Saturday, May 23, 2009

Book forum focuses on the misuse of patriotic fervor to justify acts of aggression

Please click on image to ENLARGE view of panelists at the OMNI Center for Peace, Justice and Ecology book forum at Night Bird Books on May 22. 2009.




Edrene McKay (from left), who teaches history at NorthWest Arkansas Community College, Tom Kennedy, emeritus professor of history at the University of Arkansas, Nancy Miller Saunders, author of Combat by Trial, and Lisa Corrigan, assistant professor of history at the UA, are pictured. Kennedy was the moderator. In the top photo, Saunders and emeritus professor of English Dick Bennett pause for a portrait after the discussion. The other scheduled panelist, Larry Woodall, a Springdale businessman and local leader in progressive thinking, was unable to attend Saturday's forum.

Friday, May 15, 2009

Endangered species day and other items of interest today

INTERNATIONAL CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTORS DAY
PROTEST THE HUMAN [all species] COSTS OF MILITARY TOXICS WEEK begins
ENDANGERED SPECIES DAY
(I momentarily overlooked MAY 13, BIRTHDAY OF RACHEL CARSON, one of the inaugurators of the modern ecological movement.)
Tomorrow is PEACE ACTION DAY, an appropriate alternative to ARMED FORCES DAY.
And the 17th is the DAY Brown v. Board of Education was decided, and World Shift DAY.
We should pay more attention to these days. Contact OMNI if you will.
--
Dick Bennett

Monday, May 11, 2009

OMNI patriotism forum

OMNI PATRIOTISM FORUM‏
MAY 22, 2009
Sponsor: OMNI Center for Peace, Justice, and Ecology
OMNI BOOK FORUM ON PATRIOTISM
Subject: The books discussed by the panelists range widely over such subjects as patriotism, superpatriotism, nationalism, Americanism, US exceptionalism, loyalty, justice. What is patriotism, and what is the proper behavior of a patriotic citizen?
Date: Friday, May 22, 2009
Place: Nightbird Books
Time: 6:00
Some of the questions to be raised during the Forum:
What is patriotism. What does it mean to love one’s country? To be anti-patriotic is to be anti-American? Is love of nation natural? Is there a difference between country and nation and government? Are love of nation and love of country identical? What is the role of the flag? Of loyalty? Is love of country geographical, demographic, cultural, ideological (freedom?), for economic opportunity and prosperity? What is the relationship between patriotism and nationalism? Are they responsible for good or harm mainly? Is patriotism equally laudable in all countries—Nazi, Soviet, British, USA? How many US wars have been justifiable? What has been their purpose—freedom? Should a citizen support an unjust war? Should we recite the/a Pledge of Allegiance? Sign a loyalty oath? Would we be better off with matriotism?
Panelists:
Edrene McKay, NWACC History Instructor, Superpatriotism
Lisa Corrigan, Asst. Prof. UA, The Curious Feminist
Larry Woodall, Businessman, American Exceptionalism and Human Rights
Nancy Saunders, Writer, Combat by Trial
Dick Bennett
jbennet@uark.edu
(479) 442-4600
2582 Jimmie Ave.
Fayetteville, AR 72703

Saturday, May 9, 2009

Remembering Mother's Day 1872

JULIA WARD HOWE’S MOTHER’S DAY FOR PEACE 2009

Julia Ward Howe made the first known suggestion for a Mother’s Day in the United States in 1872. She suggested that people observe a Mother’s Day as a day dedicated to peace, in protest against the carnage of the Civil War. For several years, she held an annual Mother’s Day meeting in Boston. Earlier in 1870 she wrote this Proclamation:

Mother's Day Proclamation

Arise, then, women of this day! Arise all women who have hearts, whether our baptism be that of water or of fears!

Say firmly: "We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall 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 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 the 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 our dishonor nor violence indicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plow 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 then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing after their own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.

In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality may be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient and at 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.

Julia Ward Howe, Boston 1870


Julia Ward Howe was trying to build a Culture of Peace in the United Sstates. What is a Culture of Peace? A culture is the sum total of ways of living built up by a group of human beings and transmitted from one generation to another. It’s everybody, not just the leaders. Remember that the Inquisition was not solely a priestly imposition, but it was a cultural symptom—the people supported it. Similarly, President Bush was elected not only once but a second time by which time his depredations were known. Support for perpetual war was integrated throughout our nation between the beginning of WWII and today. In contrast, the peace movement would replace the culture of commercial cupidity, wars, and empire with a Culture of Peace. Therefore we must counter violence, war, greed, arrogance in all of their manifestations. OMNI is doing that in NWA. One way is to affirm institutions that reinforce cooperation and compassion. OMNI, for example, celebrates Human Rights Day for all people. Another way is to replace institutions that sustain the dominant system with alternatives. An example is our counter-Columbus Day—Indigenous Peoples Day. Another example, is the Mother’s Day created by Julia Ward Howe.. Like so many originally good ideas, it has been so commodified as to be unrecognizable. Instead of urging us to spend time with our mothers, or help our mothers, or struggle for equal pay for mothers and women, or recognize stay-at-home mothers as equally value workers, or support mothers in keeping their children away from wars, we are urged to shop, give things, buy something unnecessary, like glass hyped as diamonds.

