[GPCA Updates] Honor Veterans with Peace

[Green Party of California Updates]

This article was sent by GPUS as a fundraiser, but it's a nice contemplation
of a Green perspective on Veterans Day.

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Dear Supporter,

The Green Party is the Peace Party, the one voice in the political array that
doesn't rely on about-face justification for continuing international violence
underpinning notions of a superior calling for our nation.  What does that
mean?  On Veteran's Day, what is the price of war?

I'm from a military family.  My dad went into the Navy right out of high
school, and is a Pearl Harbor survivor.  After the war, he went Army, to
finish his twenty years.  Growing up, I attended 13 schools before I finished
9th grade, most of them in rural villages, where the Nike missile base was a
barracks for the privates, the missile "silo" was a cramped metal trailer, and
the two families with kids were temporary outsiders.

Except for aunt Marianne, who was a navy nurse, the military didn't want
women, so we four daughters were not expected to enlist. As a woman, I was
often told I had no right to an opinion in favor of peace, unless I had a
brother or a cousin in combat. Like many of you, I decided that the way you
best fight war is to get there ten years beforehand, and prevent despair by
fixing what was wrong.

My husband's family was also military. In their Appalachia, no one was
drafted-- they were Volunteers. His dad never saw a plane close-up, til he
climbed into one, to learn to fly it for WWII. He re-upped, and finished his
military career by teaching ROTC, in a building on campus that a Quaker-led
group, including me, would stumble into one day, and occupy long enough to
pray for the dead, and the still living. My as-yet-unmet husband's only
brother was among the unnamed for whom we prayed. His unarmed reconnaissance
plane was shot down, the last fatality from Tucson. Until the next war.

How do we count the cost? There was the warrior's widow who, with two toddlers
to raise alone, commenced a writing and publishing career with a Memorial Day
article, asking for peace. She never remarried, and, she was eventually
disabled with a brain tumor, and my husband and I became her caregivers. That
is the part of the war that extends forever-- that the one who should be there
to help, years later, is, instead, a name my hand touches on a Wall, as I
touch the places where he should have been, and was not, and the differences
that it made, to people I care deeply about, and people who will never even
know that he existed.

How do we, in the Green Party, honor the vet, on this Veteran's day, the one
who lived, the one who did not? I have marched so often over the years, stood
in vigils, helped tie a ribbon around the Pentagon. I've been cheered, been
ignored, been spit on by old men with VFW hats. My husband, too, had marched
against the War, and, in haunting, last letters back, his brother blessed the
marching.

The only "thank you" big enough for Veteran's Day is taking up the duty to
find a better way.  Praise of their courage, in a speech or a flag-colored
bumper sticker, is too small. Throwing one beloved corpse upon the next, to
justify having thrown the first, is sad beyond grief.  The truest word is that
they are lost to combat because we did not work hard enough to build a world
where war was avoided, because peace was the better option.

They planted a Peace Rose on Dave's grave, but it was gone by the time we
buried his wife beside him. The next year, my husband and I took my dad back
to see Pearl Harbor again. And last month, my cousin Clifford's son, Aaron,
was killed in Afghanistan, leaving a widow and two young children, and we all
cried again.

No more names on a Wall, or bumpersticker praise for the Vet. Raise your
voice. Raise our collective voices, supporting those who speak for peace, and
who stand on the platform of our party to do so, and speak through the
megaphone of their candidacy, and challenge the war-makers at the one place
they can be displaced-- the ballot box. Ballots can unmake bullets, but only
if the Party committed to peace endures, and for that, we need your support.

This is not a small thing, and we are the only political Party that does it.
If our Party is silenced, then we become spectators in a stymied, broken
version of democracy, and the wars go on.

Donate today. Help your Green Party make enduring peace, this Veteran's Day.

Do it now at
https://salsa.wiredforchange.com/o/175/shop/custom.jsp?donate_page_KEY=2989.

Claudia Ellquist
Arizona Green Party

Please help us fulfill our mission by donating to the Green Party today.  We
don't take ANY corporate money because we think corporate money in politics is
wrong.  If you want to help us work for peace, please help us today.  Your
donation will help us make sure we have a strong Green Party today and into
the future.

You can help us reach the goal we set in July at our national meeting of
funding our operations with the help of 500 sustainers giving $10,000 a month
by the end of 2009.  Click
https://salsa.wiredforchange.com/o/175/shop/custom.jsp?donate_page_KEY=2989 to
become a sustaining donor to the Green Party today!

Your gift of any amount will help to strengthen our voice so that we can make
lasting peace a reality.  With your help we can provide support for anti-war
candidates and challenge the war-makers.  If you have given recently, please
consider giving more.  And, if you haven't given in some time, please make
today the day you give at
https://salsa.wiredforchange.com/o/175/shop/custom.jsp?donate_page_KEY=2989.

Email: gpinfo at gp.org

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We are not the alternative - we are the imperative. Rosa Clemente