Peace Bridges Inc.

By a vote of five to two, the Bend City Council proclamed the Portland Avenue Bridge as the “Peace Bridge of Bend”, during its December 17th meeting. The following remarks were delivered after the Proclamation was read by Mayor Bruce Abernethy:

Mr. Mayor and Council,

 I’m John Schwechten. I want to thank you each for the courage of your votes tonight. But first allow me to offer my condolences to you on the recent loss of your colleague and fellow councilor, Bill Friedman. I thought often of Bill as I wrote these remarks. Bill did not agree with our proposal, but I came to respect his frank honesty. He will be missed.

Announcing…Fundraiser/Concert for Better Life Children’s Home of Kibwezi, Kenya

Peace Bridges will be holding its annual fundraiser for their Kenyan orphanage, Better Life Children’s Home. Pianist and singer/songwriter Jonathan Hanks, will be presenting a program featuring classical pieces by Liszt and Chopin, contemporary gospel, and seasonal arrangements. A silent art auction and light refreshments will accompany the concert. Michael Funke of KPOV 106.7 FM will M.C.

The fundraiser will be held on Sunday, Nov. 23^rd @3:00 PM, at First Presbyterian Church, 230 NE 9^th, in Bend.

Tickets are $15.00 for adults, $10.00 for teens ages 13-16, and children are free.

Tickets may be purchased at Blue Moon Market Place, 61 NW Oregon, Strictly Organic Coffee, 6 SW Bond, or at the door.

Please join us for this important event. There has not been as serious a food crisis in Africa than that which exists today, according to those who have witnessed events throughout the continent. In eastern Kenya, where we have our orphanage, there are families who can no longer afford to send there children to school. Families have gone without food for days on end. Some have placed their daughters on the streets and highways to make money through prostitution in order to feed the family. One report cited the tragic suicide of a boy who was distraught after being taken from school for lack of funds.

We ask your support for our work in Kenya. Please write a check to Peace Bridges, Inc., dedicated to Better Life Children’s Home. 100% of your tax-deductible contribution will go directly to Better Life for its work with orphaned and homeless children. Thank You.

Contact John Schwechten at 541-383-2646 for more information.

A Day for Peace

By John Schwechten

      Sunday, September 21st is the International Day of Peace. This day was established by the United Nations in 1981, and is celebrated annually across the globe.

     There are many ways in which we can celebrate peace. We can have a parade, make speeches, break bread together, talk with our children about what peace means to us. I believe all of these activities can and will contribute to our understanding of peace as we have come to know it. 

    But how do we regard peace? To me, peace is the absence of violence, of conflict. Peace is the most delicate of flowers, which can only survive in a particular niche, and only when the conditions for its survival are met. It needs balance in its environment in order to grow and flourish, a proper amount of water, of sunshine, of nutrients, and protection from its many predators. Without these conditions it will not survive. Nor will peace. The conditions that threaten peace include conflict between individuals, families, communities, and nations, and violence in all its forms: physical, mental, emotional, sexual, spiritual, and relational. 

    As a counselor in private practice with a specialty in work with sex offenders, I can tell you that a very important condition for peace within the human community is the capacity for empathy, that ability to feel another’s pain. When we fail in our empathic regard for others we do not know peace. When I mention my work with sexual offenders, most people do not immediately think, “Oh, those poor dears, they’re so maligned.” No, they think of all the misery and damage offenders have done to others, sometimes their own children. I think of that too. But while lack of empathy is a condition shared by all offenders, it is not unknown to the rest of us sometimes.

      Mohandas Gandhi is quoted as having said that poverty is the worst form of violence. By this, I believe he meant all forms of poverty, and not just the material poverty of the poor, but also includes poverty borne of hopelessness, a spiritual poverty.      So this tension between poverty, however felt, and peace is experienced by peoples throughout the world, from the hungry AIDS orphan in an African shantytown to the battered wife in Bend, Oregon. In Africa, I met happy orphaned children, because they found a temporary refuge in school and were receiving an education. And in Bend, I have worked with survivors of sexual violence, who fashioned a kind of peace with their pasts, and were busy building their futures. Peace in this context exchanges desperation for hope.

