Link to Original Article: http://www.opednews.com/articles/2/Photo-Essay-Thoughts-for-by-Mac-McKinney-090703-434.html

As we go into the fourth of July weekend, which is all about bombs bursting in air, fireworks and hotdogs, let us not get sucked up into the seductive militarism that tries to attach itself to this celebration of our revolution freeing us from the British, a celebration where, however, patriotism can get confused with imperialism, where power projection can get confused with national defense, and let us at least ponder, for a moment, what Major General Smedley Butler of the Marine Corps, in a lucid statement, once
said:

WAR is a racket. It always has been.

It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes. (source)

And now let us look at some people who also feel very strongly that war in general is not only wrong but horribly threatening and destructive to all sentient life on the planet, particularly at this stage in
the planet's evolution, where resources for survival are dwindling and social
problems magnifying exponentially. Let us look at people who not only talk the talk about a peaceful world, but walk the walk to create it.

Friday, June 26, 2009

Norfolk,
Virginia

I had the day off and overslept some, so I had to pick up the pace to get dressed and eat before I took off for the other side of Norfolk, at the Little Creek Naval Amphibious Base - the intersection of E. Little Creek Blvd. and Shore Drive to be exact. It was already hot outside when I rushed to my car and turned on the ignition. The weatherman was promising temperatures in the 90s today for all of Hampton Roads, Virginia and here it was at 8:00 am and it already felt like 80 degrees.

8:00 am! Damn, I'm late! The vigil starts at 8:00, so I would have to press the pedal to the metal some, roaring up Hampton Blvd toward Naval Station Norfolk, which is at the northern end of Hampton, but this was not my immediate destination, although it would be the ultimate one on this last day of this challenging five-day peace event from June 22-26 called "On the Road to No War: A Walk for Disarmament from Camp Peary to Naval Station Norfolk."

I pulled into a big, largely empty parking lot for a mall complex across from the Naval Amphibious Base (NAB) at Shore and Little Creek. I could see some vigil signs and a flag rising above cars and through telephone poles and trees across the street as I parked and stepped out into the bright sun. Immediately north of me I saw several recognizable figures holding signs, Ann and Sara, Sara with her two kids:

The signs speak for themselves. Imagine what half a trillion dollars, a rough stab at the cost of devastating Iraq thus far, would do to help the destitute in America and elsewhere.

After talking briefly to the Sara and Ann, I crossed to the naval base side of the street where the bulk of the peace advocates were standing with their signs and posters, and Tom Palumbo with his Veterans for Peace flag fluttering in the slight breeze.

There were twenty plus people milling around smartly, some of them local, some out of state. I could recognize a few members of OffBase, Norfolk Catholic Worker, the local Amnesty International and other groups, but a good number I had never seen before. One such, Angela Stevens, whom I learned is affiliated with the local Hope House, but not actually representing them this day, provided me with what I consider an iconic moment in photography, as she stood all alone facing incoming base traffic entering from a side road. The passersby, all military or civilian contractors, were not all exactly receptive to her sign's blunt message, "DISARM NOW" so she was getting a few unkind comments from them like "fu*king hippie", although she was getting some positive responses too.

By close to 9:00 am, the motley lines of peace activists gathered together across the street from the base for a vigil prayer circle to end the event. There were just shy of two dozen people, young and old alike, who now gathered together to annunciate a sense of collective spiritual purpose for the event. And when I say young, I mean really young:

The highlight of the vigil was when a red-headed Virginian gal named Patrice, who has a son in Iraq, read aloud Julia Ward Howe's famous 1870 Mother's Day Proclamation. Here is what she read:

Mother's Day Proclamation

by Julia Ward Howe – Boston, 1870

Arise then...women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
"We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."
From the bosom of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: "Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."
Blood does not wipe out dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil
At the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace...
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God -
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

At this time the group started shifting gears into walking mode. The long journey to Naval Station Norfolk, sometimes called NOB, Naval Operating Base, was about to begin, a nine plus mile trek in heat that promised to hit the 90s today.  This immediately thinned the ranks because mothers and grandmothers with young children were not going to attempt such a rugged trek in the sun, and several other individuals simply had to be elsewhere. For example, Daniel Riehl of the Frazer Mennonite Church 30 miles west of Philadelphia, who had marched for peace all week, had to begin the long drive back.

