Breaking the Addiction to War

Dear friends,
On this day in 1973, the war in Vietnam should have officially ended when a cease-fire agreement signed earlier in Paris was to have gone into effect. But the fighting continued for more than 2 years afterward. Between three and four million Vietnamese lives were lost. Over 58,000 US troops died in combat and the effects of Agent Orange and other chemicals we used in Vietnam are still being felt today. We sent military advisers in long before the “armed conflict” officially began and it took almost 20 years after the conflict ended in 1975 for us to lift a trade embargo against the people of Vietnam. War is an addiction, and we cannot seem to get enough. Over eight years in Afghanistan and nearly seven in Iraq should be enough. There is talk of withdrawal “beginning”, but we all know that talk changes, especially when an addiction is involved. For withdrawal to be real, we must make sure there is an intervention by us!
When I worked in addiction counseling, I learned about the curve of intention The belief is each interaction, each moment, each encounter with the object of our addiction presents us with a choice. We can do what is easy and succumb, and in so doing risk a future free of our addiction, and any learning and growth possible to us in that moment. If we are to realize that growth, build that better relationship, and free our selves of our addiction, we must decide to do what is difficult in the moment – to say no — to care more about the future than the present moment’s ease or satisfaction. If we do not speak up, we become complicit – we become codependent enablers of the addiction.
During the Vietnam conflict, millions of antiwar protestors – many of you among them – rallied, organized and continued to keep the pressure on. My sense today is that the antiwar voices are tired and discouraged. They do not feel the personal connection to the machine of war or its consequences that they did a generation ago. The addict (our military industrial machine) has become very good at maintaining the status quo and diverting our attention from the fact that we are very much connected to these wars and all the good we do without in order to continue them. And in each moment we all have a choice. Congress needs to know now that we will not continuing enabling war. Each letter you do not write, each rally you do not attend and each person that you refuse to engage in dialog is a missed opportunity for dismantling the addiction of our nation. Do we make a move to a better world or play along with the one we have? Do we take the easy steps or the difficult ones? Each moment is up to each of us and we become a ripple of hope to each other…Betsy

A Patriotic Duty to Dissent – Zinn

Dear friends,
Howard Zinn taught us that, “dissent is the highest form of patriotism”, and spurred us to action with the words, “there is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people”. His book, A People’s History of the US was the first to challenge traditional thinking and present an alternative, liberal viewpoint on our history, at a time when most people didn’t even dare to call themselves liberal. He was the first to call Christopher Columbus’ actions genocide, and has remained a steadfast champion of the freedom of speech. In his last published article last week in The Nation (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100201/forum/6#zinn), he called on us to stand firm and push President Obama in a better direction to bring about change and prevent mediocrity. This could not be more relevant given the recent Supreme Court ruling giving corporate special interests the go-ahead to buy our democracy and drown out the voices of ordinary citizens, the very voices Mr. Zinn applauded and encouraged. In honor and tribute to Howard Zinn, who died yesterday, and in celebration of our patriotic duty to dissent, let us take a close look at the wheel as it turns and refuse to be complacent cogs. Write letters, sign petitions, make phone calls, join the Progressive Democrats tonight – or do it all. Naomi Klein called Howard Zinn “our favorite teacher”. Let us make him proud of us…Betsy