Julia Ward Howe offered us a different way:

(The following comes from The Peace Company Team 2009}:
"Mother's Day is a time to honor the immeasurable value and contribution of Mothers, and to celebrate our own Mother and those who have nurtured us throughout our lives. It's a time to say thank you for innumerable sacrifices and express our gratitude for the incomparable gift of mother's love.
If we truly wish to demonstrate our regard for Motherhood, and our goal is to support mothers every day not just on Mother's Day, we must do more than offer cards and gifts, as important as that is. We must also offer mothers our daily encouragement and practical assistance, and we must support public policies that make children and mothers a priority in our nation and in our world [including the cessation of separating sons and daughters from mothers for the purpose of killing other sons and daughters—D].
Despite our compassion and prosperity, the status of mothers and children in the United States is tragic.
Did you know...
A full 25% of U.S. families with children less than six years old live in poverty.
Nine million children are without healthcare coverage and millions more are under-insured.
Fourteen million children are unsupervised after school every day. At least 40,000 of these are kindergartners due to a lack of affordable after-school programs.
In a Harvard study of over 170 countries, the U.S. was one of only four nations without any form of paid leave for new mothers. (The others were Liberia, Swaziland, and Papua New Guinea.)
Women without children make 90 cents to a man’s dollar, but mothers make just 73 cents, and single mothers make even less -- about 60 cents to a man’s dollar.
Mothers are 79% less likely to be hired than equally qualified non-mothers.
Of the twenty most competitive economies in the world, the U.S. is the only one that does not require employers to provide paid sick days.
These statistics are eye-opening and dismal, and call for rigorous transpartisan deliberation and immediate action. Regardless of our political position, we must all make a stand for our nations' mothers.....
"All mothers are working mothers."
We also affirm and applaud the millions of stay-at-home moms. Their commitment is a noble one, and we give our encouragement and full support to these mothers as well. We recognize, however, that three quarters of American mothers are now in the labor force. With seventy-five percent of our moms at work, it's time our attitudes, policies and workplaces match the dynamics of today's American family. (*statistics and info above found at www.momsrising.org).
(Other information and resources related to supporting mothers is available via the National Healthy Mothers and Healthy Babies Coalition and United Nations Population Fund)….
Kimberly King, Co-President, Brent Bisson, Co-President & The Peace Company Team
21 Main Street, Bristol, VT 05443

PROPOSAL TO OMNI’S MOTHER’S DAY COMMITTEE FOR 2010 HOWE’S MOTHER’S DAY FOR PEACE
HISTORY
OMNI inaugurated its first annual Julia Ward Howe’s Mother’s Day for Peace Luncheon in 2004. Now it is time to evaluate and consider alternatives. The purpose of the Luncheon has been to publicize Howe’s Proclamation. That purpose was achieved through the reinforcement of the women and men who attended the luncheons, and via newspaper stories, which were supportive. But can we find a more effective way to publicize the Proclamation?

Here is a PROPOSAL from Karen Clark.
One: We should establish alternating programs—one year the Luncheon, next Proclamation ads. Thus 2010 would be the ads, 2011 returning to the luncheon.
Two: Ads: We should publish the Proclamation in as many newspapers each year as we have money for, and especially in UA’s Traveler, to educate young people about Howe’s Mother’s Day for peace and against militarism.

Whatever our format, we will need a coordinator committed to transforming another super-shopping day into a Day for Peace (instead of blind acceptance of commercialism and wars), Building a Culture of Peace. Contact OMNI.

OMNI’s President is Gladys Tiffany; Vice-Presidents Kelly Mulhollan and Donna Stjerna; Secretary Nancy Goliff; Treasurer Karen Takemoto.


