MB Civic

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http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/101206O.shtml

Here’s parts … you should just go read the whole thing
-MAB

It was a violent spring. Martin Luther King had been killed in Memphis and I had just begun reading Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s book “To Seek a Newer World” at the Bronx VA when Kennedy was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Kennedy had been the antiwar candidate, and I remember picking up his book with hesitation at first, his views seeming so very different from my own back then, but there was something that drew me toward him and his call to end the war that spring. Maybe it was the wounded all around me on the paraplegic ward, or the hundreds of Americans who continued to die each week, but I remember feeling deeply saddened when he died, just as I had when his brother, President John F. Kennedy, had been killed in Dallas in 1963…

…Several days later I discovered the diary of Che Guevara, the Cuban revolutionary who had gone to Bolivia and was later killed there while attempting to inspire a revolution. I felt uneasy at first holding the book in my hands as I sat paralyzed in my wheelchair, afraid that someone might come up to me and catch me reading about the “enemy,” but I now wanted to know who this enemy was, who were these people I had been taught to hate and sent to fight and kill.

I remember watching the 1968 Chicago Republican National Convention on TV with other paralyzed veterans in their wheelchairs, the crowds in the streets outside the convention hall chanting, “The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!” as antiwar demonstrators were beaten and bloodied by police and dragged into waiting paddy wagons. Most of my fellow veterans were angry at the protesters, cursing them and calling them traitors, but I remember feeling very differently that night. What the police had done was wrong, and for the first time, though I did not share it with anyone yet, I began to sympathize with the demonstrators…

It was during this period that I read Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience” and was immediately struck by the concept of “resistance to civil government and non cooperation with evil” seeming to directly contradict what I had once believed in as a boy – that my country was always right and could do no wrong. The whole idea that we as citizens had a right to follow our conscience and resist laws that were unjust and immoral had a powerful effect on me. I was later to learn that Senator Joseph McCarthy had attempted to ban Thoreau’s essay (< http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/banned-books.html>) and that both Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King’s philosophy of creative nonviolence as a tactic for social change had been strongly influenced by their reading of “Civil Disobedience.”

…A century of arrogance, brutality and aggression has come back to haunt us all. September 11th has happened. The mask has been ripped away. The lie has been exposed and this criminal government now stands naked before the world! These are provocative words, and the truth may be deeply unsettling but when will we speak the truth? When will we end this silence? How much longer will we wait before we are ready to finally admit that the murderer lives in our own house, that this government that we entrusted long ago with the sacred task of protecting life and liberty now, by it’s every reckless, unjust and immoral action threatens the lives and liberty of us all?

…Have we become so complacent, so coward and intimidated by this government that we have forgotten our own revolutionary birthright of rebellion and dissent? Have we become so paralyzed by the eleventh of September that we would give up our liberty and freedom for the promise of a security that does not exist by a government that now threatens our very lives? What will it take before we finally realize the true reality of this crisis? How many more terrorist attacks, senseless wars, flag draped caskets, grieving mothers, paraplegics, amputees, stressed out sons and daughters before we finally begin to break the silence of this shameful night? Let us open up our hearts and speak in a way we have never spoken before knowing that lives now depend on it, and the very survival of our nation is now at stake. Let not our silence in this crucial moment betray us from our destiny.