Message of Solidarity and Appeal from Peace Park, DC on 50th Anniversary of Hiroshima Bomb (Keynote Speech by Ellen Thomas) It's been gratifying to see photos in the American newspapers of the Japanese Emperor laying wreaths in Peace Parks, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's good to see whole issues of news magazines devoted to the question, "should we have dropped the bomb?" It's important for both governments to apologize for the horrors of World War II. It's time to heal. It's time to make sure we don't drop another bomb on another city, ever again. It's also time to teach the children a peaceful way of living, and to stop glorifying war. One of the least-discussed secrets of the American press is our own Peace Park - Washington DC, which took root fourteen-plus years ago when a pilgrim, horrified by the escalating war machine, first sat down on the White House sidewalk with a sign that read "Wanted: Wisdom & Honesty." The men across the street and up on Capitol Hill, who gave the Pentagon billions more dollars than they asked for this year, who distract us with non-issues like balanced budget, flag-burning, and school prayer amendments, while our kids become more and more desperate about a future which seems more horrifying all the time -- these same men (and some women, I confess) continue to invest billions of taxpayers' dollars in ever-more efficient ways to murder people, and continue to send arms to thugs all over the planet. This insanity must stop. Now. Peace Park - DC is where we promote a practical idea which might help lead us toward a safer world. It is here where we launched the Proposition One voter initiative campaign, which won its first election with 56% of the vote in 1993. Proposition One has been introduced two years in a row into the House of Representatives as the "Nuclear Disarmament and Economic Conversion Act," by DC's Delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton. In 1995 the bill's number is HR-1647. If this bill becomes law, it will send a message to the world, for the first time, that the United States is willing to eliminate all its nuclear weapons if everyone else does. It sends a message to the people of the United States that the billions of dollars saved each year will be used to convert the nuclear weapons industries, clean up the environmental mess that's been made, and provide for human needs such as housing, health care, food, and education. In 1994, the bill gained eight co-sponsors: Representatives Hilliard of Alabama, Tucker of California, Lewis and McKinney of Georgia, Wynn of Maryland, Oberstar and Minge of Minnesota, and Rangel of New York. No doubt co- incidentally, several of these lawmakers are currently under some form of investigation, and Ms. McKinney was deprived of her district last month by the U.S. Supreme Court. Eleanor Holmes Norton was deprived of her voting rights as the first act of the new Republican Congress, and her aides are skeptical about the bill's chances in the current political climate. However, she has pledged to continue introducing the bill each year as long as she's in office, saying "these things take time." If we've learned nothing else in Peace Park, we've learned patience. Like water flowing around a rock, we can find another path. So, while we're asking U.S. citizens to write letters and make phone calls to their politicians, we also suggest they work to put Proposition One on their local ballots and send the politicians a message they're less likely to ignore. We're also asking people from ALL countries to write letters to the United Nations Ambassadors for all nuclear powers. Advise them of the existence of HR-1647. Ask them to obtain their nation's promise, "Yes, we'll get rid of all our nuclear weapons if everyone else does." ((())) Last November I had the honor of being an invited speaker at the 9th annual Japan Peace Conference, which was held in Misawa City, 500 kilometers north of Tokyo. There I spoke to 1,500 activists from all over Japan about Peace Park - DC and Proposition One. Misawa City hosts a U.S. air base which is wreaking havoc on the environment with low-flying reconnaissance. Nearby is a base of the Japan Defense Force, which my hosts said is unconstitutional and should be disbanded. After World War II the Japanese adopted a remarkable Constitution which declared, in part: "... We believe that no nation is responsible to itself alone, but that laws of political morality are universal..." (Preamble) "Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.... Land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized." (Article 9) General MacArthur initially opposed this language when it was suggested by the Japanese Prime Minister in 1947. It was MacArthur who managed to circumvent the Constitution by creating the "Self Defense Force" whose purpose ostensibly was to assist the United States in case Japan was attacked by the Communists. It was MacArthur's Occupation Forces that made it a crime to write or broadcast any information