peace, even though the Pope was blasting the U.S. government for bombing Iraq. Then, one of my missions, a small, wealthy church in the mountains near a ski resort, comprised of a handful of devout, retired, military, Republican families from Texas, asked the Archbishop to kick me out because of my anti-war homilies. When I stood outside to shake their hands at the end of Mass, many of them would denounce me, so I easily kicked out[sic}.

Instead of bringing peace as I hoped, I brought only division, but in a strange way I felt consoled because this is what happened to Jesus. Then, last November, the local National Guard Unit was ordered to go to Iraq, and that night, the commanders met with the local mayor in my desert town and decided this was their chance to get me and the next morning at 6 a.m., 75 soldiers from the 515 battalion suddenly appeared marching around the rectory and church where I lived, in a quiet high desert town, and after an hour, the shouting got much louder, so I looked out the window, and there they were all lined up, right at my front door, filling the street, shouting, “Kill, kill, kill!” which was actually the battalion slogan, “One bullet, one kill!” What do you do? I walked out into the street, right into their midst and said, “In the name of Jesus, I order you to quit the military, not to go to Iraq, not to kill anyone or be killed, and to start following the nonviolence of Jesus because God doesn’t bless war, God doesn’t support this war, God condemns our wars. So for the love of God, stop preparing for war and go home and live in peace. God bless you!” They stood there in silence for a moment, then broke out laughing and left.

The next week, they left for Baghdad where they are now. I’m so notorious now that I tell my friends that I don’t have to go to a demonstration ever again: from now on, the soldiers come to me! I tell you all of this not to whine or complain but to share with you my experience. And I am learning that this is the good stuff, this is where the blessings come. I am learning that if we’re going to follow Jesus, if we are going to seek God’s reign of peace and justice, if we’re going to try to implement the Sermon on the Mount, if we’re going to love our enemies when everyone else is cheering the killing of our enemies, we are going to get into trouble. This is our calling. If you practice nonviolence in a world of violence, you are going to get into trouble. If you call for peace in a culture of war, you are going to get into trouble. If you denounce the empire and its injustices and corporate greed and the nuclear arsenal, you are going to get into trouble. If you pursue the vision of a peacemaking church, you are going to get into trouble.

“I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves,” Jesus tells us. Imagine a pathetic, vulnerable, fragile little lamb surrounded by a group of starving wolves. What are they thinking? “Get the mint jelly, fellas, it’s lamb chops for dinner!” If we’re going to follow Jesus, we’re going to be devoured. It’s not going to be easy. It’s going to cost us. But for some reason, we think subconsciously that since we are Americans and Catholics, we can work for peace and justice, we can be active in the church, we can even try to end war and change the world and the church--without getting into trouble. We think that we can do these things without causing problems or upsetting people or getting kicked around like Jesus did, that we don’t need to take up the cross or suffer or risk our lives, that somehow or other, we won’t end up as he did, that we will make everything work out alright with no discomfort at all. And the moment we face opposition, we get upset, we complain, we give up and we walk away. We want everything to be easy. I’m here to tell you that if we want to follow Jesus, if we want to become his authentic church, if we want to put the Gospel into practice, if we want to help end war and disarm nuclear weapons and serve starving humanity, if we really want to change the church, we have got to expect that we will get into trouble.

We have to expect a difficult lifelong struggle because the status quo of injustice is not going to cave in easily. We have to risk the cross and resurrection, we have to enter the Paschal mystery, and it’s going to be messy and we’re not going to like it and everyone’s going to be upset with us and we will feel like failures. And when this happens, I submit, then we’re finally getting somewhere. Dorothy Day once said that we measure our discipleship to Jesus by how much trouble we are in. So my message is: Become holy troublemakers for peace and justice just like Jesus. I would like to look at one scene in the Gospel to see how Jesus acts. This is from the Gospel of Mark, chapter 3: Jesus entered the synagogue. There was a man there who had a withered hand. They watched him closely to see if he would cure him on the Sabbath so that they might accuse him. He said to the man with the withered hand, “Come up here before us.” Then he said to them, “Is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath rather than to do evil, to save life rather than to destroy it?” But they remained silent. Looking around at them with anger and grieved at their hardness of heart, he said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out and his hand was restored. The Pharisees went out and immediately took counsel with the Herodians against him to put him to death. -- Mark 3:1-6.

