Month: June 2005

When the Pentagon’s plan to inoculate all 2.4 million US service men, women, and reservists with an obscure anthrax vaccine surfaced almost three years ago, few people anticipated the opposition that would emerge. During an environmental review period, "public comments" submitted by veterans’ rights group Citizen Soldier and others raised questions about the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine, previously used by only a small number of workers, and urged that independent civilian scientists and groups be allowed to participate in studies. Typically, the Pentagon ignored these suggestions, preferring to storm ahead on its own. read more

For those of us who believe that fundamental change is needed in the United States and the world, there is a new development that we all need to welcome, understand, support and work with: the non-violent army.

The April protests in Washington, DC against the IMF and the World Bank bore witness to this historic development. Many thousands of people from across the country followed up successfully from the November 30, 1999 disruption of the World Trade Organization in Seattle by focusing the attention of the world on these two linchpins of the world’s corporate-dominated, destructive, economic and financial system. read more

Thousands of activists will take to the streets of Washington, DC on April 16 and 17 to halt the meetings of the policy-setting bodies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank Group. Their blockades, marches, and displays of colorful puppets and banners will cap a week of activities designed to educate and inspire people concerned about justice from around the world.  Working groups are meeting regularly in Washington and elsewhere to plan non-violence trainings, educational forums and teach-ins, demonstrations, and cultural events. read more

An international gathering of genetic engineering opponents will convene in Boston on March 24-30. Their gathering, Biodevastation 2000, is planned to coincide with the convention of the Biotechnology Industry Organization at the Hynes Convention Center.

"Biodevastation 2000 will highlight biotechnology’s growing threat to our health, the environment and the future of our farms," said Jessica Hayes, spokesperson for Biodevastation 2000. "Following last November’s events in Seattle, we also hope to bring the resistance against corporate globalization back to the center of public attention, as we bring diverse organizations and individuals together to express the growing rejection of genetic engineering." read more

"Our power to empower is perhaps the most important role we can play in the 21st century. The more individuals who feel empowered to work in their own systems for peace and conflict transformation, the closer the world comes to that critical mass that will allow for a massive leap of consciousness, allowing new processes for peace that were previously unimaginable to become normative, and easy." – Louise Diamond

Transformation is the name of the game with Dr. Louise Diamond. When I met her in the mid-1970s, she was Louise Lindner, a psychotherapist in Burlington, Vermont. Although her work with my mother was very important in my life, the most profound impact came when I visited her in the hospital when she had cancer. Yet, the courage and joy with which she lived her life in those stark circumstances inspired and aided me immeasurably when I was later called upon to serve as a death midwife for my father. Confronted with death, she strove to be "full of joy, full of love, full of peace." read more

It’s 120 degrees here in the Death Valley desert, where I spend my days in a trailer pouring words into my computer, mixing them up, hoping they will come out right. Outside, the sky stretches as far as the eye can see. At night, the stars cover the world like an old soft quilt and everything is quiet, except the slithery night creatures foraging for food.

Thousands of miles away, high in the Peruvian Andes, in a concrete cell where the temperature never gets above 40 degrees, a young North American woman named Lori Berenson lies awake and watches a sliver of sky through a tiny window. I think about Lori when I look at the stars. I’d give my sky to Lori if I could – just wrap it up and sneak it through that narrow window – and hope that it would comfort her. read more