to the Japanese people about the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. Many Japanese didn't learn about them until well into the 1950's. Recently the U.S. and U.N. have put pressure on Japan to send their Defense Force overseas to help with U.N. peacekeeping missions. The Japanese government is so far noncommittal, in part no doubt due to the extremely well-organized opposition they face from a broad coalition of organizations throughout Japan. For example, last November, the Japanese had collected 45 million signatures on their "Hiroshima Appeal" to ban all nuclear weapons. Their goal was to collect 16 million more signatures by today, the 50th Anniversary of the dropping of the Hiroshima bomb. This would bring the total signatures to more than half the population of Japan. I look forward to hearing of their success! Last November, I was particularly blessed to be invited to Hiroshima, my own sister-city of the heart. I sat at dawn in Peace Park - Hiroshima, on the edge of its healing river. Hiroshima River is an estuary which ebbs and flows with the tide. I'm told that one reason Hiroshima recovered from the radiation so quickly was the frequent rains and the tidal rivermouth that flushed the poisons away ... into the Pacific, no doubt, and back perhaps to the shores from whence it came -- our poor, confused, also secretly- nuked America, land of the almost free. The water was low, and several crows swooped and scolded and poked for shellfish in the mud. I thought of my husband, Thomas, and of Concepcion Picciotto, our partner in vigiling, who I knew without any doubt were at that moment maintaining a waiting presence outside the U.S. President's house. I want especially to honor Concepcion today. Concepcion began her truly continuous, courageous, sometimes solitary vigil in 1981. Surrounded by stone monuments to death and destruction, she is Washington's living monument for peace and justice. Her photo appears in the Berlitz Guide. She's been interviewed and visited by people from all over the world, who all study her display of photographs of the Hibakusha from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When most people are curled up in 2 a.m. comfort, Concepcion is sitting up at her signs, weathering rain, snow, drunks, cynics, and overzealous police, and is bright and tidy and ready for whatever may come every morning at first light, when squirrels, pigeons, and crows hop up to collect their morning meal of bread or nuts. Concepcion, and the rest of us, may not be here much longer, if the Secret Service has its way. Recently Secret Service officers have warned us that there are plans afoot to put an iron fence around this historic park and close it off from the public at night. We're very concerned about this possibility, of course, not only because it would finally end our vigil. It also sends a message to the world that the U.S. is a terrorized police state. We wonder why this administration wants to send such a hopeless message. In past decades, similar efforts by the S.S. have been stopped short by the Senate. This president seems to believe all he's told by the police who surround him. This Congress has odd ideas about freedom and speech. We, the people, do not wish America's Free Speech Front Lines taken away. This park was set aside by Thomas Jefferson nearly 200 years ago, so ordinary people would have a place near the President's house where they could petition the government and speak their minds. The first known Free Speech event in this park was July 4, 1801, when people gathered from all thirteen states to picnic, run races, dance, and hand their petitions to President Jefferson, personally, on his front porch. These seven acres have the tears, fears, hopes and prayers of thousands poured into its air and soil. Once this land was a native american burial ground. Later, it was a slave burial ground. Dolly Madison ran footraces here, between the White House and St John's church. Bernard Baruch pondered the universe from a bench here. A fence was put around it during Abraham Lincoln's civil war, when injured soldiers were laid out in rows because the hospitals were overfull. That's the same fence some architectural planners have suggested be retrieved from its current home around Georgetown cemetery, to block us all out. In 1917, Suffragists vigiled at the gate across the street, round-the-clock, throughout the winter, asking President Wilson not to send their loved men to war. In the '60's it was the site of a civil rights tent city; in the '70's the Quaker vigil against the Vietnam War remained on the White House sidewalk for a year. Clear-thinking people have always recognized the value of freedom of thought and expression; incrementally it is being transformed into a crime. In the '80's and '90's, during the course of this record- breaking vigil, a single bureaucrat began the arbitrary reversal of the status quo by writing or supervising the writing, interpretation, and enforcement of four regulations which