Vigil

Gentlefriends: Here is a step into another world, the Beloved Community.  Our friends and colleagues in the Olympia FOR, and especially Doug Mackey, are nurturing our introduction and support of this group of Afhgan Peace Youth Vigilers.

Watch these Afghan peace youth vigilers say with the world “Love is how we’ll ask for peace.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLKR6iEdZGs 

Please take our next small steps with us.  Love and peace from Afghanistan,

On September 11, 2001, I was in Johannesburg, South Africa, nearing the end of a three-week trip to the country. I'd started in Cape Town, attending the 100th anniversary service of St. George's Cathedral -- the site of many anti-apartheid vigils and a sanctuary space for anti-apartheid activists during those traumatic years. Then I traveled to Durban to attend the World Conference Against Racism, joining an amazing gathering of thousands of people representing governments, NGOs, and people's movements from across the world. Unfortunately, the U.S. government boycotted the conference, so it was left to activists like me to "represent" the U.S. voice there.

I recently found this picture in a series of photos about life in Olympia, Washington. The Olympia FOR chapter has been conducting weekly vigils since 1980!

Pictured at left is Glen Anderson, who has just rejoined FOR's National Council.

Kudos to the Mid-Missouri chapter of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. They organized a vigil to mark the 4,000th U.S. servicemember's death in Iraq and got good coverage by the Missourian and TV station KOMU.

"My country for five years now has been subjected to all kinds of destabilizing, dehumanizing policies," [Iraqi Zaid] Mahir said.

Over the weekend four more U.S. soldiers died in battle bringing the total death toll of U.S. Soldiers in Iraq to 4,000.

This weekend is the annual protest and vigil in Fort Benning, Georgia against the School of Americas (recently renamed to "Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation"). Many of our colleagues from FOR will be there, and I hope to get them to post some updates here on the blog during the event.

Meanwhile, ¡Presente! magazine has a fascinating collection of videos like the one above, and lots of informative articles, including this one about the impact of the SOA in Colombia:

I love this time of September! In Minnesota, where I live, it is the time of year for holding on and letting go of The Lake. This means both the experience – swimming, boating, beaching – and the idea itself, that is, the idea of vacation, la vida facil, a perpetual summer.

When I was a kid, we would wait for my Dad to get home from teaching high school, probably around 4 in the afternoon, and then assess the situation: Can we go the lake another day? This was the holding on.