The peace community around the nation is outraged at Obama's announcement of the deployment of 35,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. But should we be surprised? Obama promised the reduction of forces in Iraq and further escalation in Afghanistan during his presidential campaign.

Regardless, not only are more lives going to be lost in an escalation that shouldn't happen, but billions of taxpayer dollars are going to be spent on this escalation, further impacting domestic programs that provide essential services to human beings in the U.S.

This is an outrage.

There are numerous actions being held around the country this week in reaction to Obama's announcement. Here in Salt Lake City I hope people will come out to the event listed below to raise their voices:

Afghanistan: No Escalation Vigil – December 3, 5:30pm

Afghanistan: No Escalation!

Vigil, 5:30 – 6:30pm
100 South State Street, Salt Lake City, UT

Today is Green Blog Action Day, a project of Green Change which was inspired by the global day of blog action on climate change. The topic: Local action. Check out all the Green Blogging going on over at Green Change to see what people around the country are writing about local action. My local action topic for today is a story about how I grew into taking action on a local level that is making a difference in my community.

As a young child I decided that because there was so much greenery on the earth my favorite color would be green. I grew up appreciating the beauty of our planet due to the inspiration I had from family that influenced my love for life. That inspiration led to personal practices that have helped me to work towards reducing my footprint on the world. One of those practices is that of consuming only what is necessary. This continues to be a practice which I constantly examine and refine in my life. I buy clothing at thrift stores and make my own jewelry and handbags, for example. I grow a lot of my own food. I compost. I recycle. I take public transportation and walk as much as possible. It is no wonder, then, that the Green Party, a party that promotes values near and dear to my heart, would eventually become "home" to me.

Local Action=Personal Responsibility

As a younger woman growing up in Frederick County, Maryland, about 50 miles west of Baltimore, each Thanksgiving I would watch with intrigue as the local news would air the piece about the huge Thanksgiving Feast organized by this amazing woman - Bea Gaddy, the
"Mother Teresa of Baltimore", a woman who grew up in poverty and rose above her life's challenges to become a successful advocate for human beings on our planet.

Each year I would continue to be inspired by the stories published about Bea Gaddy and her efforts. I would think to myself "I want to be like her when I grow up." She demonstrated a level of community action that touched my heart and warmed the souls of tens of thousands of people through the years. Then one day my wish began to come true.

Local Action=Following Bea Gaddy's Mission

I became involved with the Green Party when I moved to Utah in the late 90's because of everything the Green Party advocates with regards to life on earth. I became active at the national level and met many great people. One person I met from Rhode Island, Greg Gerritt, told me
about the Rhode Island Green Party organized "Winter Coat Exchange" held each year on Buy Nothing Day, the day after Thanksgiving....the heaviest shopping day of the year. This year is the 12th year for the Rhode Island event where thousands of coats are now collected and
given away. All types of community organizations have become involved. The idea: "If you need a coat, come get one. If you have a coat, we know someone who can use it." As I learned more about this event, I knew that I had to organize a sister event in Utah.

Local Action=Community Action

I had participated in Buy Nothing Day actions before. At malls and shopping places I would join dozens of activists in "anti-carol" sings, with messages about the pitfalls of consumerism, including its impact on our planet. But something just wasn't working.
Shoppers would hurry past us as we sang and any leaflets we handed out ended up on the ground. I was frustrated. There had to be something else that could be done on this day to have more of an impact. Something that would touch the hearts of people as they spent their money on material goods that day. The concept of a coat exchange was something I decided to pursue.

Local Action=Pulling people together for a common good.

The first Community Coat Exchange was held in Salt Lake City, Utah The day after Thanksgiving in 2006, with about 300 coats collected, and 100 given away. TV cameras showed up and people responded positively to the idea. The next year we collected about 400 coats and gave away 200. Last year we collected over 700 coats and gave away 600. We now have 5 collection sites. People from all walks of life participate. The event is growing. Next year we hope to have a sister event in Ogden, a city north of Salt Lake City. We have more community partners. We get some media attention, but there still seems to be more "news" at the malls where people are shopping. No matter. As we grow, we touch lives and warm hearts in our local community.