By Pastor David C. Nagler

Nativity Lutheran Church, Bend, OR

Note: This article was original published in The Bulletin (Bend, OR) on June 14, 2008.

June is Torture Awareness Month. We are asked to pay attention to the use of torture by nations around the world. We are asked to reflect on the morality of torture: what it does to our souls as individuals and our image as a nation.

We live in a complex and messy world. To be sure, there are people who intend us harm and any intelligence that we can obtain about their plans is valuable. Intelligence gathering techniques often include spying, deception, and intense interrogation of people suspected of being connected with terrorist organizations. We justify the use of these otherwise abhorrent practices because they save human life. The ethical principle that is employed recognizes the higher value of saving lives over spying and deception.

Yet that ethical principle has limits. We cannot remove all barriers to human decency in order to save human life. Something happens to us and to our ability to create just and decent societies when we cross the line into torture. No message of impending doom, no perpetual orange alert, can provide the rationale for practices that dehumanize people also created in God’s image.

Friedrich Nietzsche said, “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” After we witnessed the tragic loss of innocent life on September 11, 2001 we knew that there were monsters in the world. However, in our desire to bring those responsible to justice and protect our citizenry we have incarcerated people without charge or representation, practiced extraordinary rendition of prisoners to countries that are willing to torture them, and interrogated suspects using harsh techniques including beatings and water boarding. In short, we have lost our moral authority by ignoring the rights to which we owe our very existence. We have become the intolerable bully on the global playground.

America has a vital role to play in human history. We are called to be the nation that reminds the world of the rule of law and the rights of each individual person. We are a mighty nation that is strong enough to limit the use of its power so that human rights and dignity are upheld. That identity is threatened when we condone the use of torture. It turns us into the very tyranny that our Founding Fathers swore to oppose. When the President vetoes legislation that would provide clear limits to our interrogators and restore us to the agreed upon practices of the United Nations, it sends a signal that we have lost our moral moorings and now need to be feared by even our allies.

The United Nations Convention Against Torture stated, “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.” Signing treaties in peacetime only to violate them when we are under threat cheapens our collective authority. It is beneath the values that our soldiers have fought and died for. For it is exactly when we are facing a threat that such a commitment to never use dehumanizing means of interrogation is tested. In our current experience, we have failed this crucial test.

Finally, and from my perspective most importantly, our failure to support the dignity of every human being by the use of torture betrays the best of our religious traditions. All the great monotheistic faiths bear witness that humans are created in the image of God. To torture a person is to fundamentally deny the God image within them, and therefore to blaspheme the Holy One. God wants us to see even our enemies as brothers and sisters who are just as loved and just as blessed as we are. In my tradition, the bar is set even higher as Jesus calls us to love our enemies. There is no way to love someone and torture them at the same time. It is time to repent of this practice and “do unto others as we would have them do unto us.”

Pastor David C. Nagler

Nativity Lutheran Church

Mr. Mayor and councilors, Good evening, I’m John Schwechten.

I read recently that with politics people always end up disappointed. And I thought about the past year with our proposal to dedicate an older Bend bridge as a bridge to peace, how it has become so unnecessarily complicated and divisive. And how over the course of this last year in my private conversations with some, not all, of you, there was this hesitance to commit, to trust in the idea of peace translated to a bridge as symbol. And to see beyond the mocking Politicized bridge leads to no good. And the cynical Peace Bridge, a credibility gap. And how through such words Bend’s Old Guard has juxtaposed power with fear. And how this politics of exclusion becomes disappointment, then apathy on the part of the public. And we wonder why so few people vote.

But this year there is the possibility that change is afoot. People are registering to vote in record numbers. And, reportedly, for the first time in many years in Deschutes County, the two majority parties may now be in rough parity. And hope and change are the new bywords. I, for one, hope so.

