Protest at Wall Street

Ken Dalton (center) holds VFP banner at Wall St. protest

A contingent of Veterans For Peace Chapter 21 and Military Families Speak Out members from New Jersey joined the Occupy Wall Street demonstration on Saturday, October 8.

Many in the crowd of young people, older folks who dusted off memories of the protests of the '60s and '70s, and photo-snapping tourists seemed delighted to see the VFP banner unfurled near a corner of Liberty Plaza facing the new office towers being constructed at the site of the former World Trade Center. Among the Jersey contingent was VFP Chapter 21 President Ken Dalton, a Navy vet of the Vietnam war, who worked as a fire fighter in search and rescue operations at Ground Zero in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attack.

A common question of news reporters who stopped by for a comment was “What do war and Wall Street have in common?” Duh. Millions of unemployed veterans and other folks caught in the web of trillion-dollar wars and an economic collapse that the federal bailout of Wall Street banks was supposed to fix could have told them in a New York minute.

Many of the demonstrators in New York on Saturday eloquently stated the reasons for their dismay in an array of hand-made signs, some of which are shown here.

(Photos by Jan Barry)

Peace Beat

By Jan Barry

War drums began beating across America before the dust settled at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. It’s an all-American tradition to march to the beat for military action, the fountain of flag waving excitement that produces legions of war correspondents, bugle-blaring headlines and armchair commandos in newsrooms.  

It is rare to hear that a drum-beat journalist felt, in retrospect, that rushing to war was perhaps a grave mistake. It’s almost historic, in fact, to see the reconsideration that Bill Keller, a top editor and columnist at the New York Times, published amid the flood of 9/11 commemorations on the 10^th anniversary of that explosive spark of war the US expanded to places most Americans had barely heard of before.

“The world is well rid of Saddam Hussein. But knowing as we now do the exaggeration of Hussein’s threat, the cost in Iraqi and American lives and the fact that none of this great splurge has bought us confidence in Iraq’s future or advanced the cause of freedom elsewhere— I think Operation Iraqi Freedom was a monumental blunder,” Keller wrote in a New York Times Magazine article revealing his conversion from the war hawk club of liberals beating the drums for military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Aside from this astonishing note of atonement, the bulk of the Times’ massive retrospective in the Sunday newspaper is essentially a monument to the US news media’s cheerleading for a decade of military blunders.

A major reason for this is that, for all the war correspondents and warrior-editors, there are few if any journalists assigned to cover waging peace.

Do editors at the Times and other mainstream news organizations ever travel outside military-oriented circles and see what groups such as September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, Peace Action, Veterans For Peace or the US Institute of Peace are doing? Even small newspapers have a military affairs reporter. Does any news organization in America have a peace beat?

The glaring lack of coverage of peace groups’ actions spurred a special report earlier this year by the Nieman Watchdog website of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.

“Antiwar activists repeatedly stage dramatic acts of civil disobedience in the United States but are almost entirely ignored by mainstream print and broadcast news organizations. During the Vietnam era, press coverage of the fighting and opposition to it at home helped turn public opinion against the war. This time around lack of homefront coverage may be helping keep military involvement continue on and on,” wrote John Hanrahan, a former Washington Post reporter.

“By ignoring antiwar protests almost totally, editors are treating opposition to the ongoing war in Afghanistan much as they handled the run-up to the war in Iraq: They are missing an important story and contributing to the perception that there is no visible opposition to the U.S. wars and ever-growing military budgets, even as polls show overwhelming support for early U.S. military withdrawal,” Hanrahan continued.

Among the examples of non-coverage of significant events that Hanrahan cites is this:

“Last December 16, in a demonstration organized by Veterans for Peace, 500 or more people gathered outside the White House, as snow was falling, to protest the war and to support Wikileaks and accused leaker PFC Bradley Manning. As Nieman Watchdog reported in a previous piece in this series, there were 131 arrests – including a sizable number of veterans of current and past wars – for nonviolent acts of civil disobedience. (This was the most arrests at the White House at any point in 2010.) One of the arrestees had chained himself to the White House fence and another to a lamppost. Additional newsworthy factors: Among those arrested were the nation’s most famous whistleblower (Daniel Ellsberg); a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter (Chris Hedges, the former long-time war correspondent for The New York Times); a much-praised FBI whistleblower (Coleen Rowley); a former CIA analyst who used to prepare daily presidential briefings (Ray McGovern), among others. Additionally, the demonstration seemed newsworthy because it coincided with both the release of the Pentagon’s latest progress report on Afghanistan to President Obama and the results of a new ABC/Washington Post poll in which 60 percent of Americans responded that the Afghanistan war had not been ‘worth fighting.’