criminalized harmless behavior. My husband, Thomas, and I served three months in prison in 1988, charged with "camping." Judge Charles Richey, in sentencing us, admitted our cause was noble, said he knew we'd be coming right back out to resume our vigil when released, but said he hoped, by sending us to prison, he could "deter others from adopting your lifestyle." "It won't work, your Honor!" yelled one of our supporters in court, and indeed, it didn't: not only did she and others stay until we returned from our exploration of the U.S. penal system; Concepcion remained, as she does today, the most steadfast vigiler of us all. If you agree with those who have told us, "As long as you're out here, the world won't be able to ignore the threat of nuclear war," write letters, sign and circulate our petition, stop the Secret Service from fencing the Park. Please help, so we may continue to stand here, outside the pharoah's gates, converting his Praetorian Guard, reminding the 3 million visitors to the White House every year that there is reason for hope. We need not despair. For every bad there is at least an equal good, and this 50th Anniversary year has seen some steps toward global nuclear disarmament. * The outcry against the French tests is having an effect, they've moved their timetable forward in hopes they can complete the task before Greenpeace and the peace flotilla arrive. * The 25th year Non-Proliferation-Treaty conference in New York in May brought to light the issue of superpower avoidance of Article VI, which requires the signatories "eventually" disarm, and produced an NGO call for disarmament by the year 2000. * The World Court Project, asking that nuclear weapons be declared illegal, has global support. * Truth about human radiation tests, nuclear accidents, environmental devastations, are coming to light. * The mainstream press is debating these issues as never before. * China's opening her borders (meanwhile jockeying for position in the global con game) the way the USSR did in the late '80's. * And people, ordinary citizens, getting tired of oppressive government regulations and policies, are using ballots and letters, town meetings and initiatives to stop bad ideas such as Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant, toxic waste dumps in upstate New York, shopping centers, strip mining, etc. Such nonviolent activists, if given the same attention by the media as the Tim McVeighs, David Koreshes, and ATF's, could show those scared, angry people how to speak harmlessly, how to work together, how not to be tempted into violence. With concentrated effort, we can get the job done. There need not be another Hiroshima or Nagasaki or Trinity or tests of any other nuclear device. Ever again. It's up to all of us, each of us, one by one by one. Ellen Thomas 8/5/95 Peace Park Antinuclear Vigil/ Proposition One Committee P.O. BOX 27217, WASHINGTON, D.C. 200038 (202) 462-0757; http://www.us.net/peace/; prop1@uujobs.com ============================================================== PETITION TO THE LEGISLATORS OF THE UNITED STATES AND COMMONWEALTH OF INDEPENDENT STATES, AND THE UNITED NATIONS We, human beings threatened with and burdened by nuclear weapons, HEREBY call upon the legislatures of the United States and of the Commonwealth of Independent States, to jointly codify the following commitments: (l) DISABLE AND DISMANTLE ALL NUCLEAR WARHEADS BY THE YEAR 2000 AND REFRAIN FROM REPLACING THEM WITH ANY WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION AT ANY TIME; (2) ACTIVELY PROMOTE POLICIES INTENDED TO INDUCE ALL NATIONS ON EARTH TO JOIN IN THESE COMMITMENTS FOR PEACE ON EARTH; (3) USE RECENT LEVELS OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROGRAM RESOURCES TO (a) CONVERT ALL NUCLEAR WEAPONS INDUSTRY EMPLOYEES, PROCESSES, PLANTS, AND PROGRAMS SMOOTHLY INTO CONSTRUCTIVE, ECOLOGICALLY BENEFICIAL PEACETIME INDUSTRIES DURING THE THREE YEARS FOLLOWING THE RATIFICATION OF THIS AMENDMENT; AND (b) REDIRECT THOSE RESOURCES INTO HUMAN NEEDS SUCH AS HOUSING, HEALTH CARE, EDUCATION, AGRICULTURE AND ENVIRONMENTAL RESTORATION. (4) ENTER INTO A VIGOROUS GOOD FAITH EFFORT TO ELIMINATE WAR, ARMED CONFLICT, AND ALL MILITARY OPERATIONS. ----------------------------------------------------------------- UNITED NATIONS AMBASSADORS, U.N. Plaza, New York, NY 10017, USA: PLEASE encourage ALL nuclear powers to PROMISE, "Yes, WE'LL GET RID OF ALL OUR NUCLEAR WEAPONS IF EVERYONE ELSE DOES." (Don't quit until the job is done!) _________________________________________________________________ PRINT LEGIBLY, please! (Draw an arrow(-->) for more information) NAME | ADDRESS (number/street/city/state/zip) | PHONE/FAX |E-MAIL ================================================================= _________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ Please photocopy/distribute/circulate send signed petitions to: PROPOSITION ONE COMMITTEE, PO Box 27217, DC 20038, USA Voice: 202-462-0757 | Fax: 202-265-5389 - E-mail: prop1@uujobs.com; http://www.us.net/peace/