Missoula peace rally address: We say NO
By JANET FINN
Sunday, February 16, 2003
I am overwhelmed to take in this sight of so many of us gathered here today – it is a glorious mosaic of humanity. I am deeply moved by our collective presence, standing together for peace. We have the power of conviction and collective voice to say NO to the politics of violence and preemptive strikes. We are many, we are organized, we are growing, and we will not be silenced. We will not be silenced by the politics of fear and the campaigns to convince us that war against Iraq is our country’s only alternative.
We say NO to the arrogance of imperialism that blinds us to the possibility and necessity of a shared global future.
We say NO to the public relations campaigns selling war. We say NO to the condemnation of those of us who refuse to buy it.
We say NO to the either-or logic that drives of our nation’s leaders – it is a divisive logic of all or nothing, of axes of evil, of “us and them.” It is a logic that condemns those who question as enemies, threats, anti-American and other. It is a logic that undermines the very fundamentals of pluralism, debate, and diversity that are at the heart of our democracy.
We say NO to the political doublespeak where “occupation” is called “liberation” where massive human wreckage is called “collateral damage,” where a foreign policy of aggression in tidied up in the language of a “doctrine of preemption,” where total war is called “peacemaking.”
Earlier this week Senator Robert Byrd challenged his fellow senators to contemplate the horrors of war. He questioned their ominous silence, their political paralysis in such a grave, global moment. He accused his colleagues of sleepwalking through history. But we are not sleepwalkers. We are here today because we are awake, we are alert, and we are adamant that war is not inevitable. We say YES to the very real peaceful alternatives before us – to redoubling the work of inspectors, to valuing the political wisdom and diplomacy of our allies, to reclaiming our greatness as a nation through respect for human rights, dignity, and life, and to acknowledging our vulnerability as well as our strength.
I ask that we take a moment to contemplate the horrific possibilities of war in Iraq and its psychic, social, material, and spiritual consequences. Tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians died in the US air war against Iraq in 1991. The destruction of infrastructure and safe water supplies, economic sanctions, and campaigns of intimidation have perpetuated the damage over the past decade. And now our government is poised to wage total war against Saddam Hussein. In truth, we are poised to wage war against a country of vulnerable people, more than half of whom are children under age 15. We are poised to send tens of thousands of our young men and women into this conflagration, and place our towns and cities at risk for retaliatory attacks. Our leaders are pumping billions in to war, draining resources from those with the least political and economic power at home – children, the poor, the homeless, the elderly – draining resources from the basics of health care, welfare, jobs, and education. By saturating us in images of fear and vulnerability, do our leaders hope to distract us from the realities of our faltering economic at home? Are they banking on the adage, “war is good for business?”
In the event of war, what might be the consequences? According to the London Guardian, the World Health Organization estimates that 100,000 Iraqi civilians could be wounded and another 400,000 hit by disease after bombings of water and sewage facilities. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people would likely become refugees pushed into neighboring countries, while more than a million are likely to be displaced inside the country. The WHO does not even hazard a guess at the possible death toll on all fronts. The potential for destruction is incomprehensible. And how will we bear witness to the consequences of war? Will we be fed sanitized, surreal images and pep-talk sound bites as fleeting as those of Afghanistan, guaranteed to gratify short attention spans and erase historical memory? We stand together to say NO to this vision of our future and YES to the possibilities of peace.
I am a social worker and I have both a personal and professional commitment to peace, human rights, and social justice. I am inspired by our strengths in numbers today, and I am inspired by the courage of women who have come before us and given us models for waging peace. I close with the words of Jane Addams, a social worker and lifelong peace activist and advocate for social justice. Addams was the first president of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. Her words are as relevant today as when she spoke them more than 70 years ago. These are her words:
“I believe that peace is not merely the absence of war but the nurture of human life and that in time this nurture would do away with war as a natural process. People must come to realize how futile war is. It is so disastrous, not only in poison gas used to destroy lives, but in the poison injected into the public mind. We are suffering still from a war psychology. [We must come to realize that] one war is really the result of past wars. If it became fixed in the human mind that killing was not justified it would be done away with.”
Thank you.