[Peace] AWARE anti-war demonstration - Sat April 1st, 2-4pm, Main & Neil in downtown Champaign

[Stuart Levy]

AWARE returns to the streets to demonstrate against our wars this Saturday -

   Saturday, April 1st, 2-4PM
   corner of Main and Neil, downtown Champaign

Please join us for any or all of that time.

Fifty years ago next week - April 4, 1967 - civil rights leader Martin
Luther King, Jr. gave a speech, "Beyond Vietnam".  
How little has changed in half a century?   May our vision be as
uncompromising as his was then.

(The full text is here: http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0115-13.htm )

    "Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King?" "Why are you joining
    the voices of dissent?" "Peace and civil rights don't mix," they
    say. "Aren't you hurting the cause of your people," they ask? And
    when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their
    concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean
    that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my
    calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the
    world in which they live.

    [...]

    "I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence
    of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly
    to *the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own
    government. * For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this
    government, *for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling
    under our violence, I cannot be silent.*"

    [...]

    "[The people of Vietnam] must see Americans as strange liberators.
    [...] Even though they quoted the American Declaration of
    Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to
    recognize them. [...]

    When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line
    of military dictators seemed to offer no real change, especially in
    terms of their need for land and peace.

    The only change came from *America, as we increased our troop
    commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt,
    inept, and without popular support.* All the while the people read
    our leaflets and received the regular promises of peace and
    democracy and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and
    consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move
    sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their
    fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are
    rarely met. They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs."

    [...]

    "We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if
    our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane
    convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his
    convictions, but we must all protest.

    Now there is something seductively tempting about stopping there and
    sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular
    crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter that
    struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing.

    *The war *in Vietnam is *but a symptom of a far deeper malady within
    the American spirit,* and if we ignore this sobering reality...and
    if we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves
    organizing "clergy and laymen concerned" committees for the next
    generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala -- Guatemala and
    Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will
    be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. *We will be marching
    for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end,
    unless there is a significant and profound change in American life
    and policy.*

    And so, such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our
    calling as sons of the living God."

    [...]

    "*In 1957, a sensitive American official overseas said that it
    seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world
    revolution.* During the past ten years, we have seen emerge a
    pattern of suppression which has now justified the presence of U.S.
    military advisors in Venezuela. *This need to maintain social
    stability for our investments* accounts for the counterrevolutionary
    action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American
    helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why
    American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active
    against rebels in Peru."

    [...]

    "*A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the
    fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. *On
    the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's
    roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come
    to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men
    and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make
    their journey on life's highway. *True compassion is more than
    flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which
    produces beggars needs restructuring.*"
    [...]

    "*A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring
    contrast of poverty and wealth. *With righteous indignation, it will
    look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West
    investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America,
    only to take the profits out with no concern for the social
    betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will
    look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and
    say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it
    has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not
    just."

    [...]

    "This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our
    nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs
    of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men
    home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and
    psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice,
    and love. *A nation* *that continues year after year to spend more
    money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is
    approaching spiritual death.*"

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