“The event was covered by The Huffington Post, the Socialist Worker, OpEd News, Salem-News.com in Oregon, and the Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald, but was ignored by The Washington Post, The New York Times and almost all other mainstream media,” Hanrahan found.

Veterans For Peace protest at White House

 As the Nieman report notes, there’s been a colossal failure of balance in coverage of what’s going on in the world. It’s a cultural failure, as well.       

“It’s been a decade since 9/11, time enough to let go and shift the way we approach our decisions about war, right?  One might think so, but … I’m beginning to question if and when we will choose to let go and imagine a new way forward,” notes James A. Moad II, an Air Force officer whose career as an airline pilot was diverted to military missions by the long war. 

“Like most Americans of drinking age, that September day is seared into my subconscious,” he continued. “As a young commercial pilot back then, I can still remember my own nightmares as I imagined what took place in those cockpits, thinking about an old pilot buddy who’d been murdered there, and more than anything, the feeling of insecurity reverberating out from the rubble of those two towers like great clouds obscuring the future and limiting us, blotting out the imagination necessary to see beyond the anger and destruction.”

Moad’s incisive comments were not conveyed in the New York Times’ galaxy of 9/11 reminiscences, but in a War, Literature & The Arts Blog that he administers.

The internet and community-oriented newspapers provide a vital forum for many voices with a different perspective than the usual sources featured in the national news media.

"One of the outcomes of 9/11 is we need to make the decision about what kind of society we want to be," Andrea Leblanc, whose husband Robert died on United Flight 175 when it smashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center, told a local newspaper in New Hampshire, Foster’s Daily Democrat. "What do we want to teach our kids? The story isn't about the fact that for 10 years I've been a widow. It's about the real cost of 9/11. I think this country squandered its moral authority. To me, it's all about peace; what societies are doing to either move toward or away from conflict."  

Leblanc credited fellow 9/11 survivors with providing a compassionate, activist community of support for her anguish.

“An eye opening thing for Andrea through her involvement with September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows is the people all over the world who are reaching across borders to converse and share with other cultures,” Foster’s reporter Jennifer Keefe wrote. “She noted the numerous women's networks in Afghanistan and youth networks that reach out via Skype to hold conferences with other youths to talk about love and understanding. The groups and organizations dedicated to forming unity and speaking out in the wake of 9/11 are not in short supply, and demonstrate each day there is a compassion across borders that breaches even the deadliest of wars.”

It’s not hard to find these stories. In Philadelphia, PA, CNN filmed a Saturday night crowd at World Café Live drawn to an evening celebrating peace and ice cream. “Philadelphia-based Christian author and activist Shane Claiborne partnered with Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream, to raise public awareness about federal military spending,” noted CNN’s website report.

“The evening started off on a somber note with Cohen pouring 10,000 BB gun pellets into a metal container to illustrate the power of the United States’ nuclear arsenal in front of a stunned audience. ‘It’s that kind of overkill mentality that drives an out-of-control Pentagon budget,’ he said.” Another part of his demonstration is a tall stack of oreo cookies looming over tiny piles of cookies representing the military vs. everything else in the federal budget’s priorities.

Winding up the evening, Cohen said: “If we’re going to have fewer bombs and more ice cream, we need to shift our budget to what helps people live instead of killing people.”    

The ice cream business maven has traveled the nation and partnered with community activists, business executives, war veterans and many others to present a stunning critique of military spending overseas while the home front economy crumbled. I first saw his BB and cookie demonstration at a journalists’ conference in Vermont five years ago. Video versions from presentations around the country are all over YouTube.    

For more information:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/06/us/sept-11-reckoning/keller.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=%22bill%20keller%22&st=cse

http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Background.view&backgroundid=563

http://www.fosters.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110911/GJNEWS_01/709099949/-1/FOSNEWS

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/09/11/jesus-bombs-and-ice-cream/

Jan Barry is an award-winning investigative journalist. He has been a peace advocate since resigning from the US Military Academy after serving an Army tour in Vietnam.