We are here tonight with a message of inclusion. We have always stated our support for the Veteran’s Memorial Bridge and support for our soldiers and marines. Our well-known opposition to the Iraq War is also something we have not hidden from anyone. But it is an opposition shared by the majority of our citizens, not the few.

We sought and were given a meeting with The Bulletin’s editorial board this past Friday. It was, to use the language of statesmen, instructive and frank. But what I came away with was not disappointment–no one there had his or her mind changed, rather it was for me an affirmation. Because people can disagree and still choose to be neighbors, still both resolve to peaceably co-exist for the good of the whole. If they so choose. And our disagreement with The Bulletin’s editorial position on our proposal pushed us to dig ever deeper for the essential truth to the question why. Why a bridge to peace? Of course, the Bulletin’s editorialist assumed the answer without really asking. But the question hangs there, doesn’t it? And it deserves a truthful answer. And so I thank The Bulletin for pushing us. And earlier during this long process, Peter Gramlich twice asked me the same question. And that was also a necessary push. So Why a bridge to peace? My first response is there are many reasons. A bridge to peace speaks to connection between people in conflict. It is therefore a metaphor for closing a painful chasm which separates us from one another. And that’s an important part of the truth.But it’s more than that. Peace is a journey, it’s a journey without end. And a bridge to peace says to me that if we seek to change the world, we must start with ourselves. If I, as an advocate for peace, want others to lay down their weapons, to quiet the world’s battlefields, then I must first and foremost work to quiet my own inner conflicts. That’s the real core of this. I cannot ignore my disquiet, and expect others to follow my hollow lead. So a bridge to peace in Bend, Oregon, stands along our life’s journey. It is not an end point, but rather it is both a real and a symbolic way forward. It is there for whomever needs to recommit themselves to try again, to not quit because the conflicts seem too great, because we feel a hopeless despair. The Portland Avenue Bridge is ideally sited to this journey between Pioneer Park, named after the pioneers who came to this area in search of renewal, and Pacific Park, which speaks of tranquility, peace.

Note: This column was originally published in The Bulletin on May 20, 2008.

By Meg Brookover

Some think that torture is a way to insure security in spite of contrary reports.  President Bush vetoed the bill sent to him, intended to stop  U.S. sponsored torture on 3/8/08. What can we do when a country sacrifices its principles in an attempt to safeguard its security?  War, torture, and destruction of civil liberties are some of the casualties of a foreign policy based on security. While many of us do not sanction these, we feel incapable of making change. 

I’d like to tell you about 3 people who gave up their own security, and engaged in civil disobedience, or. for them, divine obedience, to put torture on trial, to challenge the definition of torture and the various exemptions of the bans on torture.  They were trying to say, “Not in my name” to any degrading, pain-inflicting actions that dehumanize. 

Betsy Lamb, 69, of Bend, Mary Risely, 65, of Arizona, and Franciscan priest, Jerry Zawada, 71 decided they needed to act against torture. On Nov. 18th 2007, the three moved past temporary barricades near the main gate of Fort Hauchuca in order to pass out flyers and to speak to personnel about the use of torture, and how it degrades both the perpetrators and the victims. Stopped by Military Police after crossing onto the post, the three knelt to pray and were arrested. Fort Hauchuca, located southeast of Tucson, Arizona, is a symbolic place for protests since Army manuals for interrogation are prepared there. Those same manuals are used at the School or the Americas. Many past graduates of this school have been convicted of torture, murder and other heinous crimes. 

Betsy and Father Jerry were imprisoned for two months in a federal holding facility in Florence, Arizona because of prior arrests of this sort. On February 4th, at their hearing in Tuscon, Betsy apologized for her quivering voice; she was chilled and weak from sleeping on the cement floor the night before with no jacket, no bedding, in a cold holding cell typical of those where prisoners there are held before court appearances. Her honesty and compassion came across clearly as did that of her two co-defendants during their testimonies. Important statements were:

Betsy said, “As a person of faith and conscience, I could not stand by without protesting the war and torture and other evils that are being perpetrated in our name.”