As I reflect on this growing event, this local action, I have come to realize, on a small scale and relevant to my world, that my wish has come true, thanks to everyone in my life who has influenced me - my amazing and wonderful husband, my parents, my grandmothers, my
siblings, my children and grandchildren, my wonderful friends, my Green Party colleagues from around the country, and others in the world who have inspired and influenced me.

I am growing up to be like Bea Gaddy.

My desire now is to continue to grow and serve our community in ways that all people will benefit from efforts such as the Community Coat Exchange: A local action that has made a difference to the lives of countless people....to the life of the disabled man who just
needed to talk to someone (and get a coat)....to the families of refugees who were in need of coats for the cold Utah weather....to the war vet who was struggling to get the care he needed to survive....to the women who were being sheltered in a domestic violence victim shelter and needed winter wear for their children....to the homeless men who came to stock up on winter wear for the weather in which they were forced to live....to the school children who collected coats at their schools for the event....and for the many people who realized that shopping on Black Friday was not as important as giving back to the community and taking pause to consider how to better protect and prolong the life of our planet.

Local Action=Making dreams come true. You can do it!

                                 - Juneteenth website

The year 2015 will mark the 150th anniversary of Juneteenth.  Preparations are under way for planning for this event.  Organizers encourage people to sign up on the website to help in the planning for this anniversary.

I was interviewed awhile back by Mike Paleck"s New American Dream site and am the feature interview today.

It will be up until Thursday a.m., then will be in the archives.

Mike, who is an Iowa author of peace and justice issues,  visited Salt Lake City last April.  He has authored several books, one of which has a photo of Utah's Radical Cheerleaders, Pom Poms Not Bomb Bombs!

Today is Doris "Granny D" Haddock's 99th birthday. She is celebrating with friends today in Peterborough, New Hampshire, and will celebrate again on the 28th in the NH Governor's office --something of a New Hampshire tradition now.

She will be coming out here to Arizona in a week and a half to get some warm walks and to work on a little writing.

Some of you have sent reports and memories of what you have been up to during the last eight difficult years, and I will have them printed out for her to read and admire. We'll try to do something to put them all together. (It's not too late, by the way, to add your story --email me by return post.)

If you want to wish her a happy birthday, consider doing so on the Facebook page a friend has set up for her. I'll make sure she sees them. If you don't do Facebook, send an email ( Dennis Burke <burke@fastq.com>) and I'll print it out for her. She does have email, but it gets backlogged terribly.  She has a phone, but she would kill me if I asked everyone to call today, as she has a goal of calling 100 members if the NH Legislature today --she is pushing a state bill for campaign finance reform.

Green Party members nationwide are mourning the unexpected and tragic loss of Texas Green Bill Holloway.

Bill was very good to me and Tom when we visited Austin and Camp Casey in August of 2006.  He even wrote about us on his blog.  Here are two photos of us with Bill at Camp Casey:



January 10, 2009

The Green Party of Texas mourns the tragic loss of Bill Holloway.  Bill was a dedicated leader who was currently serving as the Co-Chair of the Travis County Green Party in Austin, TX. He will be missed as a mentor and a friend.( Read more... )

Today was a success. We gave away about 600 coats.

I am a member of Pom Poms Not Bomb Bombs which participated in the Equality Rally on Saturday.

Below is a video that Lionel Trepanier took and edited into a really nice piece.

Joe Truss has posted this video on the Green Party  over at Green Change.
A thought provoking documentary created by members of the Green Party, in support of Ralph Nader, Cynthia McKinney, Rosa Clemente and Matt Gonzalez. What is the Green Party? Who are the members? What is Independent Political Action? How is it different from the Democratic and Republican Parties? What next?

Doris "Granny D" spoke over the weekend in Philadelphia. She was sharing the program with Whoopi Goldberg

Philadelphia: October 12, 2008

Thank you.