Why You Won’t See Veterans For Peace on the Cover of TIME Magazine

Published on August 31, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

by Leah Bolger

The cover of the August 29, 2011 issue of TIME magazine features five members of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), with the caption “The New Greatest Generation.” The point of author Joe Klein’s article is that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have created a new kind of veteran who is “bringing skills that seem to be on the wane in American society, qualities we really need now:  crisp decision making, rigor, optimism, entrepreneurial creativity, a larger sense of purpose and real patriotism.” Klein profiles a small number of veterans (including a Harvard valedictorian, a Rhodes scholar, and a Dartmouth grad) who have done well since returning to civilian life and credits their military service as the reason, then goes on to make a sweeping generalization that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have created a whole new generation of hard-working, disciplined young citizens who have something “more” to offer than their civilian counterparts.

It is articles like this that perpetuate the meme that anyone who ever wore a military uniform is a “hero.”  TIME magazine is part of the biggest media conglomerate in the world, and corporate media is the lubricant that keeps the well-oiled military machine humming along so smoothly.  By glorifying this “new generation”  of veterans, they are adding to the layers of positive messaging about war and militarism, which the American public seems eager to absorb.  We don’t want to ask ourselves the hard questions because we might not like the answers.  The media conflates the military members with the wars themselves and produces layers upon layers of nothing but superficial “feel good” messages which eventually form a fairly unimpugnable depiction of our military, wars and militarism, and anyone who questions the wars risks being decried as unpatriotic.  Congressmen fund wars they don’t agree with because they can’t afford the political cost of not “supporting the troops.”

Klein briefly mentions the high rates of suicide, domestic violence, joblessness and homelessness amongst Iraq and Afghanistan vets, but then dismisses it all by saying that that’s all we ever hear about—he wants to tell us the untold story of a handful of vets who came out of their military experience and moved forward in a positive way.  But the real untold story is the truth of war, and we will never read about that in the likes of magazines like TIME. 

The mission of IAVA is “to improve the lives of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and their families,” and they are very good at that.  They have a multi-million dollar budget, have ready access to the top Congressional leaders and have even met with the President on more than one occasion.  The Executive Director of IAVA, Paul Rieckoff, has appeared hundreds of times on all the major media outlets.  Why is it that IAVA is given so much media exposure, so much access, and so much money?  The answer is that they do not question the legality or morality of war.  They are not critical of the complicity of the corporate media in fostering and supporting militarism.  They want only to support our troops, and who doesn’t want that?

The mission of Veterans For Peace is to end war as an instrument of national policy by educating the public about its true costs and consequences.  Veterans For Peace has been around since 1985 telling the ugly truth of war.  Our members understand the devastating effects of war on both sides of the conflict.  We seek justice for the victims of war—not just ensuring care and benefits for our soldiers, but also reparations for innocent civilian victims.  We know that wars of aggression are the most egregious crime there is, and we point an accusing finger at our government, the military-industrial complex, and the corporate media who collude to keep the United States in a perpetual state of war.  We try to use the power of our first-hand experiences and stories to prevent wars from happening and to end them once begun.  We don’t sugarcoat the experiences of war and the militarism.  We believe that if the American people saw the real truth of war, they would end it.  Think we’ll be on the cover of TIME magazine anytime soon?  Don’t hold your breath.

Leah Bolger spent 20 years on active duty in the U.S. Navy and retired in 2000 at the rank of Commander.  She is currently a full-time peace activist and serves as the National Vice-President of Veterans For Peace.

Local Campaign on Federal Budget Priorities

Sign at recent Teaneck Peace Vigil

If ordinary citizens could decide how to spend one million dollars on behalf of the nation, what would they spend the money on?  That was the idea behind handing out copies of $1 million bills to people who stopped by the NJ National Guard Armory in Teaneck last week during the weekly peace vigil at the corner of Teaneck and Liberty roads.

“Jobs Not War,” Veterans For Peace member Tom Urgo, a plumber from Ridgewood who served in the US Army in Vietnam, wrote on the back of one of the bills. “Resurrect the W.P.A. & the C.C.C.,” wrote another North Jersey resident, referring to the federal agencies created by President Roosevelt to provide government-subsidized jobs building schools, roads, state and national parks during the Great Depression in the 1930s.

