To all my human family,

Doctor Rosalie Bertell, Ph.D., G.N.S.H., mathematician, medical researcher, and President of the International Institute of Concern for Public Health (IICPH) spoke in 1986 directly to what we now face at this crossroads in the human journey we are ALL part of:

. . . as things get tighter and as money gets shorter, the thing that's sacrificed is always health. . . . there's no justice issue which does not result in a violation of human health. Everytime there's a justice issue, somebody gets sick. It's quite clear.
          . . . we have a right to know what's in our food. But the problem is just quietly going underground and everybody's just quietly eating radioactive food, and they're going to be quietly getting cancer and quietly having deformed babies. We will quietly undermine the rest of the integrity of the gene pool, and the integrity of the earth.
          . . . At some point or other if we survive, there's going to have to be a massive non-cooperation with our society which is producing death. . . . And if we are ever to break out of the militaristic society that we live in--and that IS what I think is our basic aim, because that's what distorting everything--it's going to have to be through an across-the-board non-cooperation effort.
          It's this preoccupation with producing death, and instruments of death and mega-death. This is our root sickness. We're not choosing to LIVE on this planet, we're choosing to kill it. If we're going to turn that around it's going to require massive non-cooperation; it's going to have to be non-violent because you can't violently choose life, you kill it. So it's going to HAVE to be non-violent. And it's going to have to be basically people-to-people networks built on trust because you're TRUSTING the future and you're trusting your life.

from  "Quietly Eating Radioactivity" Transcript of a speech given by Dr. Bertell in August 1986 to AMARC, an int'l community radio group, in Vancouver, Canada. http://www.ratical.org/radiation/inetSeries/RB86.html

An article in today's W.Post points the way we must go and are being called upon to live up to as sentient, self-reflecting beings who were born to honor and serve life's needs:

Organizers of Antiwar Movement Plan to Go Beyond Protests
By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 3, 2003; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A30813-2003Mar2?language=printer

LONDON, March 2 -- The people who helped organize the largest worldwide peace demonstration in history last month say they are not through yet.

More than 120 activists from 28 countries emerged from an all-day strategy session here this weekend with plans not just to protest a prospective U.S.-led war against Iraq but to prevent it from happening. They want to intensify political pressure on the Bush administration's closest allies--the leaders of Britain, Italy and Spain--and force them to withdraw their support, leaving the United States, if it chooses to fight, to go it alone. And they intend to further disrupt war plans with acts of civil disobedience against U.S. military bases, supply depots and transports throughout Europe.

Finally, if war breaks out, they say, they will demonstrate in towns and cities around the world on the evening of the first day, and hold a worldwide rally on the following Saturday that they hope will rival or surpass their efforts of Feb. 15.

...

Campaigns to disrupt U.S. forces have also been launched. Besides the dozens of activists who have traveled to Baghdad to volunteer as "human shields" against a U.S. attack, nine Dutch antiwar activists were arrested Tuesday for chaining themselves to the gates of a U.S. military center outside Rotterdam. In Italy, hundreds of protesters occupied train stations and railway tracks for nearly a week to delay trains carrying U.S. military equipment from northern Italy to the Camp Darby military base near Pisa. Irish protesters broke through the perimeter fence at Shannon airport in January and damaged a U.S. Navy plane, causing other planes to divert their flights and refuel elsewhere. Trade union movements in Italy and France are pledging work disruptions and considering general strikes if war breaks out.

Organizers say they would like to find a way to channel the newfound enthusiasm and activism into a worldwide political movement. But they say the disparate nature of those participating would make such a movement difficult if not impossible.

"This was caused by social forces, and it's not something that organizations produced," said Andrew Burgin, a member of the coalition's British steering committee. "They're not in our control. . . . You don't lead a movement like this, the movement leads you."

ONE approach is to visually help others SEE our collective humanness:

BAGHDAD SNAPSHOT ACTION
http://nationalphilistine.com/baghdad/snapshots/

On February 13, 2003, teams of artists and activists postered New York City with thousands of copies of snapshots from Baghdad. Quiet and casual, the snapshots show a part of Baghdad we rarely see: the part with people in it.