But twelve hearty souls were ready, signs, posters or flag in hand,  to begin the walk, Jerry, Steve, Tom, Patrice, Glenn, Jack, Chrissy, Russell, George, Sister Carol, Sister Ardeth and Michael. I am going to call them the Final Twelve. And then there was me, in sync with the cause but acting as an independent journalist today for OpEdNews.com.

The idea was to walk all the way to the western end of Little Creek Blvd, and then turn north on Hampton Blvd, which dead-ends at the main gate of NOB. And so, around about 9:15 am, the final leg of the five-day Road to No War began.

The point man, so to speak, was a fellow named Michael Berg, formerly from Philadephia and now a Norfolk resident, an athletic-looking middle-aged guy who was dedicated to, to the point of multiple arrests for his protest activities, creating a peaceful world. He was an affiliate of both Norfolk OffBase and the Norfolk Catholic Worker. He was a somber man with a story to tell, for he had lost his son in Iraq. As I began walking and talking with him, he told he had just recently crafted a statement that explains why he was taking a public stand against war. He pulled out a hand-written statement from his pocket, not even completely finished and handed it to me to read. I decided to copy it down, and this is what it said:

Before I lost my son Nick in Iraq I protested war because I couldn't imagine what it would be like to lose a son or daughter or another loved one to a war. I couldn't imagine the ring of the phone with the message of his fatality, the burst of the bomb in my head, the shrapnel that filled my gut, nor living paralyzed, crippled the rest of my life. Now I protest war because I can imagine these things. I implore you to all that you can to keep yourself and others from the learning the same way.

There were several people from out of state in our troop, Sister Carol Gilbert, O.P., Sister Ardeth Platte, O.P. and Chrissy Nesbitt, all three of them from Jonah House (http://www.jonahhouse.org/) (as in the Biblical Book of Jonah), a spiritual community founded by the late Philip Berrigan and his wife Liz MacAlister in Baltimore, whose mission is to teach nonviolence and resist war, militarism and oppression. Dominican Sisters Ardeth and Gilbert are both well-known Plowshare activists against nuclear weapons, who have both been arrested and imprisoned for making crosses with their blood on, and symbolically striking the concrete silo of a missile with a hammer at a Colorado Minuteman III nuclear missile site in 2002. This was specifically in protest to the then pending attack on Iraq. They served 41 months and 33 months respectively in Federal prison and are considered "domestic terrorists" by our Orwellian government. I talked awhile with them as we sojourned up Little Creek and they shared their deep commitment to banning nuclear weapons and ending the culture of violence known as war.

Sometime after 11:00 am we were closing in on the intersection of Granby Street and Little Creek, which was more than half way to our goal. We stepped into a
MacDonald's parking lot and, somewhat frizzled by now from the steadily rising
heat, decided to eat lunch off in a tree-shaded corner. Someone cell-phoned our follow car, which would show up every now and then with water, Gatorade and fruit, which soon pulled up again to provide food for lunch, nothing extravagant, peanut butter and jelly, more fruit, some salad, granola bars.

It was at this point that Patrice and myself had to get back to our cars, Patrice to drive back home, I to go do some essential tasks for several hours before coming back. My goal was to catch up with them again as they approached NOB. So back they took us to the mall parking lot across from NAS where we gingerly crawled into our now oven-like cars and drove off.

At Naval Station Norfolk, Main Gate

A little before 2:00 pm I started driving up busy Hampton Blvd toward the naval base. I had called Ann, who surprised me when she said they were already well up Hampton, so I was now trying to stay in the faster lanes to catch them in time. But this is where the colloquial version of the Peter Principle, where if something can possibly go wrong in a situation, it usually does, suddenly kicked in because, as I approached the intersection of Terminal Blvd and Hampton Blvd, I noted that on the far right, a Norfolk Southern freight train headed for the coal piers was starting to cross into the intersection to the accompaniment of clanging signal bells and flashing red lights. No way was I going to be able to run past that.

