During the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King called our government “the
greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” True then—and even
more so today.
A few years before that, in 1964 Mario Savio made his great speech at
Berkeley; at the end he says, “There is a time when the operation of the
machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t
take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put
your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon
all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to
indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless
you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”
There are children being orphaned, maimed or killed every day, in our
name, with our tax dollars; there are soldiers and civilians dying or
being maimed for life, in order to generate profits for the most odious
imperialistic corporate war machine ever, again in our name. How long
are we going to let this go on? Until it is too late, until this
destructive machine destroys all of us and the planet to boot?
We believe that the power of courageous, committed people is greater
than that of corporate warmongers. But we will only see our power when
we use it collectively, when we stand together.
With courage, persistence, boldness and numbers, we can eventually make
this monstrous war machine grind to a halt, so that our children and all
children everywhere can grow up in a peaceful world.