Rally For Peace

End the War; Begin the Peace
Photo: L.E. Baskow, www.LeftEyeImages.com

Rally For Peace
what	Antiwar Rally & March
date	Saturday, March 19th, 2011
time	12:30-1:30 p.m.
where	Pioneer Courthouse Square
cost	What's life worth?
calendar

Rally For Peace | Saturday, March 19, 2011 | Portland, Oregon.

"I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values."

- Martin Luther King, Jr. "Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence" (Delivered 4 April 1967, Riverside Church, New York City)

"Jesus took the biblical command to love your neighbor and extended it to loving your enemy too."

- Gabrielle Chavez, Pastor; Christ the Healer; United Church of Christ

Antiwar Rally & March to Protest the Continuing Occupation of Iraq!

Rally Marks the 8th Anniversary of the Illegal Invasion of Iraq in 2003 by the United States, Great Britain and a Coalition of the Killing.
Day/Date: Saturday, March 19th, 2011.

12:30 PM - Music

1:00 PM - Rally

1:30 PM - March

Place: Pioneer Courthouse Square, SW Broadway & Yamhill, Downtown Portland.

Slogans

Theme: Eight Years in Iraq - Nine Years in Afghanistan: How's the War Economy Working for You?

• End The Wars And Occupations! Bring The Troops Home Now!
• Fund Jobs, Healthcare, Human Needs, Not The War Machine!
• Stand For Civil Rights At Home And Abroad!
• Take Action!

Cosponsors & Endorsers

Peace and Justice Works Iraq Affinity Group | Veterans for Peace - Chapter 72 | Iraq Veterans Against the War - Oregon Chapter | War Resisters League of Portland | Portland Peaceful Response Coalition | Portland Jobs with Justice | Portland Labor for Peace and Justice | Metanoia Peace Community | Jewish Voice for Peace | Portland Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild | Military Families Speak Out - Oregon | East Timor Action Network / Portland | the No War Drum Corps | pdxjustice Media Productions (media cosponsor) | Portland Area Rethinking Schools | KBOO 90.7 FM Community Radio (KBOO.fm - media cosponsor) | Economic Justice Action Group of the First Unitarian Church | Freedom Socialist Party | Northwest Veterans for Peace | Little Light of Mine Friends Worship Group | Women in Black | Sisters of the Road Café | Living Earth | Augustana Lutheran Church | People's Activist Cafe | Flying Focus Video Collective (media endorser) | Shelly's Garden | No War Drum Corps | Physicians for Social Responsibility | Alliance for Democracy - Portland Chapter | and others ...

Time To Break The Spell

One of the great liabilities of life is that all too many people find themselves living amid a great period of social change, and yet they fail to develop the new attitudes, the new mental responses, that the new situation demands. They end up sleeping through a revolution.

The Sunday afternoon "peace rally" and march scheduled this year is on track to accomplish exactly the same goals as all the previous rallies and marches protesting the violence the United States has perpetrated on the Iraqis, Afghanis and Pakistanis over the past decade or so: zilch. Mission not accomplished. The killing continues. The torture never stops. And Portland's "peace rally progressives" fail to recognize the futility of their feeble attempts to stop a monstrous death machine hell-bent on destroying all that lives.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, people are waking up and making dramatic changes. In recent weeks, the Egyptian and Tunisian people have successfully toppled the brutal dictators who once oppressed them. Tyrannical thugs our government propped up for decades joined other deposed despots flung onto history's dung heap after their former subjects decided they'd had enough. And right now it looks like the people of that region are just getting started!

What's the response from "peace rally Portlandians" thus far? The kind of response you'd expect from folks who utterly fail to recognize that people half a world away just showed the entire planet what real democratic change looks like. Another rally is scheduled for a lazy Sunday afternoon. Another set of empty, flaccid slogans are proffered. The usual suspects of "cosponsors and endorsers" are rounded up. And the same old annual farce proceeds once again.

The Revolution That Stillbirthed

We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood -- it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, "Too late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyám is right: "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on."

