· Indian independence achieved· Buses desegregated in the U.S. South
· Imigrant workers’ rights defended in the U.S.
· Zambian independence achieved· The Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed · The Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed
· Freedom won in Ghana· Democracy established in Philippines
· Latvian liberty won
· Berlin wall falls· Solidarity wins in Poland · Ukraine holds onto democratic win · Milosevic deposed · Hungary freed · South African apartheid ended, democracy won · Women get the vote i
n U.S. · Anishinabe treaty rights reaffirmed · Lithuanian democracy established · Estonian Singing Revolution succeeds · Czechoslovakia achieves its freedom · Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty signed in Europe.
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"Each of the victories listed above occurred not because of governments, but despite governments, which were ultimately dragged along kicking and screaming. That’s the way trickle-up, people-powered peace and justice works. It’s revolutionary. It is the hope of this millennium."
I am Sister Ardeth Platte, and to begin with, I want to give gratitude to God for our being able to be present here with you. I give gratitude to you who are seated in this jury. The task before you, I know, is very difficult, and I know the grace of God will be with you, that whatever decision you make as it relates to us, that we will continue to bless you, so do not be afraid to speak the truth of what you believe. I also give thanks today to the prosecutor and judge. I want to forgive the prosecutor for some things, one is when he talks about us as "allegedly" being sisters --...I just want you to know that Sister Jacqueline Hudson and I, in our combination of years, have about a hundred years now in religious life in the Grand Rapids Dominican sisters, and Sister Carol has about 37, going on 38 years, so just to speak the truth, we are Sisters...Now I say that because what we have done sounds like an extremely dangerous thing, and yet all over the world there are people saying the same thing. There are people who actually believe in what we did. And you are seeing them now by the millions as you turn on your television sets. Also I want to give thanks to our international community and our religious community because of their strength in understanding what we have done all our lives, and that is to study the gospel. We are students of the gospel. We are believers in non-violence. We are believers in truth force. We are believers in love force, and we are believers in soul force, so that's the unit with which we come in our communities. We have formed consciences. We are working every day on understanding what is moral and what is immoral. We are trying to be open to the leading of the holy spirit, the spirit of God....The same time we were committed to do this non-violent civil resistance action, at the same time our sister, Sister Ann Montgomery, had traveled to Iraq , and to Hebron . She has lived in Hebron for more than six years. She has been into Iraq many times. So you will see her name. I want you to know through the years she was personally giving us information as she took medicines and foods and things into the people of Iraq and visiting the children who were dying in the hospitals from leukemia caused from the use of depleted uranium., She was sharing with us in spirit, so that our information was coming firsthand from her and from very many other friends who have been in and out, and a set of at least twenty people who are there right now under the bombs that we are dropping.
I also want you to know that we have Dominican family in Iraq running hospitals and orphanages. Now that's very important because they are our family. They are the family of God. The whole human race really is the family of God. So whatever we do, whatever we do, affects the entire family. It affects the environment.
And so with this in our minds and hearts, we are trying to carry out something that seems so important. This is our faith and background.
We also are citizens of the United States. And we consider democracy very important; in other words, we are persons who will seriously study what is going on in this country, what we are doing as a nation. And we will try to stop crime, we will try to uphold the laws that are also God's laws. So, for more than a year we learned of the planning and the preparation and the threatening of mass murder, of extermination, by the use of nuclear weapons. We heard it, we read it in the paper, we would hear it on television, and we heard that there was a targeting of the people of Iraq . That they were part of seven nations in the axis of evil, and all we could do was think about our brothers and sisters. All we could think about were the babies, the children, who have no defense
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Now, you heard other people's explanation of what we did, but this is exactly what we did. We went to -- we came to Colorado because here exists the kill chain. That's terminology used by the military. The kill chain from outer space, the use of satellites, the use of the ground receivers, the use of land, sea, and air weapons systems.
The kill chain. And you know it from -- you all know this because you live here and you know Schriever Air Force Base, you know Peterson Air Force base, Cheyenne Mountain, you know Buckley; those are all connected, and then the Minuteman silos, 49 of them
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Now,we went there to inspect, to expose and to do a symbolic disarmament. Every movement of our body was a liturgy. We processed. We cut the little link in the farmer's field fence. We did not want to injure the farmer in any way. We did not touch the lock that still had the combination on. All they had to do was hook the chain back together.
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On the side of the concrete lid, we did three more crosses, and on each of the three tracks we did a cross, and what is so important in that is the tracks reminded us of Germany and the people going in to the ovens, and we thought to ourselves God forbid that this cover ever be launched off this site,. that this nuclear weapon of mass extinction, extermination, would ever be used. And yet we realized it's all but being talked about that these will be used.
And it's just like the inspection in Iraq that we did for all to see, to tell every military person that came into our presence, to tell them that it is a crime to threaten to use it. Ever to use it. That it has been declared an illegal weapon of mass destruction.
And in this ritual we recall Jesus carrying the cross and pouring out his blood rather than ever taking anyone's life. When he said, "Peter , put away your sword," and the crosses reminded us of every man, woman and child, soldier, civilian, baby, old people, men, women, who have been killed, hundreds of millions, a hundred million plus over this century. Going into a new century, saying this is not the way of our faith. We remember the millions killed in the past, present and the wars possibly that were going to come.
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Now, Sister Carol and I live amidst Air Force base personnel for years. The ones who flew the B-52s, the ones who participated in the roles in the Gulf war, just like my dad who was a Navy man. We could go on, all of our families. It has to do with the love of them too.
...mean we fell so in love with the people with whom we lived that when they came back from the Gulf war and we were there when they went off to war, the squadrons of B-52s, and we were there when they came back, and all I can say is this is what we think about all the time is what they have to do, the injury to them. Not only the physical injuries but the mental and psychological injuries. We are not meant to kill. We are not created by a loving compassionate God to kill. We don't like it in our schools, we don't like it on the streets, and we don't like it massively over God's children any place in the world.
Well, then we took household hammers as the next act.
We each had a hammer, and we symbolically disarmed the site, hammering on the silo cover, on the tracks, and during that time we prayed aloud, "We shall hammer swords into plowshares, spears into pruning hooks, nations shall not take swords up against other nations nor shall they kill anymore.
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We want to bring about a lasting peace. We want to see justice, a banning of war, total disarmament, all over the world. We want the people in this world to live. Forgive me.
This is a passionate plea. And you might think that this is the soap box, but what this is is a heart and spirit and the cry that this world begin to see that we are brothers and sisters. So this is where we come from. If we have to spend the rest of our life in prison, we will. We have friends right now in the war zone who will be martyrs. We must do more for peace. We must do more for peace, and if our symbolic disarmament action does any good, thank you, God, and if it doesn't, then we must do more. Thank you. Forgive me for crying.
1 comment:
i like especially how the sister continually was weaving the phrase 'i give thanks...' throughout. that's what you're talking about as well--giving thanks, instead of just being angry at injustice. giving thanks, in the face of things that aren't right. giving thanks, finding that which IS justice, which IS right. Give thanks in all things, for this is God's will in Christ for you...
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