In a number of theology classes, we talked about the unity of all beings and things on the earth. We are all interconnected. As I have sat with this over the last few years, the more I have come to believe this (from a scientific, theological, and social perspective, etc.). Today our group – Witness Against Torture – did a Ghost Walk in the Senate Hart office building. A number of us walked in orange jumpsuits with names of prisoners who have been cleared for release on our backs. We each walked separately on a different floor and wing in a very prayerful and solemn way. We went to “lobby” those in the Senate to help remember these men who have been “cleared for release” and are ready to leave yet remain in Guantánamo.
We put the jumpsuits on once in the building and after about 20 minutes a police officer came running up to me (very out of breath) as I was walking at a Thich Nhat Hanh pace… very slowly and deliberately. He respectfully asked how I was doing and what I was doing here. Then he requested my ID, followed by a number of investigative questions. We weren’t doing anything illegal in our action, but they were checking on us. After I was allowed to continue walking, another person – from the capitol police – wanted to talk to me. As I told him that I was with Witness Against Torture, that I was not protesting or demonstrating, that I was lobbying to help follow the executive order to close Guantánamo and end torture, and that we were completely nonviolent, he responded: “Oh, Witness Against Torture. I know you guys. I’ve seen you for a number of years.” They let me (and our whole group) continue to walk.
Our good friend Kathy Kelly, who is also a contributor to this site, sent along a nice article a couple days ago – which ran on Common Dreams and several other sites – about the staggering human and financial cost of the many wars that the United States is currently engaged in. She also examines how our violence is only exacerbating the problems of terrorism and extremism, while the average Afghan continues to live in desperate need of humanitarian assistance. Kelly then explains the campaign that Voices for Creative Nonviolence has launched to address these concerns:
The U.S. Constitution states that Congress shall make no law to abridge the right of people to assemble peaceably for redress of grievance. We are deeply aggrieved by the folly of these wars. Our right to free speech is irrelevant if we don’t exercise it, and so we intend to raise the lament of those who bear the brunt of our wars but whose voices seldom reach U.S. government figures.
For two weeks this January, leading up to the date when President Obama is due to submit his budget for Fiscal Year 2011 to Congress, Voices for Creative Nonviolence and friends will gather in Washington D.C. for a “Peaceable Assembly Campaign” project. (www.peaceableassemblycampaign.org)
We’ll be meeting with elected representatives to raise questions about the folly and the crime of war, holding daily vigils at the White House, and engaging in acts of nonviolent civil disobedience to emphasize our refusal to cooperate with the war makers.
Please join us in this year-long campaign, whether in Washington D.C. this month, or participating locally where you live. Visit the Voices website, www.vcnv.org, to learn more about ways to become involved, both locally through this coming summer and in the Days of Resistance in Washington.
We’ll be there from January 19th through February 2nd.
More than 250 people held a candlelight vigil outside the U.S. Military Academy in West Point on Tuesday night to protest President Barack Obama's decision to escalate the 8-year-old war in Afghanistan.
Other protests against the escalation of war in Afghanistan were held in New York, Minneapolis, and many other cities across the country.
A peaceful Boston University counter-protest of more than 200 people faced six picketers Tuesday afternoon from the Westboro Baptist Church, who held signs with messages such as “The Jews killed Jesus,” “God hates fags” and “Thank God for AIDS,” outside the Hillel House.
An undocumented Mexican immigrant, who has been living in the United States for 20 years, recently began a hunger strike in front of the White House, calling for President Obama to pass comprehensive immigration reform by the end of the year, as he’d promised.
Finnair canceled more than 20 flights Wednesday as ground staff extended a walkout to protest outsourcing of cargo and baggage services and the transfer of hundreds of workers.
Daimler workers in Germany have walked out in protest at the company’s plans, announced on Wednesday, to assemble Mercedes C-Class models at its US plant in Alabama and shift German production from Sindelfingen to Bremen.
Striking workers at a local supplier forced Fiat to halt production at its Termini Imerese plant in Sicily for a second day Thursday, to protest against the company’s decision to stop making cars at the plant after 2011.
As the President mulls over how many additional troops to send to Afghanistan, in a recent article for Truthout, Jeff Leys wrote that the antiwar movement seems to have gone missing over these past several months. Apart from the action on October 5, in Washington and other antiwar events around the country on October 17, he unfortunately seems to be right.
