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--- Begin Message ----Caveat Lector- Building on Our Victories By Eisha Mason January 2, 2004 by CommonDreams.org http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0102-11.htm We have arrived at the end of a tumultuous year in our world, in which our country and our own lives have changed dramatically. Last winter, in bitter cold, I was in Washington, D.C. marching to prevent the war in Iraq with 100,000 other dedicated Americans. We were a part of demonstrations all over the world, united in a desire for peace. We were cold, but our hearts were warm; and we dared to believe that we might really stop the coming war. But war came. And a year later, the Bush Administration continues its assault on civil liberties, on the environment, media, human services programs, and on our children’s financial future. It continues to rob from the poor and give to the rich, and undermine the foundations of democracy. If we listen unquestioningly to the mass media, we may begin to believe that we have endured one defeat after another in 2003. And some of us see the commencement of the Iraq War as our greatest defeat. But this is a mistake. Such a perception sees through too narrow a prism. Iraq was a milestone. One battle does not make a war, one experiment does not make an invention and one campaign does not make a movement. In the past year, we have been victorious in progressing as a movement for peace and justice. We have much to celebrate and much to build upon as we face the challenges ahead of us. The Victories We Won We Were Not Silent In 2003, our movement firmly established itself in resistance to the war and in the recognition that the military build up abroad, in effect, declared war on the economic and civil well being of Americans at home. Throughout America, neighborhood peace groups spontaneously sprang up with lightening speed. And these autonomous groups rapidly formed loose networks of like- minded local groups and all ready established peace and justice organizations. Street corner vigils multiplied, not just in the numbers of individuals on a corner, but in the number of corners occupied across America, in small towns as well as urban communities. Mass demonstrations in San Francisco, LA and New York became more “massive” because people, ordinary people, traveled across country to make their voices heard. We Spoke Truth to Power Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his reflections on the Birmingham campaign during the American Civil Rights movement, said, “The ultimate tragedy of Birmingham was not the brutality of the bad people, but the silence of the good people.” Let us celebrate that we were not silent. At a time when it was so easy to be cowed by the media war machine or by this Administration that called us “traitors” and “collaborators with the enemy,” we dared to question or think for ourselves. When it was easier to keep silent in family gatherings or in the lunchroom at work, when neighbors may have turned away from us, when we sometimes thought we were all alone, we can celebrate that we were not silent. When we were pumped an intravenous diet of Fear each day, we did not succumb. We were true to our own consciences. When our children and grand children question us about this time, we will be able to look them in the eye and tell them that we were not silent. When they ask how countrymen betrayed their values and almost lost our freedoms and almost bankrupted this country, we can tell them how we helped save these treasures for the next generation and how we held the vision and listened to the Truth in our own hearts. Perhaps this, more than anything, is what matters most. We Created Public Debate In 2003, even though we were all but shut out of mainstream media, we succeeded in demonstrating our presence as a movement. Through our vigils, demonstrations, letters, and alternative media, we created public debate where there was none. We United Globally Just as we were uplifted when we learned of the millions of people worldwide demonstrating for peace, for justice and for international law, they, too, were uplifted when they learned of us. We may not have been covered much in U.S. media, but we were covered in international media. We let the world know that “we are here in the belly of the beast and we are not silent! We are crucial members of a global movement for justice and peace.” Throughout the world and in the United Nations, they heard us. Never before have 12 million voices made a single cry, “Peace Now!” We Organized Infrastructure This year, we succeeded in organizing infrastructure for our movement. We can see, in neighborhood peace and justice groups, that we have established our local communication networks as well as values and principles by which we operate. In our own groups, we have established a process for decision-making, methods of outreach, analysis of skills, ways of working together that work and ways of raising funds. We Built Trust and Networks We have bonded together through successive actions. As we have built trust in one another and been strengthened by the power of community. We are educating and training ourselves about the issues shaping our lives. We have identified alternative sources of news and information. We are developing organizing skills. We are broadening our base of leadership, having learned from experience that there cannot be just one leader. We have linked with like-minded organizations to build a network expanding all of the above resources. We have connected with other populations in your community that, a year ago, we didn’t make the time to know. Collectively—we are learning and