by Nancy Tate
Should those of us working for a sustainable Lehigh Valley and a sustainable world make peace and anti-war work a priority? LEPOCO, of course, answers this question in the affirmative.
One of our earliest flyers hints at this by quoting then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”
Our country will not be able to make the needed contributions to stopping global warming as long as our military remains the world’s largest consumer of fossil fuels and the largest source of greenhouse gases.
When activists are mocked because advocacy for health care for all, the green new deal, or educational reparations for slavery would each be way “too expensive,” we can answer with “tax the wealthiest more” and note that any of these programs will strengthen our economy. But, we can also recall the saying, “Why is there always money for war and never enough for education, health care, and jobs?” The Pentagon will get $700 billion of our tax dollars in 2019. When we write a check to the IRS or have a tax deduction taken from our pay check, wouldn’t we rather see the 45% headed to war spending go to more humane programs? On Tax Day (April 15), outside your post office you may see a friendly LEPOCO volunteer distributing the War Resisters League pie-chart flyer detailing how too much of our federal tax dollars go to war.
Another big reason that peace is a sustainability issue relates to the slogan, “Everything Is Connected.” The Women’s Pentagon Action of the 1980s (in which local folks participated) said it this way, “We know there is a healthy sensible loving way to live and we intend to live that way in our neighborhoods and on our farms in these United States and among our sisters and brothers in all the countries of the world.”
Sustainability touches us at all levels of our being from our personal choices on food, shopping, and transportation, to our collective choices about how we live with our neighbors at home and abroad, and how we treat other creatures and our planet.
Certainly the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the nuclear arms races since have made our planet less sustainable. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists established the Doomsday Clock in 1947 to predict the symbolic number of minutes we have to save the planet from global catastrophe — this town crier for sustainable human behavior now has us at just two minutes to midnight (climate change and nuclear war are both in their calculation).
We shudder as nuclear weapons treaties are now casually tossed aside (the Iran nuclear deal, the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty). Some are pushing back against nuclear weapons madness: the Kings Bay Plowshares nonviolently and symbolically disarmed a nuclear weapons base in Georgia last year (three of the seven people involved remain in federal prison); the Hibakusha Appeal calls for a ban on nuclear weapons (hibakusha are A-bomb survivors); and the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons would outlaw those weapons. LEPOCO supports these efforts and holds a Hiroshima-Nagasaki remembrance event every August.
Our ability to live sustainably on the planet is challenged by our empire-like, threateningly un-neighborly 800+ U.S. military bases around the world. Would it be more constructive to speak in the world through government diplomacy, civilian humanitarian efforts, and citizen diplomacy like that organized during the wars in Central America? At least 50 local peace activists were among the thousands who participated in accompaniment, solidarity work brigades and peace witness delegations supporting civilians in the countries affected by war.
Our country will not be able to make the needed contributions to stopping global warming as long as our military remains the world’s largest consumer of fossil fuels and the largest source of greenhouse gases.
LEPOCO’s work is educational in a broad sense. We are grateful for veterans who work for peace by questioning war based on their own experiences. We are grateful to those (campers and volunteers) who make the Young People Making Peace Summer Day Camp a place to learn simple peacemaking and diversity sharing skills. We are grateful for the example of Costa Rica showing us that we can live without a military (they have since mid-20th century). They have a high happiness rating.
In our peace work we have found consensus, shared leadership, and small group processes to all be important in building community. We will continue vigiling, marching, nonviolently resisting, discussing, speaking out, writing letters, singing together, sharing potluck meals, supporting those who witness as war tax resisters and as car-free commuters, tabling, leafleting, and listening Ð as time and volunteers allow.
We look to our great peace prophet, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who said at Riverside Church in 1967: “Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism and militarism.” Help us rise to the challenge.
by Nancy Tate
Nancy lives in Riegelsville and has been a staff person for LEPOCO (Lehigh-Pocono Committee of Concern) since 1974.
Published in the 2019 edition of Sustainable Lehigh Valley.
(Essays express the ideas of the individual authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the Alliance.)
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