Nevertheless, we can and must step up the pressure. For those interested in taking action, Leys suggests joining the Peaceable Assembly Campaign (PAC) – the latest effort by our good friends at Voices for Creative Nonviolence to challenge the militarism that is so pervasive in our country.
From January 19 through February 2, the PAC will maintain a two-week vigil at the White House and engage in regular acts of nonviolent civil disobedience, starting on the day President Obama enters his second year in office, continuing through his anticipated State of the Union address to Congress, and concluding on the day he is to submit his budget for 2011 to Congress.
Then after February 2, the Peaceable Assembly Campaign will focus its work upon Congress. Similar to the Occupation Project effort of 2007, the PAC will organize lobbying – both legal and extralegal (i.e., civil disobedience) – in the home offices of representatives and senators who do not commit themselves publicly to oppose additional funding for the wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the occupation of the Palestinian territories.
Our friends at Nonviolent Peaceforce have been busy. First of all, if you’re not familiar with their work, check out this new 18-minute video about what they do:
Ready to do something about it? Starting in a few days, leading up to Gandhi’s birthday, NP is organizing a “12 Days of Peace” campaign as a way for people to take part in the struggle for peace. Each day, there is something you can do, in coordination with others around the world:
Monday, Sept. 21
Celebrate United Nations’ International Day of Peace by working a day for peace – donating all or a portion of your day’s wages to a non-profit, non-governmental organization seeking to foster nonviolent peacekeeping worldwide.
Tuesday, Sept. 22
Sign the Peace Alliance’s petition to create a Department of Peace with a cabinet level Secretary of Peace on the presidential staff (www.thepeacealliance.org).
Wednesday, Sept. 23
Write a blog post and/or a status update on Twitter and Facebook noting that you are marking The 12 Days of Peace.
Thursday, Sept. 24
Re-establish and re-connect with a past friend, relative or colleague with whom you’ve had conflict.
Friday, Sept. 25
Write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper, and/or a letter to your Congressperson expressing support for nonviolent, unarmed peacekeeping in conflict zones worldwide.
Saturday, Sept. 26
Visit a community park with your friends and family for a picnic or gathering in celebration of peace and harmony among those closest to you.
Sunday, Sept. 27
Conduct a prayer for, or meditate upon, peace.
Monday, Sept. 28
End your day by enjoying a piece of music that demonstrates peace to you, such as “Imagine” by John Lennon or “Peace on Earth” by U2.
Tuesday, Sept. 29
Watch the 18-minute film Civilian Unarmed Peacekeeping: Building a Nonviolent Peaceforce, documenting the social and economic benefits of unarmed civilian peacekeeping as trained Nonviolent Peaceforce workers seek to create a safe space for peace within conflict areas. View at: http://tinyurl.com/n7xvl9.
Wednesday, Sept. 30
Spend time with your children and family discussing the social and healthful benefits of practicing peace among their friends and community.
Friday, Oct. 2
Celebrate Gandhi’s birth anniversary – and the U.N. International Day of Nonviolence – by borrowing Gandhi’s autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth – from your local public library.
If you’re interested in taking part, let us know. We’d love to hear about it, and we’d be happy to be your blog of choice for September 23’s activity. Send in your experiences and we’ll post them.
About 150 migrant children left to survive on their own in Greece have gone on a hunger strike to protest their imprisonment on a Greek island where conditions have been described as “abominable” by one European human rights body.
About 50,000 people in the Baltic states marked the twentieth anniversary of the ‘Baltic Way’ – when two million people formed a human chain to protest against Soviet rule – with a relay along the original 678km route that runs through Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania.
A group of senior lawyers resorted to a day’s token hunger strike in front of the Aurangabad Bench of the Bombay High Court on Thursday to protest against the alleged caste bias in appointment of government pleaders at the court.
International climate activists floated two roof tops in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool early Thursday afternoon in anticipation of the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. One of the roofs read, “HELP,” the other, “The Water Is Rising.” The 30 ft. banner behind the roofs declared, “Prevent the Next Katrina, Restore the Gulf, Stop Global Warming.”
