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

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

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.^[1]

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 anything 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 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 Khayyam is right: "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on."^[2]

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."

References

↑ Martin Luther King, Jr.; "Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution" (Delivered at the National Cathedral, Washington, D.C., on 31 March 1968. Congressional Record, 9 April 1968.)
↑ Martin Luther King, Jr. "Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence" (Delivered 4 April 1967, Riverside Church, New York City)

(Don't worry - more to come.)

[1] Martin Luther King, Jr.; "Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution" (Delivered at the National Cathedral, Washington, D.C., on 31 March 1968. Congressional Record, 9 April 1968.)

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

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