“Spend our tax dollars for people’s needs, not to kill people. Use this money to create jobs, fund education & medical care, and finance our state & local governments,” wrote Joseph Harris, a labor mediator from Teaneck.  

These and other handwritten budget messages are being sent to New Jersey’s congressional delegation.

Other budget priorities presented by more than two dozen people who took time to write their thoughts include: housing for the homeless, Veterans Affairs, AIDS and drought relief in Africa, the Peace Corps and to establish a Peace Department.

While not drawn from a scientifically random survey of North Jersey residents, the budget priorities expressed by these concerned citizens closely match those of the American public as shown in national polls. “Unemployment and jobs” topped a Bloomberg National Poll in June, while the war in Afghanistan only drew 5 percent support as the nation’s most pressing issue.

A University of Maryland study released in March found similar concerns in its national survey.  "Clearly both the administration and the Republican-led House are out of step with the public's values and priorities in regard to the budget," said University of Maryland School of Public Policy researcher Steven Kull, who directs the Program for Public Consultation, which did the study. "Our respondents would more than double funding for job training and cut deeply on defense."

The $1-million budget priorities campaign was inaugurated during the 6^th anniversary of the weekly peace vigil at the National Guard Armory. The event is sponsored by the Teaneck Peace Vigil, Military Families Speak Out, Bergen County; Veterans For Peace, Chapter 21 NJ; Bergen Greens and New Jersey Peace Action. The peace vigil goals are: The immediate return of all troops and military contractors from Afghanistan and Iraq, proper care for the troops when they return, maintain the NJ National Guard in New Jersey, and use war dollars at home for community benefits.

Welcome Home

Among the highlights of the 2011 Veterans For Peace convention in Portland, Oregon earlier this month was a showing of a new documentary, "The Welcome," on a memorable community event that several VFP members helped create and foster.

Eli Painted Crow and fellow vets in "The Welcome"

By Jan Barry

Bob and Moe Eaton’s marriage, shadowed for more than 30 years by nightmares from the war in Vietnam, was about to implode. Ken Kraft, an Army officer who proudly served in Iraq, felt betrayed by his son’s refusal to carry on the family tradition of military service. Eli Painted Crow, a former Army drill sergeant, felt betrayed by the nation that sent her to war on dark-skinned, tribal people like herself.

These were just some of the rubbed-raw emotions that a couple dozen war veterans and several family members brought to an unusual retreat in Oregon. In this deceptively quiet setting, a film crew recorded real life dramas brimming with outbursts of bitterness and laughter, tears and hugs, dark humor and dawning revelations. The focus of the four-day gathering, just before Memorial Day 2008, was to sort out what they wanted to say—in a poem or a song or a concise statement—to a crowd of people preparing a public event to welcome these warriors home from war.

“I’m asking you to f------ listen!” Eli Painted Crow shouted at the other participants in a particularly tense point in the new documentary called “The Welcome.” A retired Army sergeant and Native American peace activist, Painted Crow was fed up with interruptions as she attempted to explain how she felt about her deployment in Iraq, where fellow soldiers called combat areas Indian country. “I just want to be heard with your hearts,” she added, before stomping out the door to cool off. “If you don’t hear me with your hearts, I can’t heal.”

In another scene, a member of Veterans For Peace said he felt like the enemy in Vietnam. Another Vietnam vet retorted that he wasn’t the enemy but killed people who were the enemy. That set off a whirlwind of war justifications by other veterans.

Such scenes pull viewers intimately into the inner turmoil of the aftermath of war that swirls through many veterans across America. Throughout the 93-minute film directed by Kim Shelton, veterans and family members openly struggle to tame the turmoil long enough to find some pathway to healing.

“Sometimes you stumble into something out of a sense of duty or good intentions only to find yourself absorbed and overwhelmed beyond anything you might have anticipated,” a reviewer for The Oregonian, Shawn Levy, wrote of this low-budget film that was an audience hit at the Ashland (Oregon) Independent Film Festival this spring.

“From virtually the outset, with a poem by Laura Carpenter, a veteran of Afghanistan about to deploy to Iraq, ‘The Welcome’ drills directly through any emotional reserves you might bring into it,” Levy added. “You're unsteadied, startled, galvanized, and brought to sobs again and again.  There are dark jokes and harrowing accounts of the hellish confusion of war and its grip on the memory.  There are angry outbursts as the various veterans try to establish terms of respect and conduct with one another.  There are wry laughs and monumental silences.  And there are staggering moments of courage in which the veterans look as if they're merely speaking aloud but in which they are actually performing open-heart surgery on themselves -- in front of an audience and a movie camera.”