creating and new strategies, models and outlets for organizing. We Connected the Dots Locally In this year, we have successfully connected the dots between peace at home and abroad with global trade policies and civil and economic policies in America. Consequently, our movement broadens and deepens in numbers, in diversity, in understanding, resources and strength. Today, many of us are supporting striking/locked out grocery store employees and other workers, immigrants, and marginalized children and families in our communities because we really have grasped that all this suffering is connected! We Chose Love We have matured and become more skillful and confident as people and communities. We have developed trust our own intuition and wisdom. We have grown in love and compassion, because we learned that our anger alone would not sustain us. We have grown in our capacity to take responsibility for our own lives and the world we want. We have grown in courage….courage to stand on those corners with placards, to march, courage to say “I Stand for Peace” and when others called you names…courage not to retaliate with the same tortured spirit. We Became Leaders We have taken a stand for what is right. Many of us have never marched before, never talked politics before, never spoken to our neighbors before, never spoken in public before, never organized anything, never were in charge of a committee or a project. But here we are today! We have stepped into leadership in our lives and communities. We Made Peace the Way Finally, we have succeeded in keeping our movement nonviolent. We have demonstrated what democracy looks like. We have demonstrated what peace looks like. And our movement has grown because of it. These are successes easily overlooked, but in the building of a movement (not just a campaign) they are crucial steps! These are the strengths and assets we bring into the New Year, that we build upon in 2004. The Challenge Before Us Patience This is a hard one, and yet, we must accept that the victory we seek will not be today or tomorrow. Cesar Chavez, speaks of the “patience to win.” We must develop this kind of patience. The labor movement in Los Angeles, “ground zero” of the labor movement nationally, laid the foundation for its success today, ten years ago. It has been a patient, steady, incremental, step-by-step process leading to victories! It was sixteen years after the Gandhi’s Salt March that India finally won its independence. The Civil Rights movement did not begin with Rosa Parks refusing to give up her bus seat, but through the sacrifices of community leaders and ordinary people who had laid the groundwork for years to create the right conditions for this successful campaign. Our victory will not be won overnight. Our success will rest upon no one campaign but on our cumulative efforts. So this year we must learn more and get in tune with the natural rhythm… ebb and flow…advance and retreat…reflection and action that is a natural part of this work. Discipline This year we are challenged to embrace the discipline our work requires. We progressives love our freedom, but freedom without discipline is chaos. We can learn from those who presently govern the virtues of discipline in planning, organizing and executing strategy. This year, we are challenged to learn the discipline of patience, the discipline of leadership, discipline in action and the discipline of love. Acceptance We are challenged to accept that this is our charge. To accept, as Dr. Martin Luther king, JR. put it, “The battle is in our hands.” This is why we are here---on earth at this time, in this nation. This is our watch, not someone else’s. This is not the first time nor the last time, but this is our time. For those looking for the messiah figure, forget it. We are it. As they say, we are the ones we have been waiting for. We are it…housewives, students, bus drivers, school teachers, librarians, welfare mothers, the unemployed, artists, activists! We are the ones who will make the difference. Faith As we look into the new year, we can not help but ponder, “well, okay, I’m in” and then, maybe a bit sheepishly we ask, “…but for how long?” Let us be strengthened once again by the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “I know you are asking today, ‘How long will it take?’ Somebody’s asking, ‘How long will prejudice blind the visions of men, darken their understanding, and drive bright-eyed wisdom from her sacred throne?’ Somebody’s asking, ‘When will wounded justice, lying prostrate on the streets of Selma and Birmingham…be lifted from this dust of shame to reign supreme among the children of men?’ ---- Somebody’s asking, ‘how long will justice be crucified?’” “I come to say to you…however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long because truth crushed to earth will rise again. How long? Not long because no lie can live forever. How long? Not long because you shall reap what you sow. How long? …Not long because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Let us go forward grateful for the best of ourselves that we gave to the year that is past. Let us continue to build on the solid internal and external structures we have made—structures of courage and love, organizing and action. Let us be strengthened by Faith—in ourselves and one another—as we fulfill our charge to build a world of love and peace. [Eisha Mason ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) is the Executive Director of the Center for the Advancement of Nonviolence.] © Eisha Mason 2004By Eisha Mason January 2, 2004 by CommonDreams.org http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0102-11.htm We have arrived at the end of a