Today in Dubuque we celebrated the gift of peace, Dr. King's legacy of promoting love, justice, service, and nonviolent direct action.
Now in our eighth year of weekly Peace vigils, our group again assembled at downtown Washington Park, across from the Post Office, at 4:00pm. This vigil, along with joining Dr. King's holiday, was also a service event with the Presidential Inaugural Committee.
The temperature was 18 with breezes out of the NW when fourteen of us gathered to stand for the hour. A few of our regulars are traveling to DC for tomorrow's Inauguration.
Along with our usaservice.org "Renew America Together" signs, we featured our usual Friends' "War is Not the Answer", "Bring the Troops Home", "Occupation is a Crime: Iraq, Palestine", "Make Peace Not War", and "Friends for Peace".
Here is our photo.
In a recent conversation with organizer, Art Roche, I was reminded that locals had started gathering at Washington Park on Monday afternoons in September, 2001, envisioning presciently that a military response to 911-terrorism would be inadequate, shortsighted, and unjust.
It was a year later that I joined these visionaries. In the runup to the Iraq War a friend, Bob Roethig, and I produced a 30-minute video for local cable TV, "Not in My Name."
This was about the same time that young Illinois state senator Barack Obama addressed a modest antiwar rally of 2000 in Federal Plaza in Chicago on October 2, 2002. He denounced the war before it began: "That's what I'm opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics." His "No, we shouldn't!" in 2002 morphed into "Yes, we can!" assertiveness by 2007.
What do we do during these hourlong gatherings of vigil?
There has to be a public forum and a witness which questions the vacuous thinking that contributes to this mentality of foreign policy perpetually seeking military over diplomatic solutions on our shrinking planet.
So we stand and hold our peace and protest signs, visit and banter about events, international and local, and greet with waves those who drive past and with friendly greetings with waves those who walk past us.
We haven't sung, "Kumbaya," the scenario the rightwing holds up to ridicule, though we have sung "Amazing Grace" and "Give Peace a Chance" and "This Land Is Your Land."
Our group is composed of retirees, Catholic sisters, a hospital administrator, veterans, nurses, teachers/instructors, even a former city mayor. Most of us are politically active and a number worked with Obama's campaign: I served as a precinct captain.
Today we again asked, "How long do we do this?"
It is encouraging that Dubuque has a core group of peace activists and this downtown venue; this wartorn world offers myriad largescale tragedies to confront: Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur, more recently, the annihilation of Palestinians in Gaza.
Next Monday afternoon I plan to assemble again, to vigil, to stand for peaceful resolution of our conflicts. Dr. King has assured us he stands with us, from his remarks delivered in his Nobel Peace Lecture in December, 1964: "It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it."