Mary Burton Risely said, “I walked through the barriers because I love my country.

Fr.Jerry said, “Most importantly, our aim is not to break the law, but to fulfill the law.”

The judge seemed to be transformed as she listened to them tell of the reasons for their civil disobedience, and of the information that they have gained by studying the issue.They were given a lengthy period of probation which can end after 500 hours of  community service. They have sacrificed themselves to call attention to injustice and a need for change. Their actions are the actions of people with the power of love  who crave justice . Betsy hoped that they had been successful in pointing at finger at the U.S. government’s unconscionable endorsement and practice of torture, and in raising the awareness of people around the world on this issue.  

What can we do? Perhaps we will not dare a prison cell, but we can become active in calling for justice. We can read books such Fear Up Harsh, an important book written by  an Iraqi interrogator, Tony Lagouranus,. The book tells of the reality of torture in the field. We can monitor proposed legislation and communicate with our Congressional representatives about their votes on human rights’ issues. We must make them accountable for ending torture and abuse, and we must work to restore the reputation of the U.S. for choosing justice. Torture contradicts our nation’s most cherished values.

Love of Power or the Power of Love. These are the two great motivators. Craving for security or craving for justice. This is where they lead.If you have a love of power, security is your craving, but most often, unattainable without justice.  If you have the power of love, then, you’ll choose justice, the right for all to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

April 16, 2008

by Thiel Larson

Mr. Mayor and Council,

I’m Thiel Larson, I am a teacher in the Bend La-Pine School District and have taught for over 30 years. I have I have also created and run a Saturday program for low income children for more than 12 years. I work as a mentor to high school students who are mentoring third, fourth and fifth graders also who are low income. As a teacher in all these different capacities, I have learned the value of the saying; “A soft word turneth away wrath”, that consequences need not be large or long to be effective, and that the power of love is stronger than the power of punishment and hate.

In our schools we teach a system called “conflict resolution”. This is a process that empowers children to learn to solve problems, by listening, speaking, thinking, and not using physical violence, manipulation or coercion. It is, in essence, a process of peace making. This is important because as Martin Luther King pointed out, we are living in one of the most violent societies on earth. We were slow to recognize the gravity of global warming, bringing us to the brink of disaster. I believe we are also slow to recognize the importance of peace making in our nation ,states, cities and homes. The cries, “somebody’s gotta pay” are still seen as the way to global security.

Why have a bridge dedicated to Peace in Bend? Because it would be a symbol of purpose. That purpose being to unite, rather than divide, to heal rather than wound, to embrace differences, rather than treat others with fear and suspicion. Asking for a bridge dedicated to Peace in Bend, Oregon is not a demonstration of opposition to any particular policy, but a monument to peacemaking in a more general sense, not unlike the peace arch between the United States and Canada.

Peace is a shared process. A process that could be symbolized by bridges to peace, and connections with each other. I believe that a dedication to processes that solve conflicts in non-violent ways will preserve and ensure our city, our country and our children’s future. I urge you to meet with us, and take seriously the challenge to dedicate and work for a bridge to peace.

April 16, 2008

by Emilie Marlinghaus

Good evening. My name is Emilie Marlinghaus. I want to begin by thanking the Council for this opportunity to speak in support of the proposal to dedicate the Portland Ave. bridge as “a bridge to peace.”

I have been following this issue since last July when I attended a council session at which three of Bend’s citizens spoke eloquently in favor of this proposal. I was struck by the symbolic relevance of dedicating a bridge to peace. A bridge is by definition a structure or device for spanning chasms that separate people, places or ideas - a structure with great potential for promoting unity, easing transitions and making connections. It seemed to me then, and still seems to me today, that this was an exceptionally thoughtful and well reasoned proposal, and one that if acted upon would serve as a fitting and appropriate complement to what was at that time - last July - the recent dedication of the Newport Ave. bridge as a memorial to war veterans.