tumultuous year in our world, in which our country and our own lives have changed dramatically. Last winter, in bitter cold, I was in Washington, D.C. marching to prevent the war in Iraq with 100,000 other dedicated Americans. We were a part of demonstrations all over the world, united in a desire for peace. We were cold, but our hearts were warm; and we dared to believe that we might really stop the coming war. But war came. And a year later, the Bush Administration continues its assault on civil liberties, on the environment, media, human services programs, and on our children’s financial future. It continues to rob from the poor and give to the rich, and undermine the foundations of democracy. If we listen unquestioningly to the mass media, we may begin to believe that we have endured one defeat after another in 2003. And some of us see the commencement of the Iraq War as our greatest defeat. But this is a mistake. Such a perception sees through too narrow a prism. Iraq was a milestone. One battle does not make a war, one experiment does not make an invention and one campaign does not make a movement. In the past year, we have been victorious in progressing as a movement for peace and justice. We have much to celebrate and much to build upon as we face the challenges ahead of us. The Victories We Won We Were Not Silent In 2003, our movement firmly established itself in resistance to the war and in the recognition that the military build up abroad, in effect, declared war on the economic and civil well being of Americans at home. Throughout America, neighborhood peace groups spontaneously sprang up with lightening speed. And these autonomous groups rapidly formed loose networks of like- minded local groups and all ready established peace and justice organizations. Street corner vigils multiplied, not just in the numbers of individuals on a corner, but in the number of corners occupied across America, in small towns as well as urban communities. Mass demonstrations in San Francisco, LA and New York became more “massive” because people, ordinary people, traveled across country to make their voices heard. We Spoke Truth to Power Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his reflections on the Birmingham campaign during the American Civil Rights movement, said, “The ultimate tragedy of Birmingham was not the brutality of the bad people, but the silence of the good people.” Let us celebrate that we were not silent. At a time when it was so easy to be cowed by the media war machine or by this Administration that called us “traitors” and “collaborators with the enemy,” we dared to question or think for ourselves. When it was easier to keep silent in family gatherings or in the lunchroom at work, when neighbors may have turned away from us, when we sometimes thought we were all alone, we can celebrate that we were not silent. When we were pumped an intravenous diet of Fear each day, we did not succumb. We were true to our own consciences. When our children and grand children question us about this time, we will be able to look them in the eye and tell them that we were not silent. When they ask how countrymen betrayed their values and almost lost our freedoms and almost bankrupted this country, we can tell them how we helped save these treasures for the next generation and how we held the vision and listened to the Truth in our own hearts. Perhaps this, more than anything, is what matters most. We Created Public Debate In 2003, even though we were all but shut out of mainstream media, we succeeded in demonstrating our presence as a movement. Through our vigils, demonstrations, letters, and alternative media, we created public debate where there was none. We United Globally Just as we were uplifted when we learned of the millions of people worldwide demonstrating for peace, for justice and for international law, they, too, were uplifted when they learned of us. We may not have been covered much in U.S. media, but we were covered in international media. We let the world know that “we are here in the belly of the beast and we are not silent! We are crucial members of a global movement for justice and peace.” Throughout the world and in the United Nations, they heard us. Never before have 12 million voices made a single cry, “Peace Now!” We Organized Infrastructure This year, we succeeded in organizing infrastructure for our movement. We can see, in neighborhood peace and justice groups, that we have established our local communication networks as well as values and principles by which we operate. In our own groups, we have established a process for decision-making, methods of outreach, analysis of skills, ways of working together that work and ways of raising funds. We Built Trust and Networks We have bonded together through successive actions. As we have built trust in one another and been strengthened by the power of community. We are educating and training ourselves about the issues shaping our lives. We have identified alternative sources of news and information. We are developing organizing skills. We are broadening our base of leadership, having learned from experience that there cannot be just one leader. We have linked with like-minded organizations to build a network expanding all of the above resources. We have connected with other populations in your community that, a year ago, we didn’t make the time to know. Collectively—we are learning and creating and new strategies, models and outlets for organizing. We Connected the Dots Locally In this year, we have successfully connected the dots between peace at home and abroad with global trade policies and civil and economic policies in America. Consequently, our movement