Challenges and Opportunities

Dear Friends,
We are faced today with many challenges and an opportunity. Today our challenge is to change the deep and profound social and economic injustice that runs through our society. Today we are faced in Missoula with rising unemployment and chronic under-employment, low wages that are inadequate to meet life’s basic needs, unaffordable housing that is too often substandard and workers who are afraid of exercising their rights for fear of losing their job. . . .
We are also facing here in Missoula a twin assault on our power as a people to improve our society: one assault is from the immense but incomplete corporate control over our politics, economy and social life; and the other assault is from those among us who mistakenly believe that accountable and active government, powerful organizations of citizens, and the ideals of social and economic justice are somehow enemies of the people.
Now before we succumb to a simplistic cynicism that claims that nothing is better and so we should not waste our time trying, I point out that there are some things that have changed for the better since King’s time, things that we now sometimes take for granted: Medicaid and Medicare, a system of shelters and support for abused women, a flowering of smart and effective citizen organizations, the election of an African-American for President, effective environmental protection and on and on. These victories are significant and hard fought – but none of them are sufficient by themselves.
The recent struggle for health care insurance reform has disappointed many people who want to see a change. I have worked hard with hundreds of other Montanans and tens of thousands from around the country to see it accomplished. I wish that the legislation we have worked on so hard would have additional elements to make it stronger. But I was never under the illusion that a complete victory would be won in one fell swoop. Meaningful social and economic change doesn’t happen so easily. This historic legislation is very good in many aspects and will do many good things for millions of people. But it is just a step along the way.
And this step would never have been taken at all except for the work of powerful coalitions of citizens like yourself. It is citizens organized into unions, churches, women’s groups, native Indian organizations, civic groups, and health advocacy organizations who formed the powerful national coalition Health Care for America Now that is primarily responsible for passage of the only major health insurance reform for over 70 years.
Martin Luther King, Jr. saw the critical importance of creating coalitions with labor unions and other groups to not only help achieve an end to racial segregation, but also to create a better society for both the majority and the minority.
Our social and economic conditions challenge us today. The words and example of Martin Luther King, Jr. challenge us today. But it is you and me and others in our community working together that provide us an opportunity: an opportunity to meet the challenges that face us today. We need to create our own coalitions to advocate and to organize for change. Just as our coalitions have elected Barak Obama President and have passed major health insurance reform legislation; so too our coalitions need to keep President Obama accountable to the goals he campaigned on, and to keep pushing for further health care reform.
It brings dishonor to King’s legacy and to our own history when we expect far more from our political leaders than we expect from ourselves. Let’s not self-indulgently wallow in cynicism over our government’s inability to make dramatic and sweeping changes. Our government is imperfect and limited. But if we want something to change, we need to reject self-pity and cynicism and tackle the hard work it takes to make social and economic change.
We have this hard work in front of us, but we are not alone. Pooling our strength into coalitions can help us become powerful agents of change. Deepening those coalitions by working on a broad variety of issues helps all of us gain understanding and solidarity for those who are not like us. And making organizing the central method of our action develops and strengthens our own power independent of any politician, leader or institution.
Right now, coming out of the broad statewide organizing done for health insurance reform, is a new coalition with organizing at its core: the Montana Organizing Project. Currently labor unions, churches, Native organizations and women’s organizations, civic and social justice groups, and small businesses are creating what we hope is a long-term coalition dedicated to building grassroots power through organizing to meet the challenges of social and economic justice that we face today. The Montana Organizing Project plans to be officially founded this summer. Please consider getting your union, your church, your organization, your business to join the Montana Organizing Project.
While we reflect today on the extraordinary life of Dr. King we must remember that he was also just a human being, not much different than you or I. He became extraordinary by his choices and his commitment to face the challenges of injustice. Today is our time to likewise make choices in our commitment to face the challenges of today. Let us become the extraordinary people that we can become and choose to give our best, along with others, to the fight for social and economic justice. For in truth, there is nobody else, no other institution or government that can do this for us. Today is our opportunity to commit ourselves to meet the challenges we face now and here in Missoula, Montana as a people.
~Mark Anderlik

Taking Action to Help

Dear friends,

Tomorrow, January 15, marks the birth of Martin Luther King, jr. On Monday, we celebrate his spirit by observing a day of service where volunteers all over this nation will use their day off work to serve the poor, the homeless, and others in their communities. But January 15 is also the day, in 1968, that Jeannette Rankin, at the age of 88, led her brigade of 5000 to march against the Vietnam War. Service and action – two great strategies for us as we work in a world of war, injustice, and tragedy. All over the world, people are mobilizing to help the people of Haiti, long victims of some of the highest levels of poverty and exploitation, and now of natural disaster. Check some of the action items below for ways you can help. I am sorry it takes such a tragedy to focus attention on the poverty in that small country. And I hope we learn that people are victims of tragedy in many parts of the world – tragedy brought on by colonialism, war, poverty, exploitation, slavery and other egregious situations, including natural disaster.

Let us not be slow to serve and take action. Let us not wait for nature to tell us where that service is needed. Keeping all those in need in our thoughts and prayers, Betsy

Speaking Volumes: Transforming Hate

Dear friends,

A very important exhibit opens in Missoula tonight at the UM Museum of Art and Culture. “Speaking Volumes: Transforming Hate” is a powerful reminder through art that each of us has the power to transform the violence and injustice in our lives through our voices, our hands and our minds. It was developed as a partnership between the Holter Museum of Art in Helena and the Montana Human Rights Network. In 2004, MHRN secured more than 4,000 volumes of white supremacist propaganda from a defecting member of the World Church of the Creator, including numerous pamphlets and other literature written by church founder Ben Klassen. You might remember that during the 1990s, the group held conferences and meetings near Superior and distributed hate materials in several Montana towns. Rather than destroy the material, MHRN decided in partnership with the Holter Museum of Art to invite artists from across the nation to reflect upon, respond to or transform the volumes. Messages of intolerance and hate were transformed into a collection of objects intended to promote civic dialogue.