The group that made the proposal asked nothing of the council other than their willingness to make the dedication. No city funds were requested then, nor are they being requested now. This group was, and is, willing to raise whatever funds might be needed using their own resources and initiative. They did not ask for a change of the name of the bridge - again, only that it be dedicated to Peace. I could not imagine then, any more than I can now, how this could be thought controversial, or what the objections could be to making such a simple and lovely gesture.

And yet, apparently, this idea was and perhaps still is considered controversial by some. “Politicized bridge leads to no good” was the headline of an editorial that appeared after another group spoke in favor of this same proposal during an October Council meeting. It seemed to me then, and it seems to me now, that the principals responsible for politicizing this proposal were the writer of that editorial and the paper that published it.

I am an advocate for peace. I am part of a group of men and women here in Bend that has been peacefully demonstrating against the current war in the Middle East every Friday afternoon for more than five years. For the past several weeks as the central focus of our demonstration we have been reading the names of the 4000+ sons and daughters of the United States who have died so far in this violent conflict - as a way of remembering and also honoring their sacrifice. But it occurs to me that possibly the highest form of tribute that we could pay to these fallen children - and the countless, nameless multitudes that have gone before them - is to dedicate ourselves here and now to creating a world where war is no longer needed or allowed; where such sacrifices are no longer required or permitted.

Bend is a special place, as anyone who lives here knows; and I personally believe that our vision of this small, beautiful city should not be limited to the traditional or the ordinary. It is my hope that Bend, OR is a city where leadership possesses the courage and vision, the big hearts and minds to be willing to further distinguish this already “special place” by agreeing to dedicate the Portland Ave. bridge to Peace.

By taking this small action, I feel that it is possible that we could open a portal here in Central Oregon to a myriad of exciting and illuminating opportunities for this community to become not just another tourist destination, but an actual oasis in an increasingly violent and unsettled world - a city promoting and honoring peace and all forms of nonviolent conflict resolution, understanding, and compassion - a City of Peace.

Thank you for your time and willingness to consider our proposal.

Note:

Below are remarks delivered to the Central Oregon Chapter of Amnesty International on March 29, 2008. Four members of the Central Oregon Peace Network were asked to tell the stories of their time in military service in the 1960’s and now as peace activists in their 60‘s. Below is one story:

Thank you for giving us the opportunity to be here today. Thanks for all you do through Amnesty International and the other peace and justice organizations you represent and support. Your efforts are important and make a difference and are appreciated.

I want to begin by reading the last few lines of Tom Waits, Road To Peace, his lamentation on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

“If God is great and God is good,

Why can’t he change the hearts of men?

Maybe God himself is lost and needs help,

Maybe God himself needs all of our help,

And is lost upon the road to peace.”

I’m John Schwechten. I make my living as a counselor in private practice. My wife, CJ, and I have lived for 18 yrs in Bend. I’m also a long-time peace activist, an army veteran, and the father of two sons, one of whom is now serving in Iraq.

My colleagues and I have been asked to talk about our time in the military and about our activism. Personally, my time in the army was brief and entirely undistinguished. I was drafted in 1967. I fought this conscription by appealing it four times. I lost all four appeals. I had joined the Peace Corps while still in college at the University of Montana, but I put off going in until I graduated. I received my first draft notice while in my last six months in college. I appealed to my hometown draft board in Bethlehem, PA. I also called Sen. Mike Mansfield, (D-MT) who was Senate Majority Leader, and a strong critic of the Vietnam War. He called me back, listened to my plea for help, then told me he would not help. Meanwhile another draft notice arrived. I appealed it to the State Draft Board in Penna. I lost. I appealed to the Missoula, Montana draft board. I lost again. One day, Vice President Hubert Humphrey came to campus to advocate for the Peace Corps. After his speech I approached him about my case. He listened, put me in touch with his military attaché in Washington, D.C., and said he would try to help. Another draft notice showed up. After about two weeks of frantic calls to Humphrey‘s office, the V.P.’s military attaché called to say they couldn’t help. Just before leaving for boot camp, a letter arrived from the Peace Corps. It contained a plane ticket to Texas, where I was to start language training for my assignment to Kabul, Afghanistan. Out of appeals, and with the choice of going to Canada, Sweden, or underground, I gave up and left for Ft. Lewis, WA. and boot camp.

