Peace & Justice
Wednesdays, the Peace/Life Center is usually open from 12:00 noon to 2:00 p.m. Bring brown bag lunch. Come by for some coffee or tea or to chat or to see a film or browse through various books and magazines. Beverages will be provided.
Testimony by John Morearty, Ph.D.
Bombplex hearings held by the U.S. Dept. of Energy
(DOE calls the hearings Complex Transformation)
Tracy, California, March 18, 2008
On this beautiful spring evening, I wish you peace. And that very much includes you, Mr. Wyka. [presenter from DOE]
Let me offer you an image, from James Carroll’s magnificent recent book House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of Pentagon Power. The image is, we are all on a lovely pleasure boat, drifting with the current down a broad river. It’s a sunny afternoon, people are chatting, drinking their coffee and their wine, enjoying the day. We’re drifting on a quiet day-or almost quiet. Except that from somewhere ahead, down river, there seems to be a soft noise. One can barely hear it. A sort of gentle roar.
The name of the river is Niagara.
I’m John Morearty, I’m sixty-nine and a half, I live in Stockton. Between us, my wife and I have ten grandchildren, ages three to fourteen. They are the first of three reasons I’m here this evening. I’d like them to have the same opportunities which God and our beautiful country have given me-to live in joy, and contribute to building the earth community. But I’m afraid they won’t get that chance. As the Chinese proverb says, if you keep on going the way you’re going, you’re likely to wind up where you’re headed.
The second reason I’m here is, I’m a Ph.D. in Social Thought from the University of Chicago, trained as a cultural historian. As a young guy I helped found a small liberal arts college at University of the Pacific in Stockton, dedicated to global understanding. I left academia in 1975, became a carpenter, a licensed general contractor-and a peace activist.
I got arrested blocking the road to Livermore Lab in 1982, and went to jail, with thousands of others. Did it again in 1983, and then crossed the line onto the Nevada Test Site a few times. I’ve worked for peace candidates for Congress, created and hosted a public affairs cable TV show every week for fourteen years as a volunteer, and I still help produce a free monthly community newspaper, Connections, published by the Peace and Justice Network of San Joaquin County.
What happened to me at the age of forty was, it dawned on me that the very existence of thousands of nuclear weapons threatened the lives of my beautiful twin sons, who were then fourteen years old-and I could not tuck them under my arms and run away to hide. No place to hide. Have you read On the Beach, by Nevil Shute, or seen the movie? You really should. It’s about people in Australia, when there is a nuclear war in the northern hemisphere.
Nuclear explosives are not even properly weapons. A weapon is something like a knife or a gun; you use it, and you may survive. But the intrinsic dynamic of these clever and horrendous devices, in a world full of them, is that once some fool uses one, global catastrophe threatens. And we all know that. These nuclear-things-are the absurd culmination and linchpin of the imperial war system which has dominated and bedeviled humankind for about five thousand years. But Martin Luther King was right. He called our country the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, and he said, “Our choice is no longer between violence and nonviolence. It is between nonviolence and nonexistence.”
The third and final reason I’m here is that the whole nuclear enterprise is so sad: its a tragic squandering and diversion of capital resources and human ingenuity from the urgent problems that confront our species and our planet. Economists call it opportunity cost. There are thousands of brilliant scientists and meticulous engineers in the nuclear system, I honor them, and we need them-our country needs them, the world needs them-we need them to become green scientists and engineers. My twin sons are successful engineers-but they have never done war work.
Livermore and Los Alamos and the rest must become Green Laboratories, working not on bombs but on clean sustainable energy and transportation systems, medical technology, ways of cleaning up and cooling down the rivers and oceans, saving the forests and the topsoil, so our great-great-grandchildren can live in peace and plenty. The immense dangers of this planetary era summon us to immense opportunities. We human beings are so smart! We are so inventive, so capable. And now we get to decide: Will we be midwives of a new time on earth, or hospice workers?
Again, I wish you all peace!
Winter Soldier marches again--Amy Goodman on Common Dreams
ACLU, NAACP host joint program on police practices
By FRED HERMAN
In the wake of several tragic police shootings, Stanislaus County chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People will present their first joint program on May 20.
Attorney Mark Schlosberg, who handles police cases for the ACLU of Northern California, will speak at a 7 p.m. forum in Room C102 of Bizzini Hall on the Cal State University Stanislaus Campus.
The gathering, officially co-sponsored by the CSUS Criminal Justice Club, will be free and open to the public with discussion to follow. Young people are especially invited. Free parking will be available in parking lot 11. Schlosberg has been ACLUNC police practices policy director since 2002, working on issues including racial profiling, accountability systems, surveillance, crowd management and use of force.
He managed a successful 2003 ballot campaign to strengthen San Francisco’s civilian oversight system and worked extensively on state and local legislative efforts to provide greater public access to police records. He authored several reports on policing in California including most recently The State of Surveillance: Government Monitoring of Political Activity in Northern and Central California and Under the Watchful Eye: The Proliferation of Video Surveillance Systems in California.
Before his ACLU service, Schlosberg was a deputy public defender in Contra Costa County and vice chair of the Berkeley Police Review Commission. His degree is from New York University School of Law.
Both ACLU and NAACP chapters have stated goals of civilian police review boards like those set up in several progressive Northern California cities like San Francisco, Berkeley and Santa Cruz.
Members have noted that complaints against police officers are handled internally, with no outcome ever revealed to complainants.
Details at http://stanaclu.org/ or email stanaclu@earthlink.net. It was developed by attorney Troy Spears: troyspears@earthlink.net. Arrangements were made by ACLU chapter board members Ken Kohler and Phyllis Gerstenfeld, chair of the CSUS criminal justice department.
MAP: http://web.csustan.edu/directories/Maps_n_Plans/Campus_Plans/
