BSEC Peace Site Day

On Sunday Jason and I went to attend the Peace Site awards at the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture.

The place was packed (attendance at Platform has been way down this year) in a way it hasn't been in ages. If you didn't know about the rotten underbelly, the fascistic way the Board is now being run, it would seem to be a wonderful place. It seemed almost like the old days, before we had a coup and before the band of marauders took over the Board and twisted ethics, law and democracy out of recognition.

But it isn't the old days, and despite the fact that people were all smiley, the knives were underneath those smiles. Someone praised the work of the Constitution task force, which I was on, and said she didn't know we had such great common ground in that we provided for the assets to go to the AEU upon dissolution of the Society.

When we set up that clause, we selected the AEU not because we love them, but because we knew that would make it the most palatable choice, and because we wanted to prevent the members of the coup from grabbing the assets to themselves (illegally) or else pouring them into some new and unrecognizable organization that they are plotting to start up when they have driven all of us away.

The Peace Site award went to IVAW, Iraq Veterans Against the War, and was accepted by Demond Mullins. Demond is a handsome young man of color and he spoke directly from his heart. He did not wish to accept that he was any kind of hero or that he deserved to accept the award on behalf of IVAW. He called himself a coward and said he went to Iraq because he was too afraid to resist and end up in jail. He said he joined IVAW not because he cared about the Iraqis we are killing or about the other recruits who will die there, but because of his own guilt about things he did in the war.

Well, he is still a hero in my eyes even if he did join the antiwar movement because of his guilt. That shows he wasn't brainwashed by the military into believing that everything he did was right because it was for America. He kept his own mind and his own conscience even if he did wrong things and his conscience tormented him.

We had music by Jacqui DuPree and Ben Silver, singing sixties songs of antiwar protest. They made me cry. After all we went through with Vietnam, here we are again in a crazy, stupid war, and here we are again with people saying we "can't just pull out." Well, why not, it's high time the Iraqis took over and dealt with their own problem. We got rid of Saddam Hussein for them, now let them create democracy. Leave our kids out of it.

All I know is, this war is wrong, it is based on a lie, and so many of our kids have died already for this lie. I don't want them restoring a draft and I don't want Jason sucked into it. I'll support him going to jail or anything he needs to do, not to be sucked into that, because I know he isn't a soldier type and he would not do well in a war. And even if you ARE a soldier type, you can still be blown to bits by a car bomb.

Anyhow it was an excellent program. Maureen gets most of the credit since she organized it and did all the background work, with some assistance from the Ethical Action committee.

One weird note was that people from the LaRouche committee were outside the building soliciting signatures to impeach Cheney. I almost signed their petition but then I read it and saw where they were from, and handed it back to them. I tried to warn several people about what was going on. The LaRoucher's came into the building and sat in our row, and I warned Lisel about them. She went to them and got them to leave, but there was another woman I didn't know about who stayed.

Anyhow, it was a gorgeous day and the program was excellent. It's going to be hard to walk away from BSEC knowing the potential it used to have for good. But it has lost that potential because of the present governance. Sad, very sad, that it will have to end, for us and for the Society as a whole, because they have put their feet on a road that has a dead end not too far in the future.