And then I caught an odd sort of break. Remember this was 1967, and Vietnam was really ramping up. The first week after induction is spent in testing, filling out papers, and basically getting used to standing in line and getting yelled at. Well, you don’t really get used to getting yelled at. I didn’t care for standing in line, either. But when they learned that I had taken two years of ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Course) in college, which in those days was required of all male students who attended land-grant colleges as I did, I was pulled aside and asked if I wanted to go to OCS (officer candidate school). I thought about it and decided to give it a try. So for the next several days I went from place to place taking more tests, talking to more people. Finally at the last station, a clerk took me aside and said, basically, that if I go to OCS I’ll end up in one of the combat arms: infantry, artillery or armor, and get a one-way ticket to Vietnam. He said 2^nd lieutenants in Nam are fairly expendable, and I really ought to give some serious thought to this choice I was making. I did. And I changed my mind and told this major I wasn’t interested in becoming an officer.

That very night I was on an airliner headed to basic training at Ft. Bliss, TX. Punishment for not doing army the army’s way. After basic training, I was sent into combat medic training. Now, combat medics don’t exactly have it easy in wars. They’re primary targets. But following this training, I was sent to another school where I trained as an operating room tech. OR techs work in MASH (Mobile Army Surgical Hospital) units. It’s a little safer. That’s were the docs were. I trained at two hospitals: Brooks Army General, in San Antonio, TX, and Phoenixville Army Hospital in Penna. There were some 1500 amputees from the war at these hospitals, and I got to see close up what happens to soldiers who suffer the wounds of war. And I remember very clearly some of these cases. Faces being rebuild with pelvic bones. Grafts of skin from one place to another. Amazing stuff that most folks don’t get to see. Wartime, for all its horrors, are times when medical science, particularly when it involves reconstructive surgeries, makes significant technical advances. And these young docs were getting a lot of training, fast. But reconstructive surgery mitigates damages, it does not bring the body back as it was. I remember one young man who had his mutilated foot amputated and woke to see the missing limb. I still hear his screams.

Following completion of this training–by the way, of the 32 people in my class, 30 got orders to Vietnam, one guy went to South Korea– I, beyond every expectation, went to Germany. And I never saw another hospital during my two year army service. Once in Germany, I filled a paper slot with the 8^th Medical Battalion as its OR tech. But it was Germany, not Nam. So in fact, I became, without any training, the battalion legal clerk.

Fast forward some 22 years. Vietnam is history, right? Dead and gone. Well, for some it’s not history. As Faulkner has said, “It’s not even past.” 58,000 American war dead, other tens of thousands, wounded. Not to mention the vastly greater Vietnamese toll of dead and wounded, the wasteland that became their country. Those who survived, American and Vietnamese alike, were alive, but the wounded were often left to suffer not just physical, but unseen mental terrors. All of this spun out from this small, backward region in Asia. The place where Communism threatened us with a “domino effect,” as our presidents kept telling us.

Now I was not in Vietnam, as I have said. But, over my counseling career, I’ve worked with numbers of Vietnam veterans who have suffered for decades with various disabling mental problems. Post-traumatic stress, drug and alcohol abuse, depression, anxiety disorders, legal problems. It’s the legal problems that brought many of these veterans to my door. Because, you see, I treat people who have been convicted of sexual crimes. People who molest innocent little children, who rape women and sometimes men. And over the years I have listened to the stories these offender/veterans tell about what happened to them in Vietnam in that long ago war. How the things they witnessed, and the things they did to other human beings, have haunted them–things they could not handle sober, and the rage they tried to obliterate through injected and snorted drugs. Things that had to be excised from their minds by any means, and things that continued to torment them many years after that far-away war had ended, but was not past. The broken veterans I have seen in my practice have spent their lives living a private hell that began when they were young and innocent boys full of spirit and spunk, and yes, even looking to get into the fight. But the real reality of that fight, not the idealized, patriotic quest they imagined going in, became for many a suffering that still refuses to end. Now not every one who witnesses war’s horrors breaks. Some, I suspect most, have the fortitude, the inner strength, even the faith, to go on. But many young boys are not so fortunate, or the memories are just too savage, and they succumb.