Dick Bennett
jbennet@uark.edu

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Remembering Kent State murders

The Ethical Spectacle, May 1995, http://www.spectacle.org
Kent State, May 4, 1970: America Kills Its Children

Twenty-five years ago this month, students came out on the Kent State campus and scores of others to protest the bombing of Cambodia-- a decision of President Nixon's that appeared to expand the Vietnam War. Some rocks were thrown, some windows were broken, and an attempt was made to burn the ROTC building. Governor James Rhodes sent in the National Guard.
The units that responded were ill-trained and came right from riot duty elsewhere; they hadn't had much sleep. The first day, there was some brutality; the Guard bayonetted two men, one a disabled veteran, who had cursed or yelled at them from cars. The following day, May 4th, the Guard, commanded with an amazing lack of military judgment, marched down a hill, to a field in the middle of angry demonstrators, then back up again. Seconds before they would have passed around the corner of a large building, and out of sight of the crowd, many of the Guardsmen wheeled and fired directly into the students, hitting thirteen, killing four of them, pulling the trigger over and over, for thirteen seconds. (Count out loud--one Mississippi, two Mississippi, to see how long this is.) Guardsmen--none of whom were later punished, civilly, administratively, or criminally--admitted firing at specific unarmed targets; one man shot a demonstrator who was giving him the finger. The closest student shot was fully sixty feet away; all but one were more than 100 feet away; all but two were more than 200 feet away. One of the dead was 255 feet away; the rest were 300 to 400 feet away. The most distant student shot was more than 700 feet from the Guardsmen.

Some rocks had been thrown, and some tear gas canisters fired by the Guard had been hurled back, but (though some of the Guardsmen certainly must know the truth) no-one has ever been able to establish why the Guard fired when they were seconds away from safety around the corner of the building. None had been injured worse than a minor bruise, no demonstrators were armed, there was simply nothing threatening them that justified an armed and murderous response. In addition to the demonstrators, none of whom was closer than sixty feet, the campus was full of onlookers and students on their way to class; two of the four dead fell in this category. Most Guardsmen later testified that they turned and fired because everyone else was. There was an attempt to blame a mysterious sniper, of whom no trace was ever found; there was no evidence, on the ground, on still photographs or a film, of a shot fired by anyone but the Guardsmen. One officer is seen in many of the photographs, out in front, pointing a pistol; one possibility is that he fired first, causing the others, ahead of him, to turn and fire. Or (as some witnesses testified) he or another officer may have given an order to fire. It is indisputable that the Guardsmen were not in any immediate physical danger when they fired; the crowd was not pursuing them; they were seconds away from being out of sight of the demonstration.

There was also an undercover FBI informant, Terry Norman, carrying a gun on the field that day. Though he later turned his gun into the police, who announced it had not been fired, later ballistic tests by the FBI showed that it had been fired since it was last cleaned-- but by then it was too late to determine whether it had been fired before or on May 4th.

It would be too charitable to say that the investigation was botched; there was no investigation. Even the New York City police, who are themselves prone to brutality and corruption, do a better job. Every time an officer discharges his weapon, it is taken from him, and there is an investigation. Here--to the fatal detriment of the federal criminal trial which followed--it was never conclusively established which Guardsmen had fired, or which of them had shot the wounded and the dead. Since all were wearing gas masks, it is impossible to identify them in pictures (many had also removed or covered their name tags, a classic ploy of law enforcement officers about to commit brutality in the '60's and '70's), and though many confessed to having fired their weapons, none admitted to being in the first row and therefore, among the first to fire. The ballistic evidence could have helped here, but none was taken.

One rumor has it that the Guardsmen were told the same night that they would never be prosecuted by the state of Ohio. And they never were. The Nixon administration stalled for years, announcing "investigations" that led nowhere; White House tapes subsequently released show that Nixon thought demonstrators were bums, asked the Secret Service to go beat them up, and apparently felt that the Kent State victims had it coming. As did most of the country; William Gordon calls the killings "the most popular murders ever committed in the United States."

The history of the next few years is very sad. A federal prosecution was finally brought, but the presiding judge is said to have signalled his preference for the defendants, guiding their attorney's conduct of the case to help them avoid legal errors. He dismissed all charges at the close of the prosecution's case, avoiding the need for a defense and taking the case away from the jury. Among his reasons: a failure to prove specific intent to deprive the victims of their civil rights; due to the lack of any investigation, it was almost impossible at this late date to show which Guardsmen shot which victim.

In the New York City police force, which is far from perfect, officers who have killed or injured someone under questionable circumstances are often dismissed from the force even though there is not enough evidence for a criminal conviction; the standard of proof is not the same for an administrative action as for a criminal case. You don't want an unstable, sadistic person on the force, even though there may not be enough evidence for a criminal conviction. But the Guardsmen--even the one who confessed to shooting an unarmed demonstrator giving him the finger--were not deemed unfit to serve the State, even though they had fired indiscriminately into a crowd containing many passsersby and students on their way to classes.

A civil suit brought by the wounded students and the parents of the dead ones deteriorated among infighting by the plaintiffs' lawyers. Unable to agree on a single theory of the case, they contradicted each other. The jury returned a verdict for the defendants.