Amazingly, the participants ignored the camera as they candidly interacted with each other and with retreat leader Michael Meade, described by the filmmakers as a “mythologist and story teller who specialized in working with traumatized communities.” Meade’s ritualistic mixture of Native American chants and Irish stories grated on Eli Painted Crow and another Native American woman veteran. But after an outburst about respecting traditions, they participated on their terms.

“One of the ways to heal is to find out what our gifts are and begin practicing giving them,” Meade said, in guiding the group to write poetry, which he defined as “the speech of the soul,” in preparation for a Memorial Day event at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland.

Retired Army Captain Ken Kraft wrestled with how to make sense of a phone call he’d gotten in Iraq that his son had deserted from Army ranger training and denounced the war. He felt betrayed, he said, and bolted from the podium back to his seat. At the Memorial Day event, Kraft praised the intense interaction at the retreat and read a poem about his pride in being a soldier and noted that he was trying to reach out to his son.

A young woman veteran shyly read a poem about the shame of a sexual assault by a military superior. Another young woman vet read a poem about older veterans reaching out and clearing a path for them.

Cynthia Lefever, whose son was severely wounded in Iraq, read a poem about a dream in which rows of wounded soldiers marched down a road toward her, beseeching: “Be our mom—for God’s sake, bring us home!”

“I found a voice I didn’t know I had,” Mandy Martin, another of the retreat participants, said in a recent PBS television interview. "The impact has been pretty immense," she said of the veterans' healing project. A follow up on the film website notes that she now works at the Department of Veterans Affairs as a congressional communications officer.

Moe Eaton, whose husband Bob served in Vietnam, read a poem about his frightening mood swings and suicidal statements. “Me: Why can’t you count your blessings? He: I don’t know.”

Bob Eaton then haltingly told a story, which he said he’d never been able to tell his wife, about surviving a battle in Vietnam and having to shovel up the remains of dead soldiers blown apart by artillery explosions. “I thought every f------ night that that was going to happen again,” he added.

At the Memorial Day event, Bob Eaton pulled out a guitar, stared at the packed auditorium full of neighbors, friends and strangers and brought down the house with applause when he growled “I was heavily medicated for depression. I wanted to get off the medication and took up the guitar. You’re the first audience I’ve ever played for.”

“You’re coming home/ Feeling all alone/ Thousand-yard stare/ Nobody there,” he sang and then stopped, nearly breaking down. The audience clapped again encouragingly. “When will it end?/ The guilt and the shame/ Now it’s back again,” he continued.  “That old war/ It still haunts me.”

In a recent PBS television interview about the film, Moe Eaton said the couple’s participation in the veterans’ retreat “had a lot to do with saving our marriage.” She realized, she said, that Bob’s war nightmares wouldn’t go away by continuing to say “get over it.”

For Bob Eaton, playing a song he wrote at the Memorial Day “Welcome Home” event launched a new career singing at veterans’ gatherings. “It gave me the courage to keep going,” he said.

The documentary was made by Kim Shelton and her husband, Bill McMillan, who are both therapists in Ashland, Oregon. They created the Welcome Home Project to provide resource materials for communities interested in holding similar events and are seeking film festivals and organizations that would be interested in hosting showings of the film.

For more information:
http://www.thewelcomehomeproject.org/
http://www.thewelcomethemovie.com/
http://blog.oregonlive.com/madaboutmovies/2011/04/ashland_independent_film_festi_1.html

In fighting wars, do the math

This letter to the editor appeared in The Record (Bergen Co. NJ) on July 29, 2011 

Recently, a friend of mine, also a retired teacher from Paterson, e-mailed with some information about the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. I kind of put it aside. However, when I had some free time I took up his challenge and did the math, as he suggested.

My friend contended that if you spent $1 million a day from the time Jesus Christ was born to the present, you wouldn't have spent as much as we did in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last 10 years. I multiplied 365 by 2,010, which gave me a total of 734,154 days (503 leap years). Multiplied by $1 million, I came up with $734.2 billion, which is more than half of what we have spent on the Iraq-Afghanistan wars ($1.3 trillion and counting). It's also a little more than half of what the Department of Defense gobbled up in two years.