We quote King here at length to remind us of an urgent warning he delivered to Americans more than four decades ago: "there is such a thing as being too late." Still hopeful that we might yet still wake up, King implored Americans to choose "nonviolent coexistence" over "violent coannihilation." But he also knew we'd fail to make that choice if we did not "rapidly begin" to make "the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society." King deeply understood that a society where "machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered." He clearly saw how a "nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

A sniper's bullet ended King's life nearly 43 years ago, on April 4, 1968. On November 2, 1983, Ronald Reagan signed a bill creating a federal holiday to honor King. Reagan, along with many other right-wing politicians, strongly opposed the bill. But the public was overwhelmingly in favor of a King holiday, which became law after "the largest petition in favor of an issue in U.S. history." The first actual observance of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day happened on January 20, 1986. Apparently we love our martyrs. Especially once we've put them safely in their graves. Whether Jesus, Lincoln, Gandhi or King, we'll deify them. Invent religions in their name. Quote them. Make idols of them. Or turn their name into a national holiday. But do we grasp anything they attempted, both in words and deeds, to teach us? If so, why do we fail to act on that understanding?

Only Convenient Caring Please

Deathly Spirits

In the summer of 2001, Catherine Austin Fitts, former Assistant Secretary for Housing under Bush The Older, gave a presentation called "How the Money Works on Organized Crime" to "a wonderful group of about 100 people at an annual conference for a spiritually focused foundation in Philadelphia."

After walking through the various profits generated by narcotics trafficking, financial fraud and other types of organized crime, as well as the intersection of this money with the stock market and campaign fundraising, for about an hour, I asked the group what would happen to the stock market if we decriminalized or legalized drugs?

The stock market would crash, they said.

What would happen to financing the government deficit if we enforced all money-laundering laws? Since most bank wire transfers are batched and run through the New York Federal Reserve Bank, this should not really be that hard, right?

Their taxes might go up. Worse yet, their government checks might stop, they said.

I then asked them to imagine a big, red button at the front of the lectern.

By the power of our imaginations, if they pushed that button they could decriminalize narcotics trafficking or whatever actions were necessary to stop organized crime and stop all money laundering in the United States.

Who would push the button?

It turns out that in an audience of approximately 100 people committed to spiritually evolve our society, only one person would push the button.

Upon reflection, 99 would not. I asked why. They said that if they pushed the button, their mutual funds would go down and their government checks might stop. I commented that what they were proposing is that an entire infrastructure of people continue to market narcotics to their children and grandchildren to ensure that their mutual and pension funds stay high in value.

They said, yes, that was right.

In other words, these socially concerned and "spiritually evolved" people were more concerned about avoiding any disruption to their affluent lives more than the worsening social, economic and ecological cataclysm that is tightly intertwined with their affluent lifestyles. This is precisely the social malaise King identified. A society where "machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people." Where the commitment to "shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society" was never made. As a result, "the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism" grew even larger.

Ours is a nation of people who forsook "nonviolent coexistence" and instead chose "violent coannihilation." A nation that continued, "year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift." Indeed, ours is a society that has embraced "spiritual death."

And you wonder why the wars don't stop?

Not Negotiable

The most tyrannical among us apparently take great pleasure in telling anyone within earshot what's "not negotiable." Republican legislators in Wisconsin, for example, declare that their intent to "effectively eliminate collective bargaining rights for most public employees" is "not negotiable." Shortly after the terror strikes in New York and Washington D.C. in September 11, 2001, who called for a national discussion on what might have led up to such an event? Our political, "spiritual" or business "leaders"? Nope. Not a chance. Instead we got Dick Cheney, who asserted that "the American way of life is non-negotiable." End of discussion. Apparently Dickey Boy was just mouthing the sociopathic nonsense he heard dribbling out of George H.W. "Pappy" Bush's mouth a decade earlier, at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit.

(More to come...)

External Links

• Discussion List: https://lists.riseup.net/www/info/thatrallylist

To subscribe, email: thatrallylist-subscribe [at symbol] lists.riseup.net.

• Peace and Justice Works; Iraq Affinity Group Rally & March Info Page
• The world is going to hell and you can't stop it.

Please Note

As of this writing, Dave Myers, a PortlandWiki contributor and administrator, is responsible for the commentary and other edits shown on this page. -WikiMaster (talk) 11:26, 21 February 2011 (PST)

- The goal of the above commentary is not to unduly criticize the hard work and commitment of the many hundreds (perhaps thousands) of folks in and around Portland who continue year after year to work for peace.

- Instead, the hope is to direct sharp focus towards examining the underlying causes and conditions that may contribute to the less than stellar results "peace communities" in Portland and elsewhere have had in moving our society away from the obscenity of unending military and economic conflicts with our neighbors on this planet that we all share.

PortlandWiki is a publicly available wiki that invites editorial contributions from folks who care about the Portland community and who wish to contribute their knowledge and information to this site.

- For the most current list of contributors to this page, click here.