The snapshots were taken by a friend of ours who just got back from Baghdad working with the Iraq Peace Team. Yes, he saw Iraqis suffering and struggling. But he also saw Iraqis dancing and laughing. This moved him because laughing under the weight of the UN sanctions and the threat of an absurd war is no easy task. We were moved because the people in the pictures remind us of our friends & family.

Thousands of snapshot posters now pepper Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens.

We want to show New York the people who will get both liberty and death in one fatal stroke if this war begins. We want you to show them in your city. The entire snapshot collection is online as pdfs. Print them out and poster them anywhere and everywhere.

See Also:

The faces of our brothers and sisters around the world, coming together with common purpose to honor and serve life's needs:

• images from 133 Protests around the World, 15/16 Feb 2003 http://www.punchdown.org/rvb/F15/
• Berlin http://www.arbeiterfotografie.com/galerie/reportage/
• Rome http://www.h-design.it/photos/nowwar2003/index.htm
• 2003-02-15 War Protests Around the World
  http://www.hyperreal.org/~dana/marches/

PLEASE send me other sites/pages you've seen with images that help us to SEE each other and be buoyed up by the exhilaration and recognition of our common purpose.

Think of ways to exercise your creativity and JOIN IN this coming Wednesday March 5th 2003:

National One-Day Student Strike
http://www.nyspc.net/actions.html
The National Youth and Student Peace Coalition (NYSPC) calls upon students on campuses across the United States to join us in a one-day student strike on March 5th, 2003.

http://www.moratoriumtostopwar.org/
No School, No Work, No Business as Usual
HELP STOP THIS WAR ON IRAQ
The possibilities are endless, collective and individual. Lay something important in your life on the line, Along with hundreds of thousands of others on the same day.

If a war starts... www.actagainstwar.org
- S.F. Direct Action to Stop the War
Emergency Mass Non-Violent Direct Action & Protest
Morning of the next Business Day 7:00 a.m.
Market and Main, Embarcadero BART, San Francisco
Transform our city from Profit and War into Life and Resistance! - Shut down the Corporate Warmakers! - download two-page flyer http://www.actagainstwar.org/downloads/actionMenuFlyer.pdf

It is critical to be clear about what we as a species now face, where we stand, what our choices are, and where our response abilities lie. Martin Luther King knew. He gave his life for what he understood was at stake and for what believed in.

When you start associating with the poor of this planet and the exploitation of what's happened to whole cultures and tribal cultures in Africa in particular, and you see the results of the exploitation of western colonial powers and when you want to see a movement to not only arrest that process which still goes forward today under different guises but to actually reverse it and to give an opportunity for people to control their destinies and their own natural wealth, that's dangerous ground to get on. . . .

King was committed, increasingly, to that kind of political view which you will not hear about in terms of the `I have a dream' speech which is typically what he is associated with. He wept in India as early as '60, '61 when he was there. He had never seen such poverty in such a massive scale. `How can people live like this?' . . . King saw that, wanted to bridge it and the solutions were too radical, too potentially dangerous. Jefferson was an idol of his. With all of Jefferson's foibles, remember he said, `You need a revolution every 20 years. You need to sweep the room clean every 20 years,' said Mr. Jefferson. You need that revolution. King believed that as well.

-- William F. Pepper: "An Act of State - The Execution of Martin Luther King"; transcript of a talk given at Modern Times Bookstore, San Francisco, CA, 4 February 2003 http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/WFP020403.html

For the Earth, the children, all our relations,
and ALL that follow us here,
Love Dave

First man, as I knew him and his history, was a remarkably gentle being, fierce only in defence of himself and the life of those in his keeping. He had no legends or stories of great wars among his own kind and regarded the killing of another human being except in self-defence as the ultimate depravity of his spirit. I was told a most moving story of how a skirmish between two clans in which just one man was killed on a long forgotten day of dust and heat and sulphur sun, caused them to renounce armed conflict forever. He was living proof to me of how the pattern of the individual in service of a self that is the manifestation of the divine in man was built into life at the beginning and will not leave him and the earth alone until it is fulfilled. It is no mere intellectual or ideological concept, however much that, too, may be needed, but a primary condition written into the contract of life with the creator.

-- Laurens van der Post, "Witness to a Last Will of Man," p.160 of "Testament to the Bushman," 1984 http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/LvdP/WLWM.html#gentleBeing