broadens and deepens in numbers, in diversity, in understanding, resources and strength. Today, many of us are supporting striking/locked out grocery store employees and other workers, immigrants, and marginalized children and families in our communities because we really have grasped that all this suffering is connected! We Chose Love We have matured and become more skillful and confident as people and communities. We have developed trust our own intuition and wisdom. We have grown in love and compassion, because we learned that our anger alone would not sustain us. We have grown in our capacity to take responsibility for our own lives and the world we want. We have grown in courage….courage to stand on those corners with placards, to march, courage to say “I Stand for Peace” and when others called you names…courage not to retaliate with the same tortured spirit. We Became Leaders We have taken a stand for what is right. Many of us have never marched before, never talked politics before, never spoken to our neighbors before, never spoken in public before, never organized anything, never were in charge of a committee or a project. But here we are today! We have stepped into leadership in our lives and communities. We Made Peace the Way Finally, we have succeeded in keeping our movement nonviolent. We have demonstrated what democracy looks like. We have demonstrated what peace looks like. And our movement has grown because of it. These are successes easily overlooked, but in the building of a movement (not just a campaign) they are crucial steps! These are the strengths and assets we bring into the New Year, that we build upon in 2004. The Challenge Before Us Patience This is a hard one, and yet, we must accept that the victory we seek will not be today or tomorrow. Cesar Chavez, speaks of the “patience to win.” We must develop this kind of patience. The labor movement in Los Angeles, “ground zero” of the labor movement nationally, laid the foundation for its success today, ten years ago. It has been a patient, steady, incremental, step-by-step process leading to victories! It was sixteen years after the Gandhi’s Salt March that India finally won its independence. The Civil Rights movement did not begin with Rosa Parks refusing to give up her bus seat, but through the sacrifices of community leaders and ordinary people who had laid the groundwork for years to create the right conditions for this successful campaign. Our victory will not be won overnight. Our success will rest upon no one campaign but on our cumulative efforts. So this year we must learn more and get in tune with the natural rhythm… ebb and flow…advance and retreat…reflection and action that is a natural part of this work. Discipline This year we are challenged to embrace the discipline our work requires. We progressives love our freedom, but freedom without discipline is chaos. We can learn from those who presently govern the virtues of discipline in planning, organizing and executing strategy. This year, we are challenged to learn the discipline of patience, the discipline of leadership, discipline in action and the discipline of love. Acceptance We are challenged to accept that this is our charge. To accept, as Dr. Martin Luther king, JR. put it, “The battle is in our hands.” This is why we are here---on earth at this time, in this nation. This is our watch, not someone else’s. This is not the first time nor the last time, but this is our time. For those looking for the messiah figure, forget it. We are it. As they say, we are the ones we have been waiting for. We are it…housewives, students, bus drivers, school teachers, librarians, welfare mothers, the unemployed, artists, activists! We are the ones who will make the difference. Faith As we look into the new year, we can not help but ponder, “well, okay, I’m in” and then, maybe a bit sheepishly we ask, “…but for how long?” Let us be strengthened once again by the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “I know you are asking today, ‘How long will it take?’ Somebody’s asking, ‘How long will prejudice blind the visions of men, darken their understanding, and drive bright-eyed wisdom from her sacred throne?’ Somebody’s asking, ‘When will wounded justice, lying prostrate on the streets of Selma and Birmingham…be lifted from this dust of shame to reign supreme among the children of men?’ ---- Somebody’s asking, ‘how long will justice be crucified?’” “I come to say to you…however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long because truth crushed to earth will rise again. How long? Not long because no lie can live forever. How long? Not long because you shall reap what you sow. How long? …Not long because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Let us go forward grateful for the best of ourselves that we gave to the year that is past. Let us continue to build on the solid internal and external structures we have made—structures of courage and love, organizing and action. Let us be strengthened by Faith—in ourselves and one another—as we fulfill our charge to build a world of love and peace. [Eisha Mason ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) is the Executive Director of the Center for the Advancement of Nonviolence.] © Eisha Mason 2004 --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Find out what made the Top Yahoo! Searches of 2003 [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] portside (the left side in nautical parlance) is a news, discussion and debate service of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. It aims to provide varied material of interest to people on the left. 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