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Walla Walla Community Coalition For Peace
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Made in America – War
WASHINGTON - June 16 - Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) today made the following statement against the war supplemental on the House floor:
"We are destroying our nation's moral and fiscal integrity with this war supplemental. Instead of ending wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan now by appropriating only enough money to bring our troops home, Congress abdicates its constitutional authority, defers to the president, and asks for a report. That's right, all we are asking for is a report on when the president will end the war.
"There is also money for the IMF, presumably to bail out private European banks. Billions for the IMF so they can force low and middle income nations to cut jobs, wages, health care and retirement security, just like corporate America does to our constituents.
"And there's money to incentivize the purchase of more cars, not necessarily from U.S. manufacturers because a ‘Buy America' mandate was not allowed.
"Another $106 billion dollars and all we get is a lousy war. Pretty soon that is going to be about the only thing made in America - war.
RESPONSIBLE WITHDRAWAL FROM IRAQ
COMMUNITY COALITION FOR PEACE PETITION
To: U.S. Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers
U.S. Senator Patty Murray
U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell
The undersigned citizens and residents of the Fifth Congressional
District hereby petition you to immediately call on President George W.
Bush to inform the United Nations that the United States is ready and
willing to withdraw all U.S. forces and personnel from Iraq as soon as
the United Nations, without U.S. interference, shall determine, and to
fund their replacement by United Nations peacekeepers and regional
peacekeeping forces to assist in efforts to restore stable government
within Iraq.
Name Address City
Email to nosterman@hotmail.com
"I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality.That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant."
---M.L. King, Jr.
"The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, or remain silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls."
---Elizabeth Cady Stanton
BEYOND VIETNAM
Excerpts from a talk by Martin Luther King, Jr.
April 4, 1967, New York City
Even
when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume
the task of opposing their government's
policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit
move without great difficulty against all the apathy of
conformist thought within one's own bosom and in
the surrounding world . Some of us who have
already begun to break the silence of the night have found
that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but
we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the
first time in our nation's
history that a significant number of its religious
leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism
to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates
of conscience.
I come to make
a passionate plea to my beloved nation. It seemed
as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both
black and white, through the poverty program Then
came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this
program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle
political plaything of a society gone mad on war. And I knew
that America would never invest the necessary funds
or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like
Vietnam
continued to draw men and skills and money.
A more tragic
recognition of reality took place when it became
clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating
the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and
their brothers and their husbands to fight and to
die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest
of the population . No one who has any concern for
the integrity and life of America today can ignore the
present war. I cannot forget that the Nobel Peace
Prize was also a commission, a commission to work harder than
I had ever worked before for the brotherhood of man. This is
a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances.
But even if it were not present, I would yet have to live with
the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of
Jesus Christ.
To me, the relationship of this ministry to the
making
of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who
ask me why I am speaking against the war. Beyond
the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of
sonship
and brotherhood. We are called to speak for the
weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation, for
those it calls "enemy;" for no document from human hands can
make these humans any less our brothers .
My mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula.
They must see Americans as strange liberators. They languish
under our bombs and consider us the real
enemy. I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as
anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting
them to is not simply the brutalizing process that
goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to
destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death,
for they must know after a short period there that none of
the things
we claim to be fighting for are really involved.
Somehow this madness
must cease. We must stop now. I
speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor. I
speak for those whose land is being laid waste,
whose homes are being destroyed. I speak as a
citizen of the world, for the world, as it stands aghast at the
path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America,
to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in
this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be
ours. If we do not stop our war, the
world will be left with no other alternative than to see this
as some horrible, clumsy, and deadly game we have decided to
play. It demands that we admit that we
have been wrong from the beginning. Every man of humane
convictions
must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we
must all protest. A true revolution of
values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: This business
of burning human beings with
napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans
and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the
veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men
home from dark and bloody battlefields, physically handicapped
and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled
with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year
after year to spend more money on military defense than on
programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual
death.
War is not the answer.
A genuine
revolution of values means in the final analysis
that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than
sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty
to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best
in their individual societies. We can no longer
afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar
of retaliation. Now let us begin. This
is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers
wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great?
Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will
our message be that the forces of American life militate
against
their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets?
Or will there be another message ?
The choice is
ours.
PURPOSE
The purpose of the Community Coalition for Peace is to bring together groups and individuals in
the Walla Walla area who are working for peace.
The Coalition will:
--Serve as a sounding board for proposed actions by members and others
--Coordinate and support actions by members and others
--Plan and present community actions for peace.
Membership is open to all groups and individuals in the Walla Walla area working for peace.
To be added to our email list for information on local events, please send a request to peacewalla@charter.net.
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