JRPC is excited to be part of this because we believe in dialogue as a cornerstone to solving problems, and we recognize the great value in art as a means to activism. This exhibit and what it represents is so important that we have decided to use it as a theme for our annual Fr. Hogan Search For peace Awards, inviting young people in elementary school, middle school, high school and college to reflect on how their voices and hands can transform what is ugly in our world. In each category, we will accept submissions of original art in any media they choose that address the theme, “Speaking Volumes, Transforming…”. Details and an application form are available on our website (www.jrpc.org) For a complete list of all the community events surrounding this exhibit, visit the Missoula Cultural Council calendar at http://www.missoulacultural.org/events.php.

Please see the exhibit and help our youth and others make this dialog a part of the tapestry of our community….Betsy

Peace For the New Year

Dear friends,

Below is a letter I just sent in to the Missoulian. I invite you to join me by responding online, by writing your own letter and by finding the aisles you can reach across in the New Year to make peace. Let’s make sure that the message of peace stays in the media this year. We cannot be silent about the things that matter. The more pervasive the message, the more chance it will have of finding roots in our world. So join me.

‘Before you recycle those Christmas cards, take another look. My guess is at least half of them express a wish for “peace on earth”. “Peace on Earth, Good Will Toward Men” is not just a nice sentiment to be brought out for the holidays and then shelved away. We must find a way to live those ideals, as individuals and as a country. Wars have not and will not rid the world of those we consider enemies. Rather, we have more “enemies” today than ever, and they are more dangerous and far more complex, and hiding in more and more countries. Let’s not spend one more person or one more dollar trying to prove otherwise. There are plenty of ways our young people can serve their country right here at home in safety, and plenty of good they can do. Peace on earth really can begin with each of us. It’s crucial that we reach across the aisles of our differences to find ways to work together to move beyond war and toward the peace we all wish for at Christmas.’

I’d love to see all of you at the Caras Park luminary peace sign this evening from 4 to midnight. Standing there in the dark, with candles forming a peace sign and folks working together to make the sign and keep it lit is a great way to bring in the New Year, and put our thoughts into action. And then on New Year’s Day, from 2 to 3 pm we will gather at our new gathering area in the Peace Park to say thank you to David Claman and the volunteers who built it, to feel the energy and solidarity of our peace community and to imagine the possibilities for 2010. Please bring your own wishes in spoken, written, or other symbolic form.

Wishing you a happy and peaceful new year,
Betsy

One Peace at a Time

‘Tell me the weight of a snowflake,’ a coal-mouse asked a wild dove. ‘Nothing more than nothing,’ was the answer. ‘In that case I must tell you a marvelous story,’ the coal-mouse said. ‘I sat on the branch of a fir, close to its trunk, when it began to snow, not heavily, not a giant blizzard, no, just like in a dream, without any violence. Since I didn’t have anything better to do, I counted the snowflakes settling on the twigs and needles of my branch. Their number was exactly 3,741,952. When the next snowflake dropped onto the branch – nothing more than nothing, as you say – the branch broke off.’ Having said that, the coal-mouse flew away. The dove, since Noah’s time an authority on the matter, thought about the story for a while and finally said to her: ‘Perhaps there is only one person’s voice lacking for peace to come about in the world.’

New Fables Thus Spoke ‘The Caribou’ by Kurt Kauter

Dear friends, Let us all be that one voice to preach the peace and nonviolence of the season…Betsy

Public and Private Sectors

Dear friends,

While we claim “government is the problem”, we expect it to protect us from epidemics, terrorism, greedy banker’s etc. This is in addition to the responsibility of providing services like roads, mail, elderly care, social security, veteran administration etc. As you know they are made up of elected or selected individuals who are most likely our neighbors or relatives. It is fascinating to see this portrayal of government as a source of most ills and private sector as a source of great things. It seems one is a savior while the other is a devil waiting to pounce! There are many examples of role reversal, but we continue to live with our preconceived bias. Our recent financial and auto industry meltdown was a private (for profit) excess gone rogue and it needed government intervention. The jury is still out on the bailouts and whether or not a depression would have ensued without it. Hindsight carries a luxury that a crisis does not. But the effect is our present recession, high unemployment and overall gloom. Before this current meltdown, it was the dot-com and saving and loan crisis, and most (if not all) were a result of private enterprise run amuck.

Take a different industry – our private health insurance. They have given us terms like “medical inflation”, “preexisting condition”, “denial of benefits”, “excessive paperwork” etc. Their presence to accept our premium and absence when we need them is legendary. All this while our tax dollars are at work subsidizing them as non-profits. Since they are not subjected to anti-trust laws, it is perfectly legal for them to band together and quote any price (or no price) to you.

