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I am on the Road Again, and on my way to celebrate 30 years of The NUKE RESISTER and NUKEWATCH which will culminate with a NONVIOLENT civil disobedience action on 5 July 2010.I leave you with a few repeats; the first is an excerpt from KEEP HOPE ALIVE, which I wrote in 2005, and a few more links from my life as a Christian Anarchist activist.
9/11/05 AND THE GULFPORT BLUES
For the past twenty-two years
of Sunday mornings, Dr. Jake Hunter had navigated the tannic colored
waters of the Withlacoochee River in the dark, so as to arrive at the
center of Lake Silver just before first light. For miles, the eastern
vista manifested multitudes of eighty-feet-tall and six-hundred year-old
cypress trees. The rising sun that backlit the cypress always filled
Jake with awe, but this morning, his mood was most foul. He had been
consumed with rage from the instant he viewed the first images from New
Orleans the week before, and deep pain had wounded America's soul. Jake
spit out of the side of the boat and cursed local, state, and federal
bureaucracy for failing the least and most vulnerable.
"I am so pissed! What Hurricane
Katrina blew in and exposed was that the empire has no clothes! What
happened in the Big Easy was foretold three years ago in a five-part
series in the New Orleans
Times-Picayune. Then, last October's National Geographic fictional
story became fact, as it had laid out the scene in incredible detail,
which became reality on TV. Christ, have mercy! Local officials and FEMA
knew about the probability that even a slow-moving category three
hurricane would cause catastrophic loss and a lot of human misery. Those
19th-century levees were not designed for that eventuality! Now, maybe
we all will wake up to the facts, that in the third millennium, all our
infrastructures need a physician, stat! The very innards of our nation
are collapsing, and a government that has been commissioned to protect
its citizens blew it, big time! I am so pissed that a billion tax
dollars a day go to support a war in Iraq, and not one level of
government would bother to scrounge up the bucks for adequate supplies
of food, water, and medicine. I am so pissed!"
Jake rubbed his burning arms
while cursing the spinal cord impingement that caused it, and then
moaned, "Christ, have mercy on us for ignoring our sentinels! For years,
climatologists have predicted and warned us that powerful storms will
occur more frequently in this century, because of the rising sea level
from global warming. The hardest-working marsh in America is the
Louisiana bayou, and we have neglected its health. For three hundred
years, men have built walls and levees to control that mighty force of
nature, and it has wrecked havoc on New Orleans's natural defenses. From
the Mississippi border to the Texas state line, Louisiana is losing its
protective fringe of marshes and barrier islands faster than any place
in the U.S."
Jake hushed as first light broke, and he sat, motionless and awed by the view, until a mosquito bit his cheek; he again cursed, spat, and then growled into the wind, "That's the other thing that's pissing me off. People have been propagandized to buy cypress mulch, and that has led to logging companies raping the areas where ivory-bill woodpeckers once roamed. Florida and Louisiana are being violated by timber companies buying up private property, so that they can cut down these magnificent trees that are part of the filtering system for wetland health. If people would only wake up and use leaves, pine bark, or pine straw, which are much cheaper and work just as well, we could put a stop to this particular raping of Mother Earth. It's time to stop cutting down our cypress trees, and Homeland Security money should go to restoring the homeland."
Back at the A-frame, Terese
sipped from her steaming mug of black brew and checked her email, to
find report 57 from Jerry Levin, the reporter and full-time volunteer
with Christian Peacemaker Teams who had shepherded through Hebron. She
sighed repeatedly as she read about the start of a new school year in
Hebron, for it wasn't good. She had spent a few hours in Hebron in June,
and had not forgotten it for one day since.
"Christ, have mercy! These
teachers and kids trying to get to school are threatened and hassled by
these erratic and illegal settlers, and a trigger-happy IDF! What a
daily life to have to contend with! I cannot imagine watching my child
have to go through a checkpoint or be verbally and physically abused
just to get to school! What are we teaching these kids, when they grow
up looking up the barrel of an Israeli soldier's weapon of destruction?"
Next, she opened a press conference summary of September 6, 2005, from Dr. Mustafa Bargouthi, September 6, 2005's Palestinian National Initiative report regarding the aftermath of the "disengagement," and the bottom line was more settlers, more walls, and more corruption in the PA. He stated that "Ninety percent of security violations in Palestine are committed by security forces and intelligence. These forces must be disciplined; the rule of law and an independent judiciary must be installed. [And] it is estimated that 30 percent of the 160,000 salaried government employees do not attend work of any kind. This kind of corruption and nepotism must be ended.'
