-- Remarks by Sean Donahue, NH Peace Action
to "Don't Bomb Iraq" Rally, 2/11/98, Concord, NH
Martin Luther King said that "A nation that continues, year after year, to spend more money on weapons of destruction than on programs of social uplift approaches spiritual death." And I don't know how else to explain the point we've reached, where the world's strongest nation is preparing to drop bombs on desperate, starving people half a world a way in order to assert its will. Meanwhile, at home, children starve because money that could have been used to buy them food was spent instead on Aegis destroyers capable of destroying a continent. 2000 years ago in the Middle Eastern desert, one man asked "Who among you if a child was starving and cried out for bread would give him a stone?" Only the spiritually dead.
How else can we explain the idiot wind blowing through our Congress where they are debating not whether we should drop bombs on Iraqi cities but whether the "brutal and sustained bombing" that President Clinton is planning is brutal enough. Or the words of a President and his cabinet who claim to favor a peaceful solution while condemning diplomacy and amassing ships and troops in the Persian Gulf in preparation for war. Or the words of a Secretary of State who says that even though our economic sanctions have killed half a million children, maintaining the sanctions is worth the price. Have any of our leaders looked at the photographs of dying children in Iraq, seen the desperation in their eyes? How can anyone who knows the consequences of sanctions and war justify bombing and starving an entire nation? Truly we are approaching spiritual death.
How else can we explain a President who warns the world of the dangers of weapons of mass destruction while continuing to amass a nuclear arsenal capable of destroying the world many times over? A nation which claims to support peace in the Middle East while flooding the region with arms?
Last week the President asked us to pray for our nation as we faced the crisis in Iraq -- a crisis created by the intransigence of two men, Bill Clinton and Saddam Hussein. All I could think of was the passage from the book of Isaiah where God says to Her people:
Seven years ago this week, the U.S. bombed a bomb shelter in suburban Baghdad incinerating over 1,000 women, children, and old men. No one knows the exact death count because many of the remains were burned beyond recognition. In the seven years since we have deprived the survivors of the war of the food and medicine they need to survive. We should be donning sackcloth and ashes, begging forgiveness for the horrors committed in our names. Instead our President is wearing a mantle of false righteousness, calling on God to bless the murder of widows and orphans. Such blasphemy against the one to whom all life is sacred is surely a sign that we are nearing spiritual death.
But yet there are those of us who refuse to allow our spirits to die. Around the country tonight, people are gathering to bear witness against the threat of war. We stand in the breach. Standing together, we assert that life is sacred, and that this killing will not be done in our names.
The odds we are up against, the enormous strength of the great powers, can seem overwhelming. Its easy to become discouraged. But as Father Daniel Berrigan says "Every action is done against the odds -- odds of time, and place, and situation." It is only when we act against the odds that we have any chance of achieving justice. Faith in the power of nonviolence gives us the strength to speak truth to power regardless of the consequences. Standing together against the darkness, we become a community held together by that faith. And faith is the seed of resistance.
Let us water that seed with our love and make it grow.
email Sean Donahue at: New Hampshire Peace Action
Return to Peace Caucus Mission Statement