1991. Pres. George H.W. Bush asks Congress to authorize a war against the Iraqi dictator who has invaded and occupied Kuwait. This region was of strategic interest to the United States due to its vast oil reserves. But the given reason was that an ally was invaded. It wasn’t about oil, they insisted. In Bend, OR, and cities around the country, small groups of peace activists began a weekly vigil in protest of this coming war. This battle, called Desert Storm, lasted a mere 100 hours. The Iraqi army was defeated on the battlefield in a rout. But like other wars past, this one did not end there and then. It refused to be dead and gone. It smoldered. And it smoldered.

Until one day in 2003, and another Bush president, having found himself the leader of the free world, and, post-9/11, found reason enough to finish what his father had not. So he, too, asked Congress for authority to invade Iraq and find all those weapons of mass destruction that years of searching by the UN had failed to uncover.

And, like with the Congress before, he got his authority. And, as before, a small group of Bend citizens, as well as many other citizens around the country, began again to protest this building momentum for war, and then the war itself.

When after some time no WMD’s were found, the justification for the war morphed into nation-building. The very nation-building candidate George W. Bush said he wouldn’t engage in once president. We were there to spread democracy in a vital area of the world. But, as with the first Bush war, this one is really all about oil. And as the war rages on, American soldiers and Marines continue dying. Iraqis are dying in untold numbers. Tens of thousands on both sides are being maimed and brutalized. Reportedly two million Iraqis fled to neighboring countries. Since the Bush Administration failed to prepare ahead for the aftermath of the invasion, the Iraqi institutions began to fail rather quickly, security broke down, violence escalated. A civil war ensued, and continues today.

Upon this new road to peace, another justification emerged to explain why we were there. We were in Iraq to fight the terrorists. Some suggested Saddam had been in bed with Osama Bin Laden. Never mind that no credible evidence ever emerged to support this. And, not once has Bush admitted that Al-Qaida joined this fight only AFTER we invaded and BECAUSE we were there.

Now, 5 years on, after the vaulted “surge” of American troops to Baghdad, the paying off of Sunni insurgents to fight with us, and the 6-month ceasefire called by Muqtada al-Sadr appears ended, we are witnessing increasing levels of new fighting. And Bush just this week said we were winning. And last week, on it’s 5^th anniversary, he told us this war was “just, necessary, and noble.”

I want to close my remarks now with part of an email my son sent just yesterday. My son is a battalion surgeon with an infantry unit. He is in a forwarding operating base they call a FOB. Since last week they have been getting hit with rocket and mortar fire. He wrote: “We are still on lockdown and have been getting hammered pretty good lately. Sucks to be us. It’s sort of like sitting waiting for something to happen and regretting when it does. The biggest thing is how young a lot of these guys are that are hurt. I’m not an old coot, but these are just teenagers here.” My son is 31 years old. He’s married and has a one year old daughter. Her name is Ariel. He’s been in Iraq since December. He is not scheduled to leave until late February 2009.

The thing I don’t get is this. Why aren’t more people out there on the street raising their voices and carrying signs against this horror? How many more must die to wake people up? We need all the voices we can get. I hope you will consider joining us. I hope you will write letters to the local newspaper. I hope you will speak out for these young kids who are in harm’s way. We don’t need more broken bodies and minds. We need our sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, and yes, even grandmothers and grandfathers, safely home.

Thank you.