A Note from Paul: The following is an essay in the form of an email by Our Good Friend Silvia A. Brandon Pérez. I feel very fortunate in receiving this and I thought it would be good to share with you. I hope you’ll receive it with the same thoughtfulness as I did. Please feel free to share your comments as I’m eager to learn what they are.
On the eve of the celebration of Thanksgiving in the United States, and while thousands across the land battled each other for yet another nonsensical and highly expensive toy, I have returned from what I may characterize as one of the most emotionally and spiritually uplifting events of my life, and of some 42+ years of activism of one sort or another.
I attended the annual School of the Americas rally in Fort Benning, Georgia, with my spiritual sister Susan Lyons. We flew in on Thursday, attended a number of workshops, sometimes together, sometimes separately, acted as part of the legal collective and as legal observers, and then together participated in the solemn procession in front of the gates of this School, which under its modern name of WHINSEC (Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) , continues to train the despots, satraps, torturers and paramilitary assassins of the Western Hemisphere. It is security cooperation, indeed; together, there is a cooperation in wholesale abuses of the human rights, freedoms and the very lives of anyone who threatens the 'security' (read financial well-being) of the powers that be. By way of example, 22 Colombians, mostly labor unionists, are assassinated each and every day under the aegis of our "Plan Colombia" by proud graduates of the School, and with our weapons and our tax dollars.
This particular gathering was attended, on Sunday the 19th of November, by well over 22,000 people, including many young high school and college students, religious people, US American, Canadian Americans, and Latin Americans from all walks of life, all ages, creeds, national origins, ethnicities. We heard from survivors of torture, from young and old walking wounded who had lost children, siblings, parents and spouses or significant others; at times, during the procession, as the 'collective' from the stage would chant the name of yet another 20 day old or 20 year old or 97 year old 'desaparecido,' people would drop off the line and crumble on the ground to sob loudly, hands covering their faces, or would continue to weep while they stood as witnesses, and chanted, 'presente.'
It was so necessary to stand as a witness, and I could see why there is such a compulsion to cross the fence, despite the assurance of a minimum of three months of federal hard time for a puny governmental trespass infraction against a government which has committed such numerous and egregious crimes against humanity. It is as if you would embrace all of these wounded brothers and sisters, and attempt to alleviate their pain, and our pain, and to share with them Donne's words that 'any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind.'
No man is an island and 22,000+ of us gathered in a collective of grief, outrage, and a determination to close this school, and to close down the activities of empire, and to finally heal our planet. We are involved in mankind.
Words fail me. If we have not succeeded in closing them down by next November, I too will put my body on the line and say, PRESENTE, and say BASTA, and say, NUNCA MAS. For now, I am grateful that I spent these days with these heroes of everyday life, that I was able to once again embrace that spirit that alleviates my despair at this modern life of greed and indifference. BASTA, BASTA, NUNCA MAS. Close down the SOA and Guantánamo and the spirit that maintains them. NUNCA MAS.
P.S. A postscript that I would like each of you to consider, as you share with family and friends. For those of us who hail from other places in the Americas, to hear the name of our continents used as a country name is insulting another sign of empire. Please consider in future using the term US America rather than America, and the term US Americans for Americans, unless, indeed, you are referring to Americans as those who inhabit our glorious continents.
Silvia A. Brandon Pérez, planetary citizen, and Latino Americana, soon to launch
www.americaisnotacountry.org.
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