A column of about 10,000 anti-coup protesters marched into Tegucigalpa on Tuesday to demand the return of ousted President Manuel Zelaya. An additional 4,000 Zelaya supporters gathered in San Pedro Sula, the country's second largest city. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)
On this, the 64th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, we call for an end to militarization in all its guises. An end to bombs, nuclear and conventional. An end to the use of Drones (unmanned aerial vehicles). An end to walls, fences and their virtual counterparts that divide us and promote fear of each other. An end to war without end.
This morning we vigil at the gates of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base,home of a Predator UAV unit which now flies missions around the clock in Iraq and Afghanistan armed with Hellfire missiles which have killed hundreds of unarmed civilians. We demand an end to the unilateral slaughter.
This afternoon we vigil at a communication tower, “Tucson-1″ (virtual fence) construction sight. Fences and walls, solid and virtual, have funneled people in migration deeper into the harsh, dangerous terrain of the Sonoran desert, resulting in more than 5,000 deaths since 1994.
These three – bombs, drones and fences/walls – are lethal weapons directed specifically at noncombatants. Cities like Hiroshima, villages in Iraq and Afghanistan and the U.S.-Mexico borderland have been deliberately targeted and violated. These are crimes against humanity. A betrayal of civility. In spiritual terms, a sin. “Today we pray without ceasing for a world without weapons and fences. We pray for peace, for justice, for unity which makes walls and war obsolete.
The virtual tower that Heid and Zawada were arrested at is part of a larger initiative by U.S. federal authorities to deter migrants from crossing the border. With physical walls – and in some places double walls – making urban crossings much less likely in places like San Diego, Nogales, and El Paso, the flow of migrants has been channeled into remote places hardly accessible to Border Patrol vehicles. But with the introduction of these virtual towers, equipped with cameras, video, and radar, authorities are pushing migrants into even more lethal terrain. Joseph Nevins reports on the escalation of U.S. border enforcement in his book Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the “Illegal Alien” and the Making of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary.
After more than ten years since the implementation of the new border strategy, the results have been mostly negative: the federal government has spent billions of dollars in taxpayers’ money; because of border enforcement the smugglers’ industry has boomed to the point of becoming basically indispensable; the violation of human rights of immmigrants continues unabated; there is no real proof that this strategy has substantially reduced “illegal” immigration in the USA; the border build-up, rather than deterring undocumented immigrants from entering the USA, discourages them from returning home; and, most tragically, the number of immigrants dying at the border has simply skyrocketed. To deal with this latter problem the Border Patrol launched in 1998 – five years after the El Paso experiment [Operation Hold the Line] – search-and-rescue operations to help immigrants stranded in the deserts and mountains of the border region. But despite these efforts the number of deaths continues to rise because of the strategy itself – the rerouting of the immigrants towards the most dangerous terrains – that is causing these deaths. The. U.S. government refuses to take any responsibility for all these casualties, which are considered one of the “unintended” consequences of the nation’s effort to protect its sovereignty.
The “unintended consequences,” which are more intentional then many Americans are willing to admit, are the reasons why John Heid and Fr. Jerry Zawada sat in prayer at the virtual tower surveillance site. The site they visited is only one of seventeen towers in a 23-mile stretch of the border surrounding Sasabe. The two men, long-time friends through the Catholic Worker and Plowshares movement, have moved their lives and work to the U.S.-Mexico border south of Tucson. Both are members of the No More Deaths community, whose humanitarian efforts have saved thousands of lives in the harsh terrain of the Sonoran desert.
Yesterday, I attended a moving commemoration of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima 64 years ago at the Buddhist temple here in New York City (video above). They hold their annual event on August 5th, because in Japan – when the difference in time zones is taken into consideration – it is already the morning of August 6th.
There was music, poetry, and various speeches against not only the use of nuclear weapons, but all war and violence. At 7:15pm (which was 8:15am in Hiroshima), the exact time that the bomb was dropped, prayers were said as a peace bell was rung. The group of about a hundred then proceeded to walk with signs and candles some twenty blocks to a church where an interfaith service and concert was held for peace. I was very moved by the event, including the presence of a man who actually survived the horrific bombing that day.
My good friend Frida Berrigan, daughter of the longtime anti-nuclear activists Phil Berrigan and Liz McAllister, wrote a wonderful piece about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that is worth quoting at length.