Terese moaned when she read about the violations since the cease-fire agreement of February 8. "Christ, have mercy! Seventy-five Palestinians, including seventeen innocent children, and fourteen Israelis, including two innocent children, have been murdered. Two thousand Palestinians have been arrested; there have been 2,306 checkpoints imposed, and 8,700 acres of Palestinian land has been confiscated by the Israeli government! And how can these settlers sleep at night, after attacking Palestinians 394 times since the cease-fire agreement? I feel bad about these screwed-up settlers, but they are a cult that has been allowed to get out of control. The Israeli government enticed and encouraged them to settle in illegal land, and this is what it has come to! And yet, the illegal settlements continue!
"And, what a farce the so-called disengagement in Gaza was. The Israeli government still controls all access to Gaza by land, sea, and air. Bargouthi documented that only 25 of over 150 settlements will be dismantled, and only 8,475 of over 436,000 settlers [less than 2 percent of settlers] have been evacuated. Meanwhile, in the past year, 12,800 new settlers have moved into the West Bank--50 percent more settlers than were evacuated."
"This is no withdrawal,
this is BS! Until Palestinians have control of Gaza's borders and a
guaranteed passage between Gaza and the West Bank, it is not a
withdrawal; it's just BS propaganda! And Gaza is less than 6 percent of
the occupied territories, and that leaves 94 percent of Palestinian
territories under the boot of the IDF. The corruption in the PA
government and hot tempers from those under occupation are a powder keg
that's getting ready to blow! What's it going to take to wake the world
up to the fact that most of our problems with radical Islamist
fundamentalist militants leads us back to the conflict in Israel and
Palestine? All roads do indeed lead to Jerusalem. What's it going to
take before the International community gets it together and insists, in
unity, upon the upholding of international law as the rule we all live
by? And that includes Israel and America, too, for both ratified the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I wonder, what's the point of
signing on, but then not doing it?
"What's it going to take to wake up the legions of blind U.S. Christian Zionists to their indifference to the misery of their sisters and brothers in Israel and Palestine? Their blind allegiance to the Israeli government has allowed our best friend in the world to become a big bully. What's it going to take to break through the ignorance that hard-earned U.S. tax dollars are being used to continue the occupation and apartheid wall?"
Jack slammed the U-Haul's gate
down as he told Maureen, "This is the fourth year since Julianne was
vaporized on Floor 101 of the North Twin Tower, and it took that misery
in the Delta to get me to finally part with her belongings and much
more. If you would have told me two weeks ago that I would be driving a
filled-to-the-max twenty-four-foot U-Haul down to refugees in
Mississippi on the anniversary date of Julianne's demise, I would not
have been able to even imagine it. But, if I don't do something to help
somehow, I will go nuts, or I will fall off the wagon one more time.
"Here we are, two weeks later,
and many Gulfport residents still have not seen FEMA! I hope and pray
that this misery in the Delta will wake up America to the fact that
abject poverty surrounds our cocoons of consumerism and self-absorbed
lives. We all need to do something to help those among us who had so
little and now have nothing at all.
"Mo! I know what we can do; we can build Habitat
for Humanity housing within the gates of South Hampton and Beverly
Hills--you know, resettle the refugees equitably, let every state take
some in--and let's build them housing in the best school districts! That
could very well break the poverty cycle; what do you think, Mo?"
Maureen smirked and fought back
tears as she hugged Jack and spoke. "Brother, I know you are nuts! But,
in "Over the Teacups," Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., wrote: "There never was an idea stated that woke men
out of their stupid indifference but its originator was spoken of as a
crank.' So, Jack, your kind of nuts is good. Out of a town of
seventeen thousand, only you thought to contact all the churches around
and announce you would drive down donations of food, water, and
toiletries to help American refugees on the anniversary of your own
misery."
October
9, 2008: John Lennon's 68th
December 22,
2007: "July 4th in Hell without the ice cream"
Part
5 in a Series on the USS LIBERTY: "It was God that kept us afloat"
February 5, 2009:
"In the
final analysis, it is between you and God. It was never between you and
them
anyway."-Mother
Teresa Read
more...
February
1-2, 2009: Christianity,
Anarchy, Tolstoy and Day
Read
more...
June 21, 2009: SECURITY and Loose Canons
