Remarks at North Carolina Peace Action Event in Raleigh, N.C., August 23, 2014.

Thank you for inviting me, and thank you to North Carolina Peace Action, and to John Heuer whom I consider a tireless selfless and inspired peacemaker himself.  Can we thank John?

It's an honor for me to have a role in honoring the 2014 Student Peacemaker, iMatter Youth North Carolina. I've followed what iMatter has been doing around the country for years, I've sat in on a court case they brought in Washington, D.C., I've shared a stage with them at a public event, I've organized an online petition with them at RootsAction.org, I've written about them and watched them inspire writers like Jeremy Brecher whom I recommend reading.  Here is an organization acting in the interests of all future generations of all species and being led -- and led well -- by human kids.  Can we give them some applause?

 

 

In the 1920s and 1930s, anybody who was anybody tried to figure out how to rid the world of war. Collectively, I'd say they got three-quarters of the way to an answer. But from 1945 to 2014, they've been ignored when possible (which is most of the time), laughed at when necessary, and on the very rare occasions that require it: attacked.

What a flock of idiots the leading thinkers of a generation all must have been. World War II happened. Therefore, war is eternal.  Everyone knows that.

But slavery abolitionists pushed on despite slavery happening another year, and another year.  Women sought the right to vote in the next election cycle following each one they were barred from.  Undoubtedly war is trickier to get rid off, because governments claim that all the other governments (and any other war makers) must go first or do it simultaneously. The possibility of someone else launching a war, combined with the false notion that war is the best way to defend against war, creates a seemingly permanent maze from which the world cannot emerge.

A long list of prominent individuals has signed, a number of organizations will be promoting next week, and you can be one of the first to sign right now, a petition titled "Call For Independent Inquiry of the Airplane Crash in Ukraine and its Catastrophic Aftermath."

The petition is directed to "All the heads of states of NATO countries, and of Russia and the Ukraine, to Ban-ki Moon and the heads of states of countries on the UN Security Council." And it will be delivered to each of them.

 

The petition reads:

"Set up an impartial international fact finding inquiry and a public report on the events in Ukraine to reveal the truth of what occurred.

"Why is this important?

"It's important because there is so much misinformation and disinformation in the media that we are careening towards a new cold war with Russia over this."

That's not hyperbole. It's the language of U.S. and Russian politicians and media.

Barack Obama's horrific re-escalation of the war in Iraq gouges open the unhealed wounds of an illegal intervention perpetrated by a disgraced president who has never been prosecuted for his crimes against humanity.

Obama's renewed drone attacks, which may soon be joined by returning "boots on the ground," come as we hear definitive proof that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger treasonably intervened to prolong the Vietnam War in 1968, resulting in seven more years of senseless war and countless thousands of American and southeast Asian casualties.

Will we now see the same in Southwest Asia that we once saw in the Southeast?

Obama's unconscionable actions remind us that George W. Bush's "shock and awe" invasion of Iraq was built on a foundation of deliberate lies and led to a horrible tsunami of senseless death and crippling expense.

And now it rips open the terrible untreated bleeding that began in 2003 and guarantees the prospect of endless murder and destruction that Obama long ago promised to end as part of his covenant of election.

 

Black ’hood, white cops. “Get the fuck on the sidewalk.”

And so it begins, and begins, and begins. An African-American boy dies for walking in the street — for yet one more insanely small transgression. Protesters cry for justice. The legal bureaucracy hunkers down, defends itself, does what it can to paint the deceased 18-year-old, Michael Brown, as a bad guy. Sides harden in the media. Once more it’s us vs. them. Nobody talks about making things right; nobody talks about healing.

But we can’t talk about healing — yet. We can’t talk about Ferguson, Mo., and the standoff between angry residents and the heavily militarized police, now two weeks old, without talking about institutional racism. In a healthy, free society, the idea of a “standoff” like this would be absurd, because the police aren’t a separate entity, controlling that society on outside orders, like an occupying army. In a healthy society, police serve the community; they’re part of it.

 

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Here in Kabul, Sherri Maurin and I are guests of the Afghan Peace Volunteers’ recently formed live-in community for young women. Hollyhocks in the garden reach as high as the second floor of our living space. Rose bushes, morning glories and four-o-clocks have bloomed, and each day we eat tomatoes, mint and green onions plucked from the well-cared for garden. The water source is a hose and tank outside, (there’s no indoor plumbing) so that’s where dishes and clothes are cleaned. The latrine is also outside, --and unfortunately we’re sharing it with playful neighbourhood cats, but otherwise Zarghuna, Zahidi and Zahro complete almost every detail of housekeeping, each day, by 7:00 a.m.

Two additional rooms are filled with sewing machines and tables used by a group of local seamstresses.


Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism & Wrecked the Middle Class By Ian Haney Lopez

 

Review by Marilyn Howard

 

Election night 2008 was a heady mixture of triumph, hope, disbelief and pride. A black man had been elected to the presidency of the United States of America! (In the interest of full disclosure, I have to be honest and admit I never thought I would live to see the day.) Who can forget the sight of Oprah Winfrey laying her head on the shoulders of a total stranger, or the tears being shed by the old civil rights warrior Jesse Jackson? That the eve of his first inauguration fell on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day merely added to the belief that many Americans thought we had finally banished that old bugaboo, racism, and stepped into a post-racial America. They were as wrong as two left shoes. America has never been in a post-racial society; racism had merely been swept under the carpet.

Josh Roberts was a fairly ordinary guy, living a fairly ordinary life. The one day in June it was all taken away from him. He went to visit his girlfriend, Andrea Ferguson age 37, in the nursing home where she was temporarily under care and found she had been moved. He was not permitted to know where she had been taken. He returned home to their two children, Anna and Noah, ages 2 and 1. Two days later Andrea's adoptive mother arrived with five Worthington police officers and took his children. There was no police report and the police showed him no paperwork. He was given a choice of losing his children or going to jail and losing his children.

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