Never has there been a good war or a bad peace - Benjamin Franklin

The US government is facing one of the most peaceful, massive and very well organized series of protests on a world scale against the current war. BBC reported there were half-a-million people on the streets of New York on Feb. 15 and between six and 10 million people are thought to have marched in up to 60 countries over the that weekend. A local Connecticut news station reported that there were two hundred thousand people in New York and CNN reported there were one hundred thousand people. Why the discrepancy? That is a discussion for another time. As someone with first hand experience of having seen rational, progressive public voice underreported in the mainstream US media, I am not surprised by it. News channels are more interested in showing sports and weather than important debates on policies that can affect the rest of human history.

At the New York rally there were families (a lot of children, babies), Vietnam and Korean war veterans, people of every race, age group and persuasion imaginable; basically hundreds of thousands of every day people who are able to see through all the lies surrounding the current war came out on a cold miserable day to stand for peace. Even as our group got in to the train in Norwalk we could see that the whole train was filled with people going to the rally. Our next seat neighbors were from Maine who had traveled the whole night to get to the rally. It felt good. New York city made every effort to stop the march. Finally, the city gave permission for a rally but not a march. Basically people could gather at one place but they couldn’t march. Still what happened was that groups met at different locations for purely logistical reasons and marched to the rally location where a number of famous people, celebrities, historians and artists were speaking and performing against the war. The policeman we talked to said that they didn’t expect half-a-million people to come out and they weren’t prepared. He said “People have really made their point”. He was friendly. Of course there was mounted police, and police in riot gear. But barring a handful of confrontations, the rally was peaceful. There were many interesting and funny signs and placards from “How did our oil get under their soil”, to “Orange Alert!! Mad Cowboy disease”.

The mainstream US media is doing a grave disservice to democracy by playing down the importance of these public outbursts. All the talk about democracy sounds hollow when the public policy is dictated by a handful of oil hungry millionaires. US military budget is around $400 billion a year. Let us imagine that 400 billion dollars is budgeted for peace. With 40 billion dollars we can feed the world’s population; spend a 100 billion to solve the territorial issues that haunt humans today. We will still have money left!! Also, US president is the most powerful human being on this planet with 10,000 nuclear war- heads at his disposal. Our earth can be destroyed in a matter of hours. Humanity cannot afford to have one human being (or a small group) with so much power, especially, a group of people who have already used nuclear weapons once, the only group to do so; and a group that consistently violates international laws. Some of us have accepted this place as our home or a second home. Would we be happy in a home where our family makes trouble all the time, harming people in our neighborhood?

Wars set everything back. Education, health, arts, civil rights, women’s rights: every basic thing we care about. Socio-economic cost of wars is very high. Look at Afghanistan today. A country that was a relatively peaceful place in 1965 has become hell on earth because two superpowers decided to play their war games on somebody else’s soil. Since the last gulf war, where an estimated 20 million tons of explosives has been dropped and 40 tons of depleted uranium left back, the cancer rates have gone up (700% between 1991 and 1994) and child mortality has gone up (345%). 1.5 million people (750,000 children) have died in Iraq because of US government sanctions since 1999 and the US government hasn’t stopped bombing. What a way to liberate a people!

Peace is action. Peace is not inaction. Peace is more work than war. Creation is more work than destruction. As human beings we have to demand that all human life be treated equally. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter”. Life matters. We have to oppose this war with all we have, to retain our basic humanity.

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