So I sat and sat, openly cursing, while some 150 cars - I don't know, lost count - slowly clanged by at five to ten miles an hour. Perfect untiming! Cars where piling up for blocks on both sides. Finally the caboose wheeled by and the traffic started flowing again. A mile or so later I saw several of our group's cars parked on the last residential side street before the base, pulled up to them, parked and got out. Ann greeted me, explaining that the marchers were just reaching the end of the journey now, so we jumped into her car and she whisked me up to the end of Admiral Taussig Blvd and Hampton, the very last intersection before the main gate. As she stopped at the right corner momentarily, I lept out, camera in hand. There was the Final Twelve, most of them standing just ahead on a traffic island, holding their very last peace vigil as traffic whizzed by every which way. Taking another headcount, I discovered that they had picked up one more soul to replace Patrice, keeping that figure twelve intact.

For the next half hour or so everyone just basically waved signs and posters, handing out a few leaflets to curious marines or sailors walking by. Finally though, they began to form up for one last vigil prayer circle, not merely to summarize and bless the impact of the vigil, but to prayer for Russell and Glenn, who had decided to carry out an act of simple civil disobedience. Steve Baggarly of Norfolk Catholic Worker, a well-known, oft-arrested witness for peace himself, led things off with some simple thanks. Then Tom Palumbo, main organizer for Norfolk OffBase incarcerated himself in the past for taking  principled positions against authority, read aloud the history and current military mission and breadth of Naval Station Norfolk before handing things back to Steve, who now read that famous passage from Micah, Chapter 4, verses 1-4 in the Bible. This is the King James version:

1 ¶ But in the last days it shall come to pass, [that] the mountain of the house of the LORD shall be established in the top of the mountains, and it shall be exalted above the hills; and people shall flow unto it. 2. And many nations shall come, and say, Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, and to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths: for the law shall go forth of Zion, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. 3. And he shall judge among many people, and rebuke strong nations afar off; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. 4. But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make [them] afraid: for the mouth of the LORD of hosts hath spoken. 

Next, Russell, who has been arrested before for protesting against what was formerly known as the SOA or School of the Americas (Americas often interchanged with the word Assassins by many) said a few words and then a prayer, the two sisters chanted and gestured out their own prayer, Russell De Young and Glenn Fiscella grabbed their long banner and started walking out into the traffic to block a lane at the main gate, and everyone broke into a hymn, appropriately about beating swords into plowshares, led by the Sisters.

The red and black on white six-foot or so long banner read "Conversion: Military Dollars to Human Needs." As Russell and Glenn, who had also been incarcerated in the past at a New York City anti-war rally, approached the actual security gate, shouts and the high shrieks of police whistles filled the air and a contingent of police rushed to arrest them. They had been standing by because it had already been announced in the media that there would be an act of civil disobedience. The arrests were completed in several minutes, and everything went back to normal in a jaded world overwhelmed with war, torture, mass murder and weaponry, but abnormal in a Universe underwritten by Love and Unity. You can watch the whole thing slowly unfold on my video of the event by &feature=PlayList&p=1364ED3CAC84F40F&index=0&playnext=1">clicking here.

The base police, who were quite professional, confiscated the banner and led Russell and Glenn, hand-cuffed, to a processing room where they given citations for trespassing and orders banning them from the naval station in the future. Several hours later they were released.
The rest of us held the vigil for a few minutes longer before dispersing back to waiting transportation down the road. Thus ended the Road to No War: A Walk for Disarmament from Camp Peary to Naval Station Norfolk. How much impact this will have on the ongoing struggle to move the country and world beyond fear and loathing and ultimately into the Light has yet to be seen, but everyone involved knows that they touched some hearts and minds that week.

I also have posted a photo album of the vigils and walk for the day at Kodak Gallery online. You can view the entire slideshow by clicking here. You do not have to sign in.

When you reach the site you can start the slideshow or thumb through the photos manually.

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