It seems that the world is changing around us this autumn. I know that some of my feistier friends have been hoping for big social and political changes -- for a revolution of some sort -- to get us on a new path to a better future on a healthier Earth. I do not think they imagined that the revolution might take the form of strange torpedoes called credit default swap derivatives, exploding our banks and bankrupting our governments, but revolutions rarely arrive or turn out the way you expect. This society has run its course. We the people have long been ready for fresh growth, greener growth, scaled more to the needs of human beings and their communities.

I have been thinking lately of my old Texas writer friend Molly Ivins, who passed away not long ago and left us with an insufficient store of good humor to see all the amusing and satisfying turns of justice in the present economic collapse. She would remind us that Freedom's just another word for no retirement money left to lose. Yes, the walls have crumbled, but now we are free from all that anxiety about losing all our money. There's not much left to worry about. Molly would have been the one to take a few flat busted CEOs out for a scotch and water somewhere toward Greenwich Village and laugh with them and tell them they were all being sons-of-bitches anyway and had it coming. And they would laugh and have to agree. She was an American and never forgot that we are all equals. So what would Molly do? I have a little rubber bracelet that asks that question. She would remind us that the treasure of America isn’t in our banks anyway. It is in our families and friendsh!
ips, in our brotherhood and sisterhood as a free and creative people.

Sticking together, none of us will starve. Besides, we can always grow enough zucchini for everyone, can’t we?

We need not fear Fear Itself this time around, for fear is a humbug. If we have learned anything in all the Aquarian splendor of the last few generations, it is that fear for the loss of material things is but the jitters of an addict, and the jitters go away once we relax into whatever new world we find ourselves come into.

You will hear people on television worrying about the return of the Great Depression. I have heard that several times during the last week or so.

I am old enough to have memories of that time, are any of you? Maybe we were hungry sometimes, but did we starve? No, because we had our friends and family and the earth to sustain us. The earth may have been reluctant to feed us in some of those years, but never our friends nor our families.

If you lived through that time, and if now you hear some young expert on television saying the term “Great Depression” as if it were a great monster who might return, let me ask you – you who remember the last time – there are a few of us left – let me ask you if your memories of that time are not more round and golden than sharp-edged?

My husband, Jim, made an ice rink from a little meadow, and he made a few dollars extra those winters of the Depression. I learned to put on one-woman plays, and performed in women’s clubs here and there, making the rest of what we needed. We were fountains of creativity. We were fountains of friendship to our neighbors. As a nation, we were a mighty river of mutual support.

That same Great Depression made some people in other countries ready for violence, genocide and war. But, somehow, through the exceptional miracle that is America itself, the hard times only made us more willing to help the world when our help was needed.

I am not advocating hardship, and I am not cheerleading for poverty. Indeed, prosperity is the green wreath we cherish most, though it means little without the times between.

Imagination! Let me suggest that a generation raised on books and storytelling, where one’s own imagination had to fill in the colors and details, made us a generation quite able to imagine marvelous ways to fill our family dinner table in those years. Let me suggest that the power of imagination was essential to the rise of all the grand improvements we achieved for each other and called our New Deal. Imagination allows the citizen and the politician to connect with people of every situation and condition.

I have often heard it said that the more right-wing members of our present political order will not bend on a difficult issue -- say stem cell research -- until someone they love needs that bit of medical magic. Well, I think that suggests that the foundation of right-wing politics is a grand absence of imagination. If you cannot imagine what people need until it happens to you, then I suggest you have never read a mystery book under your covers by flashlight. I do not mean to pick on my more conservative friends, but imagination and its product, empathy, are necessary in a democracy, if it is to survive and prosper as a just and happy system of life. Imagination, empathy, education and moral leadership are the essentials of a good and humane democracy.

Nine years ago, at the age of 90, I walked 3,200 miles across the United States. I was promoting a specific political reform that did in fact pass Congress later. I was also cleaning out my heart after the death of my husband, Jim, and my best friend, Elizabeth.

I met the old America along that road – the America I hadn’t seen since the 1930s and which I had almost forgotten.

Toyah, Texas, is an old railroad town just west of the Pecos, where the ruins of a once-beautiful main street stand like a crumbling movie set. Berta Begay offered shelter to me on the night I walked into Toyah. She didn’t know me but was glad to greet me on her porch and welcome me to stay in a little shack she had across the road, if I would please give her time to clean it up and put some fresh linens on the bed.

