Although I’ve been a member of Veterans for Peace for the past three or four years and am one of the charter members of our local chapter, Rogue Valley Chapter 156, I had never attended a VFP function other than our local meetings and rallies until last week when I participated in the VFP National Convention in Portland, Oregon.
Some 300 veterans and associate members from across the country gathered for the convention with most events taking place in Lincoln Hall on the downtown campus of Portland State University.
The highlights of the convention for me included the following:
-Finally getting to see the amazing documentary film, The Welcome, which was filmed at Buckhorn Spring retreat center and the Angus Bowmer Theater of the Oregon Shakespearean Festival in Ashland. Featuring two VFP member and a dozen or more other veterans of several wars and some family members, who were invited to participate in the retreat to confront their own fears and demons and to prepare poems, songs or other offerings for the audience at the Bowmer on Memorial Day 2008. Kim Shelton & Bill McMillan, who directed and produced the film, introduced it and answered questions afterward. It isn’t any namby-pamby pity film. There is plenty of contentious head-knocking among the participants at the retreat, but it all comes together at the end. There weren’t many dry eyes in the audience that watched it with me. It is really one of the most powerful films about people dealing with the aftermath of war that I’ve ever seen. For more see: http://www.thewelcomehomeproject.org/.
-Listening to Journalism professor and philosopher Robert Jensen of the University of Texas talk about how he thinks we need to move beyond old liberal political ideals that are tied to the corporate power system to a new radical political theology based on a belief in the sacredness of Mother Earth and our need to protect our planet. Read more in his new book, All My Bones Shake.
-Being blown away by the courage and ethical purity of one S. Brian Willson, the author of Blood on the Tracks: The Life & Times of S. Brian Willson. Willson walked out on stage with his two artificial legs exposed and sat on a table and talked candidly and powerfully about his life and about how he sees the United States of America as one of the most ruthless, aggressive and warmongering nations in a “civilization” that has been bathed in blood for 300 or 400 generations. Willson began by reading passages from the Declaration of Independence describing Native Americans as “savages” over and over and then from an order issued by Gen. George Washington during the Revolutionary War in which his troops were instructed to wipe out the Iroquois Nation, men, women and children even if they try to surrender.
Willson said he enlisted and became an officer in the U.S. Air Force because he was a “chicken hawk” when he came out of college. He approved of the Vietnam War but didn’t want to die in it himself and thought he’d be safest in the Air Force. Wrong!
Trained to head an elite group whose mission was to do on the ground inspections in the war zone and report back how effective bombing raids had been, he often arrived in villages shortly after they had been destroyed by 500-lb bombs from B-52s or napalm from lower flying aircraft. When he came into one village and found hundreds of mangled dead bodies piled on one another, something clicked inside him and that epiphany changed him on the spot into a peacenik, who opposed war and he has spent his life fighting the war machine and oppression.
Willson survived the Vietnam War intact. He lost his legs by laying his life on the line on railroad tracks in California trying to stop a train carrying nuclear weapons. The train didn’t stop and he almost bled out before help arrived. He lost his legs but not his desire for peace.
You can read Brian Willson’s essays at his website: http://www.brianwillson.com/
It was an honor to speak with him last Sunday and join him and a contingent of about 100 VFP members in a rally and march to the Japanese-American Friendship Plaza in Portland’s Waterfront Park to commemorate the 66th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
You can see some of my photos of the VFP convention and the march by clicking here:
Allen,
ReplyDeleteGood to hear about this group and your participation. Carry it on!