Government has its own share of spectacular failures, such as the response to hurricane Katrina. On the other hand, government funded institutions or public-sector industries are in the forefront of robotics, space, medical and other advances. Internet and GPS are two advances done primarily in public institutions. A lot of the fundamental research for new drugs has a footprint in public universities. There is this myth that the biggest breakthroughs come from private sector only. Private sector has a fair share of great inventions and advances, but like public sector it also has its fair share of spectacular failures. These regular disasters from private industry demand oversight, but we have little appetite for it because of our belief that “government is the problem”

This notion of a benign self-regulating private sector marching us to glory is a myth! What is even stranger is how many people simply echo this myth without putting their creative minds to work! They come from all walks of life — politicians who are on the government payroll and protesters who despise government hands in anything. While they are correct about deficits or debts, it is perplexing to see little effort at stopping our government from spending billions to fight wars abroad or give huge subsidies to private sector at home. There are many examples where private-sector companies get one form of local, state or federal subsidies to provide jobs one day and ship them somewhere else in the near future!

We need better results from the public-sector and the private-sector. They both have problems but their combination provides “our way of life”. It is the right public-private partnership that makes all the great things possible. Any one of them going alone is a recipe for disaster. Most important of all, we are responsible to nudge both in the right direction. If we do not get involved in the changes we want to see, this entire finger pointing amounts to nothing. Whether it is health care reform, regulation, climate change, our preoccupation with wars in foreign lands or our hunger and jobless issues here at home, we need to quit pointing fingers and find ways to participate and resolve them. We live in a representative democracy for a reason! The talking heads are getting paid to dish out their opinions, but we need to exercise our mind to find the facts and use our energy to work through the issues. Otherwise the real demagogue is our indifference. For once, pause your bashing of government and thank the people in it. They are your neighborhood soldiers, mailmen, teachers, firemen, scientists, engineers, public health employees and police to name a few.

Srini Mondava,
Coordinating Council Chair

Declaration of Human Rights

Dear Friends,

On December 10, 1948, as the world came together to say “never again” in the aftermath of World War II, the Holocaust and the use of nuclear weapons, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Each of the Member countries were called on to publicize the text of the Declaration and “to cause it to be disseminated, displayed, read and expounded…without distinction based on the political status of countries or territories.” These are the rights that bind us to people all across the globe in humanity and respect. Imbedded in them are the following themes:

· Women’s Rights
· The Right to health Care and education
· The right to be free from fear and torture
· The right to freedom of expression and self determination
· The right to decent work
· The right to be free from hunger and poverty

And, most importantly, this declaration includes the responsibility of all of us to protect these human rights. Yet in the past sixty-one years, we have witnessed mass atrocities all around the globe. And today, as we escalate and expand a failing war, as we watch protesters in Iran and elsewhere jailed for their words, and as we struggle with a myriad of other issues such as immigration, gay rights, climate change and health care, it is critical that we pause and reflect on how we must act if we are to be true to our responsibility – in our own country as well as around the world — as fellow humans. Please take the time to write a letter to the editor; write your senator and congressmen, talk with your neighbors. Doing nothing to protect the rights of others is not neutral. It is a message of support for those that deny those rights – and that threatens all of us. You can read the Declaration at http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/, or purchase a copy of them in a small booklet at the JRPC store.

In freedom and hope,

Betsy

Petition for Arms Ban

Dear Friends,

In the Fall 09 issue of Physicians For Social Responsibility, we are reminded that the problem of nuclear weapons is far from being resolved. The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) comes up for a vote on December 5, but it is unlikely that a new treaty will be approved before then. It is also well to remember that the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which was last debated in 1999, was narrowly rejected by the US Senate. This should be one of our highest priorities. President Obama has taken many opportunities to promote ultimate nuclear disarmament on both the domestic and international stage. This was one important reason for his being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize this year. But we must do more than hear the words. We need global commitments to action. Of course, it is a difficult time now because of the many other important and pressing public issues which are under consideration – health care and climate change particularly. But we must devote what time we can now to the nuclear issue and to expand our involvement when it becomes the issue of highest priority. In any case, we must support our President to fulfill his promise to remove once and for all the threat of nuclear Armageddon. Physicians For Social responsibility has a petition to President Obama asking him to fulfill his vision of a world free of nuclear weapons. I urge you to sign it at http://action.psr.org/site/Survey?SURVEY_ID=3261&ACTION_REQUIRED=URI_ACTION_USER_REQUESTS

Sincerely,

Meyer “Mike” Chessin