It was a little yellow bungalow near the tracks. The kitchen floor had linoleum creatively held down in strips to the wavy wood beneath by upholstery tacks. The house was cooled by the open doors and a few fans. The yard was dirt with a little grass, and everything about the house was well-ordered and clean. She said I was welcome to stay for as long as I needed.

Berta is a beautiful Native American and hispanic woman who, each evening, prepared a beautiful basket of bread and a casserole dinner. She told me about her family. Her daughter, whose name is Misty Moon, was about to graduate from a local public college as an agriculture scientist. Her son, whose name is Dearheart, was a medical assistant at a community hospital. Her husband, Steve, was an expert machinist. Berta was at that time the postmaster of a nearby town. She was rightfully very proud of her family, as they had come a long way in one generation, thanks to their hard work and their imagination in a land of opportunity. You must understand that this town is a dusty place on a great stretch of dusty desert. They had made it their Garden of Eden.

There was a collection of lavender antique bottles in the little house. Berta collects them in the desert as her mother had done before her. The pharmacy in Pecos, thirty miles away, has a nice collection of them also, left over from the days when Berta’s mother traded bottles for medicine for her children. That’s how far and how fast they have come, and how even glass strewn on the desert had been swept up into prosperity by the force of their imagination and love for one another. The pharmacist, too, was in that circle of love, as one can see by the bottles still in his window.

Berta helped introduce me around at Toyah’s tiny city hall, which also serves as a church for the town. The two women clerks invited me to speak the next evening. The next morning, they had already created and installed hand-made posters at the gas station and in the general store out on the highway, beautifully promoting my talk on political reform.

Townspeople brought food to the evening event. Berta brought delicious cold snacks made from prickly pear cactus paddles. I saved some for breakfast the next morning. If I ever doubt that I am a tough old nut, I can remember that I had cactus for breakfast in Toyah, Texas, west of the Pecos. Very tart and tasty, by the way.

In the back of the hall during my talk, there were a few patient children trying to make sense of what we were saying. It made me remember when I was a child in Laconia, New Hampshire -- I was that child in the back of the room. Visiting speakers came to town all in a summer crowd of experts and entertainers called the Chautauqua meeting. A big tent was erected on the Pearl Street playgrounds, the largest open space in town. Speeches, entertainment, and pot luck dinners were planned for the whole week.

I went for two reasons: The fun reason was that there were dramas performed—like the villain foreclosing on a mortgage and putting the farmer’s pure daughter in harm’s way. I loved drama, and got myself a part in any play put on by the women’s club, the Elks, or the Grange of Laconia. This would later serve me well when we had to survive by our wits.

The adults listened to the political speakers. They learned how the railroad monopolies were ruining the small farmers. The great Progressive-Populist Movement had begun at such meetings in the early 1890s. Great fist-waving speeches at these meetings kept people informed, interested and fired up.

My Mama didn’t know if her children would ever be able to afford proper educations, so she made us listen to the lectures so we would at least have a few thoughts in our heads. Well, those Progressive thoughts are still rattling around up here. I thank my Mama’s imaginative university.

After my talk at the Toyah city hall, which was about the undue influence of lobbyists and large donors on the political system and what we might do about it, there were heartfelt comments from the townspeople about how they could no longer defend their own town and how it was suffering. At the end of the evening, Berta folded a letter into my hand. It was a long and beautifully written letter about her spiritual beliefs and about her town. The letter detailed how political corruption was literally dismantling the town, selling off the beautiful historic buildings for their bricks, and changing the rail service that had once been the lifeblood of the town. Her letter concluded “God has a mission for all of us, through we often don’t know the details, so therefore we trust. When you pray, please remember this little town.”
( Read more... )

Rosa Clemente, Green Party Vice Presidential Candidate

Mass Civil Disobedience around the environment

Using the Patriot act to prosecute protestors as domestic terrorists

http://votetruth08.com - http://www.rosaclemente.com

Shot by
Craig Seeman
Patrick Dwyer