Wednesday, July 14, 2010

The peace movement is dead -- new strategies needed -- suggestions follow


Fran said...

I think about what was so successful in past movements....

The Vietnam war was fueled by a triple whammy-
1. The Draft. People were sent to war against their will.
2. The Death rate. Extremely high fatality rate coupled with severe injuries. As the death count escalated, so did the pressure to get out of the war.
3. The MLK factor. The very high profile Reverend Martin Luther King crossed over from being the voice of the civil rights movement, to speaking out about war.
He had a very complex & wide perspective on it-- both from the point that poor black kids were dying & fighting at a great rate- exploiting their poverty, and from a moral standpoint.... his now 40 year old speech When Silence is Betrayal-- he said he was not 1 issue dimensional, and the whole empire idea of the states needed to be questioned. He also had the vision that unless we break away from that mindset, we'd be having wars in other countries for years to come.
He openly spoke out against it-- at a huge risk & he was killed shortly thereafter.

Because it is now "a war of the willing" there is less uproar-- in fact people don;t feel the sacrifice... unless it is their loved one killed or injured for life, or forever changed or damaged as a result of the trauma of war.

I think people are burned out. We've protested, been arrested, written, blogged , voted done whatever we can to change this course to no avail.
One observation- here anyway seems to be lots of the same /older regulars in the peace movement.... I see a few young upstarts, but not the numbers we should be seeing.

Used to be 100,000 people rally in D. C- it meant something - the pressure was on.
But now, the Pres just goes away for the weekend... nobody home.
That was a Bush tactic. Tuck tail & run

the peace movement is alive & exhausted.

Anonymous said...

the movements are dead because the next step is action by other means.