In Hiroshima, Little Boy’s huge fireball and explosion killed 70,000 to 80,000 people instantly. Another 70,000 were seriously injured. As Joseph Siracusa, author of Nuclear Weapons: A Very Short Introduction, writes: “In one terrible moment, 60% of Hiroshima… was destroyed. The blast temperature was estimated to reach over a million degrees Celsius, which ignited the surrounding air, forming a fireball some 840 feet in diameter.”
Three days later, Fat Man exploded 1,840 feet above Nagasaki, with the force of 22,000 tons of TNT. According to “Hiroshima and Nagasaki Remembered,” a web resource on the bombings developed for young people and educators, 286,000 people lived in Nagasaki before the bomb was dropped; 74,000 of them were killed instantly and another 75,000 were seriously injured.
In addition to those who died immediately, or soon after the bombings, tens of thousands more would succumb to radiation sickness and other radiation-induced maladies in the months, and then years, that followed.
In an article written while he was teaching math at Tufts University in 1983, Tadatoshi Akiba calculated that, by 1950, another 200,000 people had died as a result of the Hiroshima bomb, and 140,000 more were dead in Nagasaki.
She then discusses where we are at today in the struggle to rid the world of these terrible weapons and provides some shocking numbers that remind us how far we have yet to go:
The nine nuclear powers — the United States, Russia, France, England, China, Israel, Pakistan, India, and North Korea — have more than 27,000 operational nuclear weapons among them, enough to destroy several Earth-sized planets.
[...]
According to the authoritative Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the United States still maintains a nuclear stockpile estimated at 5,200 warheads — of which approximately 2,700 are operational (with the rest in reserve), while the Obama administration will spend more than $6 billion on the research and development of nuclear weapons this year alone.
[...]
Keep in mind as well that the bombs which annihilated two Japanese cities and ended so many lives 64 years ago this week were puny when compared to today’s typical nuclear weapon. Little Boy was a 15 kiloton warhead. Most of the warheads in the U.S. arsenal today are 100 or 300 kilotons — capable of taking out not a Japanese city of 1945 but a modern megalopolis. Bruce Blair, president of the World Security Institute and a former launch-control officer in charge of Minutemen Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles armed with 170, 300, and 335 kiloton warheads, pointed out a few years ago that, within 12 minutes, the United States and Russia could launch the equivalent of 100,000 Hiroshimas.
The Honduran people intensified protests yesterday following Sunday’s announcement that constitutional President Manuel Zelaya will return to his country next weekend.
Workers from South African paper, chemical and pharmaceutical companies have started striking over a pay dispute.
The Fisheries Minister has joined British activists, writers, actors and artists in calling on the Japanese fish restaurant chain Nobu to stop serving endangered bluefin tuna, saying he would boycott the chain.
A three and half week hunger strike that involved over 100 Los Angeles teachers and district personnel has come to an end. Despite the attention it brought, participants are planning to shift strategy in their fight against budget cuts and layoffs.
Union members upset with Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter over recent vetoes turned their backs to him in protest at an event commemorating the site of the 1914 Ludlow massacre of striking coal miners.
As part of a nationwide week of action, on Saturday evening around 50 people gathered for a candlelight vigil at Union Square in New York City to call for a national, single-payer health care plan.
As the event started, the organizers passed out signs and encouraged the largely older crowd to form a circle. Several speakers from the Private Health Insurance Must Go! Coalition then spoke of the dire state of our current for-profit health care system, and of the many benefits of the National Health Insurance Act (H.R. 676) – a bill that would guarantee everyone health care through the government as a basic human right.
Inspired by the thirteen doctors, nurses and single-payer advocates that were arrested during Democratic Senator Max Baucus’ Senate Finance Committee hearings on health care reform last month, one speaker declared that a much larger wave of civil disobedience would be necessary for the movement to gain traction.
After the planned speakers finished, the floor was opened to anyone who wanted to share their story. A camera crew filmed as several people, including a few in wheelchairs, took the opportunity to talk about their struggles with the system.
Unfortunately, the vigil was somewhat poorly planned. The speakers were next to impossible to hear, because the organizers forgot to bring a microphone. The fact that Union Square was alive with music, breakdancers and the usual street vendors on what turned out to be beautiful Saturday evening didn’t help either.
As part of a 