Let’s look at this day in the life of Jesus for a moment. First of all, Jesus is active, creative, provocative, dramatic, bold, and outrageous. He is always nonviolent; he is never passive. Everything he does is illegal and civilly disobedient. He’s a one person crime wave. This is the person we follow. He enters the religious sanctuary, faces the religious leaders, exposes the violence in their hearts, confronts their hostility, heals a poor person, and is so controversial that eventually the authorities kill him. As his followers, we too have to confront injustice with total disregard of the consequences. The religious officials could care less about the man with the withered hand. They certainly would not consider his withered hand an urgent need or a religious issue or a moral concern. They considered such activity to be illegal because it violated the cleanliness laws and the Sabbath. Anyone who violated the law was punished and excommunicated. They supported the empire and its wars and invoked God’s name to legitimize their violence.

But Jesus walks right in there and confronts their hostility head on. He calls the suffering man to come forward, to stand up publicly in the center of the sanctuary, and he forces everyone to deal with the suffering of the poor and marginalized. I have a new book out this week from Doubleday called “The Questions of Jesus” about the 307 questions which Jesus asks, and I hope you will all read it and give it to friends as Christmas gifts. It’s about how Jesus is not just the one with all the answers, but the one with all the questions, most of which are never answered. This question here is critically important: Is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath rather than to do evil, to save life rather than to destroy it?” The religious officials would have answered: it is illegal to do good; it is illegal to save life! So Jesus breaks the law and heals the man and as far as the religious officials are concerned, he is neither pious nor law-abiding nor holy. He is a troublemaking, law-breaking, disruptive, revolutionary fanatic, so they kill him. Jesus teaches that the purpose of the Sabbath and all laws should be to do good, to save life, to heal the sick, and to serve humanity. He is not primarily concerned with laws, rituals, traditions, religious observances or obligations. He cares first and foremost with doing good and saving life. He wants to heal people, show compassion, make us whole, and he will not stand by as systemic injustice oppresses the poor in God’s name. If Jesus is willing to risk his life on behalf of a man with a withered hand, imagine what he would do in our age of war and nuclear weapons and bombing Iraq! And if the religious officials say it is illegal to do good and to save life, they would also say it is legal to do evil and destroy life. Likewise today it is perfectly legal to bomb Iraq, starve the poor and build nuclear weapons, and we invoke God to bless these horrors. We turn our backs on the homeless, the hungry, and the ill.

As in Jesus’ time, it is legal to do evil and to destroy life. It is illegal to do good and to save life. So how would Jesus have us answer his question? He wants us to do good and save life, and break any law which legalizes evil and destroys life. He wants us to heal one another, disarm one another, and live in peace with one another. I think we live in an empire which is bringing war, starvation, poverty and death to the world, and that instead of fulfilling its vocation to resist the empire through Gospel nonviolence, the church has become actively involved in the empire and its wars.

This is our history, from the just war to the crusades to the countless bishops who supported Hitler and Marcos and DuValier and Somoza to the priests who bless nuclear weapons at Los Alamos and the bombing of children in Iraq. It’s blasphemous, idolatrous, and heretical, not just disobedience to the law of God, but the betrayal, denial and crucifixion of Jesus all over again. And through our silence, the church has developed a spirituality of war which says that violence saves us, might makes right, God blesses war, nuclear weapons are our true security, and the good news is not love of enemies but the elimination of enemies. The empire always tries to instruct the church on sin and morality, saying such and such personal behavior is immoral, and saying nothing about the killing of 100,000 Iraqis last year, as if that were perfectly moral. The empire needs the church to bless and support its wars, or at least to remain passive and silent. If we do that, we are no longer faithful disciples of the troublemaking Jesus. We become good Pharisees, powerful religious people who support the culture and its wars. We become a church of Pharisees.