This verdict was overturned on appeal--the main ground was that the judge did not take seriously enough the attempted coercion of a juror who was assaulted by a stranger demanding an unspecified verdict--and a retrial was scheduled. On the eve of it, the exhausted plaintiffs settled with the state for $675,000.00, which was divided 13 ways. Half of it went to Dean Kahler, the most seriously wounded survivor, and only $15,000 apiece went to the families of each of the slain students, a pathetically small verdict in a day when lives are accounted to be worth in the many millions of dollars. The state issued a statement of "regret" which stopped short of an apology for the events of May 4th, nine years before.

I write this just a week after the Kansas city bombing that appears to have taken 200 lives (the rescuers are still searching the wreckage) and the theme today is the same as 25 years ago. Hate was in the air then, as it is today. Admittedly, the First Amendment protects hate speech, whether it comes from the most marginal extremist or the highest public official. Demonizing someone else for their beliefs or their race, or even calling for their immediate assassination, is legal in America today and was twenty-five years ago. But the fact that something is legal to do does not make it right to do, or relieve the speaker of any moral responsibility for the consequences.

President Nixon created a public atmosphere in which students who opposed the war were fair game for those who supported the government. In the week following Kent State, construction workers rioted on Wall Street, attacking antiwar demonstrators and sending many to the hospital, some permanently crippled. It was reported at the time that, a day or two after the deaths, President Nixon called the parents of the only slain student known to be a bystander--he was a member of ROTC--to express condolences. The phone never rang in the other parents' houses. The message couldn't have been clearer: they had it coming.

I was fifteen that year, raised in a very comfortable middle class environment and very naive. Kent State was my political education. What I discovered that week, and that year, was that America in those times was perfectly willing to harass, beat and kill its own children if they disagreed with government policy. The step from being a member of the protected American mainstream to being a marginalized outsider, not entitled to the protection of law enforcement and fair prey to any violent, flag-waving bully who happened to pass, was to stand up and say you did not believe the Vietnam war was right.

I am not sure that anyone too young to remember those times can really appreciate what it was like. We know today the extent to which the FBI was involved in dirty tricks, illegal wiretapping and burglaries against even moderate antiwar organizations. Prior to Kent State, I had joined an organization called Student Mobilization Against the War. One day, their offices were burglarized and their membership lists stolen. We had no doubt at the time that it was the government, and we were right.

I led demonstrations that week outside my high school protesting the Kent State killings and, afterwards, the principal summoned me and my father to his office and threatened to have me expelled as a trouble-maker. My father--I am very proud of him, as he was not an ideological man and his opposition to the war was very muted--replied that if I was expelled, he would fight it "all the way to the Supreme Court." I had done nothing else than exercise my First Amendment right of protest. We heard nothing more about expulsion, but a close friend of mine, who didn't have an assertive parent to stand up for him, was thrown out of school.

That week, people came out of the woodwork--wearing black leather, chains wrapped around their fists, waving American flags--people we had never before seen in our neighborhoods. These patriots set up a counterdemonstration across the street from ours. For hours, a rumor was rampant that they would attack us and that the police would not intervene--exactly what had happened on Wall Street a day or so before. Their cursing and chain-rattling became uglier until finally they summoned their courage and charged. Someone shouted "Link arms!" and five or six teenagers, me among them, joined to interpose our bodies between the attackers and demonstrators. The Brooklyn police, unlike those on Wall Street, or the National Guard in Kent days earlier, did not seek or condone the killing of children. They ran in and forced the attackers back. I was fifteen then and am forty now, but I have never had a finer moment in my life. It was the only moment in my life that I came close to living up to Gandhi's statement that "we must be the change we wish to see in the world."

Here are the names of those who died at Kent State, so that they may not be forgotten:

ALISON KRAUSE

JEFFREY MILLER

SANDRA SCHEUER

WILLIAM SCHROEDER

My source for many of the details in this essay is William A. Gordon, Four Dead in Ohio (North Ridge Books, 1995.)

Saturday, May 2, 2009

FarmToTable theme of today's program in the Rose Garden of the Walton Art Center with renewable-energy lecture at Night Bird bookstore at 2 p.m.

Please click on image to ENLARGE view of OMNI Springfest poster.

Please click on image to ENLARGE view of poster.

Solar Power Struggle
Professor Richard Hutchinson of Louisiana Tech University in Ruston will speak on "The Struggle for the Solar Future" at 2 p.m. on Saturday, May 2, at Nightbird Books on Dickson Street in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
An inquiry into environmental change and the obstacles and opportunities in the path of the renewable energy transition.
Sponsored by OMNI Center for Peace, Justice, and Ecology.

Dick's Wars and Warming KPSQ Radio Editorials (#1-48)

Dick's Wars and Warming KPSQ Radio Editorials (#1-48)