A STAND FOR PEACE & HOPE

On 16 December military veterans, along with some high-profile activists: Chris Hedges, Daniel Ellsberg, Medea Benjamin, Ray McGovern and Robert Shetterly and others will Take a Stand for Peace at the White House Fence.

Thank goodness for men of integrity and principle. They shine out among the dross!

Last week Chris Hedges wrote that they will "protest the futile and endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many of us will, after our rally in Lafayette Park, attempt to chain ourselves to the fence outside the White House. It is a pretty good bet we will all spend a night in jail. Hope, from now on, will look like this."

Chris Hedges' full essay is HERE. He went on:

Hope is not trusting in the ultimate goodness of Barack Obama, who, like Herod of old, sold out his people. It is not having a positive attitude or pretending that happy thoughts and false optimism will make the world better. Hope is not about chanting packaged campaign slogans or trusting in the better nature of the Democratic Party. Hope does not mean that our protests will suddenly awaken the dead consciences, the atrophied souls, of the plutocrats running Halliburton, Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobil or the government.

Hope does not mean we will halt the firing in Afghanistan of the next Hellfire missile, whose explosive blast sucks the oxygen out of the air and leaves the dead, including children, scattered like limp rag dolls on the ground. Hope does not mean we will reform Wall Street swindlers and speculators, or halt the pillaging of our economy as we print $600 billion in new money with the desperation of all collapsing states. Hope does not mean that the nation’s ministers and rabbis, who know the words of the great Hebrew prophets, will leave their houses of worship to practice the religious beliefs they preach. Most clerics like fine, abstract words about justice and full collection plates, but know little of real hope.

Hope knows that unless we physically defy government control we are complicit in the violence of the state. All who resist keep hope alive. All who succumb to fear, despair and apathy become enemies of hope. They become, in their passivity, agents of injustice. If the enemies of hope are finally victorious, the poison of violence will become not only the language of power but the language of opposition. And those who resist with nonviolence are in times like these the thin line of defense between a civil society and its disintegration.

"As above, so below" - as the people conjoin to protest, the astrological chart for tomorrow in Washington shows some appropriate planetary conjunctions:



Uranus/Jupiter in Pisces ~ here's the peaceful but rebellious demonstration.

Chiron/Neptune in Aquarius ~ here's the socially conscious and creative attempt to heal the wound of endless war.

Pluto/Mars/Mercury/North node in Capricorn ~ here's anger being communicated via very down to earth means.

Sun in Sagittarius in harmonious trine to Moon in Aries at 10:00 am as the demonstration begins.




UPDATE 16 December