by Larry Kerschner On February 1, 1968, my Infantry company was involved in an “action” that resulted in the killing of over 100 men and women in the Central Highlands of Viet Nam. Most Americans know something about the massacre at My Lai.  What most Americans don’t know is that the My Lai atrocity was one of hundreds of similar massacres that occurred during the American War in Viet Nam. A recent book Kill Anything That Moves: the Real American War in Viet Nam by Nick Turse carefully documents (with many footnotes) the commonplace “search and destroy” attitude that pervaded the U.S. military from the lowliest grunt to the highest command. In 1967, after some news reports about atrocities being…

by Susan Donaldson WWFOR’s 2013 Spring Assembly on April 20, 2013, “Challenges of Nonviolence and Sustainability,” will feature a short keynote address by mild-mannered but fearless priest Bill (“Bix”) Bichsel of Tacoma on the encouragement he felt from meeting with Scottish and British anti-nuclear activists last fall that we can do away with nuclear weapons. Workshops will focus on both economic and environmental justice and on the effectiveness of nonviolent means for bringing about sustainable change. Much that we see and experience in our current world disturbs and disappoints us: jobs continue to disappear; our economic system encourages us to spend, accumulate stuff, and then throw it away—and then scolds and punishes us for not saving; hundreds of millions of…

by Brenda Collier National FOR is in the process of regionalization.  They hope this process will help them move to a more grassroots organization.  To do this they are planning to have six regional coordinator/organizers.  Many of you will remember the Reverend Lucas Johnson from the last two years at Seabeck.  He has been hired to be the coordinator for the South-East region. The WWFOR Area Committee has been working with national FOR to see how this will affect us.  Looking at the job description, WWFOR sees the need for two separate positions currently: the WWFOR organizer (currently Ellen Finkelstein) and the regional coordinator/organizer. The former would continue to be funded within WWFOR and the regional position would be funded by…

July 8 – August 1, 2013 Looking for high-school students who will be juniors or seniors in September 2013 and who want to work for justice in their communities this summer. $500 stipend: 5 hours/4 days/ 4 weeks Application deadline: May 13 More information will be available soon: www.wwfor.org or 206-789-5565

by Ellen Finkelstein “A nation that continues year after year to spend more on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.” -Martin Luther King Jr. During a recent workshop with national Peace Action and National Priorities Project, I took part in a mock “debate” in which I argued that we could not afford to make cuts to funding for the Pentagon. I said that we couldn’t cut the Pentagon for social needs, as my “opponent” suggested. Workshop participants then voted for who was most persuasive. Sadly, I won the debate – in part because it’s easy to lie and to play on people’s fears about safety, and to emphasize current jobs instead of the many…

by Glen Anderson During 2012 the Olympia FOR started organizing vigorous action to deal with the escalating disruption of global climates  We staffed information tables at public events in June and October.  In August, four members of the Olympia FOR’s Steering Committee (Glen Anderson, Kerri Griffis, Bourtai Hargrove and Ted Nation) started working very hard along with Larry Kerschner and Ellen Finkelstein to organize the Western Washington FOR’s Fall Retreat (Sat. Nov. 10 in Lacey), which focused on the climate crisis and especially toward preventing a huge number of very nasty trainloads of coal from moving through our community for exporting to Asia. Many Olympia FOR people participated in the WWFOR Fall Retreat, including some who had not attended previous…

by John Repp In Christopher Boehm’s earlier book Hierarchy in the Forest: the Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior (1999), he describes how hunter-gatherer and horticultural societies created egalitarian societies. The band or tribe members co-operated to prevent “alpha” type males from dominating their group. Having language helped them achieve this political equality. Boehm is an anthropologist and a primatologist and has studied egalitarian band, tribe and village customs and chimps in the wild. Without language that allows them to communicate and better cooperate, chimps end up with hierarchical societies. Human’s egalitarianism is not exactly “natural”–i.e., DNA driven–but is made possible like abilities like language facilitated by DNA. Egalitarianism is the result of actions and a culture–i.e., learned behavior. It is a…

by Larry Kerschner There are two books that I have read recently that I recommend.  The first is How to Create a Mind by Ray Kurzweil.  Kurzweil created the flat scanner and the text-to-speech and speech-to-text programs we use every day among many other inventions.  This book looks at the possibility (and likelihood) of creating a synthetic neocortex that in many ways could surpass the human mind.  He bases his predictions on the idea that the human brain is basically a pattern recognition device and its basic function is to predict the future.  Recent science shows that we perceive the bare outline of events and reconstruct memories in an ordered sequence, and our ability to fill in the blanks provides…

Idle No More began in Canada in October 2012 when four First Nation women felt an urgency to address Bill C-45. Idle No More “calls on all people to join in a revolution which honors and fulfills Indigenous sovereignty which protects the land and water. We must…live the spirit and intent of the treaty relationship, work towards justice in action, and protect Mother Earth.” This grassroots movement has spread throughout Canada and into the U.S. with social media, flash mobs, demonstrations. At a Seattle event, signs read “Respect Existence or Expect Resistance” and “When Injustice Becomes Law, Resistance Becomes Duty.” See www.idlenomore.com.

WWFOR is working with several coalitions to respond to the “fiscal cliff.” The work continues in 2013. It is unacceptable to reduce spending on the backs of hard-working Americans, the elderly, veterans, the poor, children and disabled when we clearly have other options that are far more ethical. Please sign the Jobs Not War petition at www.jobs-not-wars.org. On Dec. 15, 2012, a delegation met via video conference with key DC aides for Senator Patty Murray and Senator Maria Cantwell. (Photo by Kaeley Pruitt-Hamm) We can save 100s of billions: Reduce budget for U.S. overseas military bases by 20%:  $200 billion End the war in Afghanistan Now:  $83 billion in 2013 Cut unnecessary and wasteful Pentagon spending:  $100 billion a year…