It seems incredible that we're spending that kind of money on wars of choice and weapons to fight an enemy that no longer exists, the Soviet Union, while we're cutting money to things we desperately need here at home, like health care, education and public transportation.

As Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed, "Any nation that continuously spends more on weapons of defense rather than uplifting its citizens is a nation approaching spiritual death." I would add that we reached that point many years ago, and we're now in the middle of financial and political death.

In 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower, a retired professional military man, had these thoughts: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

"This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."

I hope readers will encourage their representatives in Washington to try doing the math for once.

Ken Dalton
July 20

The writer is president of Veterans For Peace, Chapter 21, in New Jersey.

Sailing for Peace

Golden Rule in June 1958 (Honolulu Star-Bulletin photo)

Beyond the July 4th fireworks celebrating historic battles against the British empire, American history includes many other memorable moments when courageous acts of conscience stirred the nation to steer a peaceful tack against the winds of war. One of those moments was in the spring of 1958 when a retired Navy captain, Albert Bigelow, set off in a small sailboat to nonviolently challenge the United States military use of the South Pacific as a nuclear weapons testing zone.

Concerns about radioactive fallout from nuclear bomb tests and the possibility of nuclear war worried many people around the world. When authorities stopped the “Golden Rule” as it sailed out of Hawaii and arrested Bigelow and his peacenik crew, a tsunami of antinuclear testing protests erupted across America. “Later that year, the beleaguered U.S. government agreed to a nuclear testing moratorium,” historian Lawrence S. Wittner recently noted in an article in Z magazine on the impact of what he called the “legendary” sailboat.

Bigelow—a World War II veteran who died in 1993 at age 87—continued protesting preparations for waging nuclear war and what he saw as other outrages, joining the Freedom Riders in 1961 on another history-changing journey. The “Golden Rule,” meanwhile, sailed off into oblivion until it was dredged up last year from the bottom of Humboldt Bay in northern California.

Shipyard owner Leroy Zerlang was torn between cutting up the salvaged wreck or preserving it in a museum, Wittner wrote. Now a crew of history-minded volunteers is working to restore the 30-foot wooden ketch and sail her under the flag of Veterans For Peace. "She's going to be the peace boat out to confront militarism and needless war," project coordinator Fredy Champagne recently told The Sacramento Bee.

“It was the Golden Rule's peace mission that captivated Champagne,” noted Bee correspondent Jane Braxton Little. “After a year of combat in Vietnam, he retreated to the hills of Humboldt County, living as a recluse with post-traumatic stress disorder. One morning in 1988, he suddenly decided to build a hospital in Vietnam.

“Since then Champagne has organized 23 teams of veterans to build dozens of medical facilities, schools and homes in Vietnam. His ‘people-to-people diplomacy’ campaign also includes driving the Kosovo Peace Bus, which held ‘teach-ins’ in major U.S. cities; building water systems in Iraq; and organizing a 2000 trip to Cuba for the Lost Coast Pirates Little League team.

"”Waging peace has saved my life,’ said Champagne.”

Champagne and other members of the Golden Rule Project of Veterans For Peace set a goal of raising $50,000 for repairs, including replacing the deck and cabin. They plan to launch the ship by next summer to tour U.S. waterways to promote the peace group’s “goals of nuclear disarmament, abolishment of war,” Champagne wrote in a report in the current issue of the Veterans For Peace Newsletter.

The Golden Rule Project organizers’ vision and enthusiasm is contagious, Grandmothers for Peace International’s director, Lorraine Krofchok, stated in that organization’s spring 2011 newsletter.

“This little ketch could be used to educate ‘the future’ and how peace is the only alternative to constant war and aggression,” Krofchok wrote after visiting the storied sailboat in dry dock in Fairhaven, California. “Our oceans are bombarded with ‘war games.’ The Golden Rule could become a lead boat in a Flotilla of Peace.”

For more information:
http://www.vfpgoldenruleproject.org/
http://www.zcommunications.org/the-golden-rule-will-sail-again-by-lawrence-s-wittner
http://www.sacbee.com/2011/06/28/3731864/eureka-volunteers-work-to-restore.html#ixzz1RI61yj6A