All I’m trying to say today is, “Don’t become good Pharisees.” There is a greater history to be part of. We can still try to follow the nonviolent Jesus, and instead of becoming devout Pharisees, we can still choose to follow Jesus as holy troublemakers. Jesus was always in trouble--healing the wrong people, loving the wrong people, speaking the wrong truth, worshipping the wrong way, doing the wrong things. All the saints and martyrs and prophets and peacemakers were holy troublemakers--from Francis and Clare to Ignatius and Dorothy Day to Dr. King and Oscar Romero. Like them, we have to resist the empire, repent of the sin of war, practice Gospel nonviolence, and explain that war is not the will of God, war is never blessed by God, war is the ultimate mortal sin, war is demonic, anti-human, anti-life, anti-democracy, anti-God, anti-Christ; war is not the way to follow the nonviolent Jesus. From now on, we are people who put down our swords, forgive one another, love our enemies, and are as compassionate as God. So I want to offer 3 little suggestions for your next step on the path of discipleship to the nonviolent Jesus: First, Be Holy Troublemakers for Peace and Justice In this culture of war and violence, make trouble for peace and nonviolence. In this culture of injustice, make trouble for justice. In this culture of hatred, hostility and division, make trouble for all-inclusive, universal, unconditional love, for the reign of God.

In this culture of nuclear weapons and environmental destruction, make trouble for disarmament, for a world without weapons or war or starvation. There are a million things we can do. None of us can do everything, but all of us can do something. Last year, on Feb. 15th, over 12 million marched against war in 430 cities on every continent in the largest single day of protest in human history. The world is marching. I hope we can all be part of it. I am going to join the protest next week at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, and I hope you will all join me. (see www.soaw.org) Next August 6, 2005, marks the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. I hope we will all start organizing vigils, teach-ins, and demonstrations in your local community to call for nuclear disarmament. In New Mexico, we are planning a peace vigil at Los Alamos. Just do something publicly for justice and peace, and do it in a spirit of love and creative, active nonviolence. (see www.paxchristiusa.org) Second, Be Holy Troublemakers in the Church Stir up discussion about justice and peace within the church, only do so through the lessons of Gandhi and Dr. King. Practice satyagraha and nonviolence on the church to change the church. Don’t just sit back and be angry and mean and whine and complain. Love your priests and bishops; meet with them. Get to know them, talk to them, and win them over with love and truth to the wisdom of peace, justice and equality. I want to offer a specific suggestion to Call to Action. As I understand it, in the 1970s and 80s, CUF, Catholics United for the Faith, sent hundreds of thousands of letters to the Vatican demanding change, calling for conservative bishops and the end of the Second Vatican Council in practice. I think we need to start a similar letter writing campaign to the Vatican, to get one million loving, kind, respectful letters calling for change, for the complete rejection of the just war theory, for more work for justice and peace, and for the ordination of women and married priests. If the bishops in Rome received a million letters from American Catholics, they might sit up and take notice. I hope CTA will start such a campaign. Finally, Be Holy Troublemakers for Jesus There are many problems in the church, and many problems in the world, but there are no problems with Jesus. He remains wonderful, gentle, loving, inviting, and disarming, and he is busy at work transforming our world. My hope and prayer is that we can learn his story more and more, listen to his words, do what he says, become his friends, and get into trouble like him, that we can be nonviolent like him, compassionate like him, and dangerous like him. So I wrote a little litany for you:

In a world of hate and fear, be holy troublemakers of all-inclusive,
universal love.
In a world of merciless cruelty, be holy troublemakers of compassion and
mercy.
In a world of lies, be holy troublemakers of truth.
In a world of injustice, racism and sexism, be holy troublemakers of
justice and equality.
In a world of death, be holy troublemakers of life.
In a world of despair, be holy troublemakers of hope.
In a world of war, be holy troublemakers for peace.
In a world of violence, be holy troublemakers of Gospel nonviolence in the
name of the troublemaking, nonviolent Jesus. Thank you and God bless you.