Walk for Justice
by Ceylon Mooney
July 6, 2006
I was arrested again yesterday.
On July 5, Voices for Creative Nonviolence finished their 300-mile Walk for Justice by walking 2 blocks from the VA hospital in North Chicago to MEPCOM—also known as “Freedom’s Front Door”—the command center for the 52 military entrance processing stations across the country. At MEPCOM—at the threshold, so to speak—we read names from a list of U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians killed by this most recent war. For this, we were arrested and charged with criminal trespass.
MEPCOM’s proximity to the VA hospital is a witness to tragedy. Since March 2003, at least 2534 folks who walked through “Freedom’s Front Door” have ended their walk dead in Iraq. Since March 2003, 18,356 U.S. soldiers have walked through that door to be wounded in Iraq. Today, thousands of veterans who walked through that door healthy and sane now walk the streets used, used up, homeless, suicidal, traumatized and addicted.
As we continue to highlight the injustice of stop-loss orders, forced rotations, and VA budget cuts, let’s not forget several million civilians held hostage in their own nation, living and dying at the muzzle end of a gun barrel: the majority of the 38 – 43,000 Iraqi civilians killed during this war and occupation were killed by young Americans who walked thru “Freedom’s Front Door” before setting foot on Iraq soil.
Call it whatever you want, this doorway to Hell should be closed. I’d like to see the young soldiers we confronted at MEPCOM out of uniform. I’d like to see them wearing O.R. scrubs, band t-shirts, cowboy boots or Vets for Peace baseball caps. They should be visiting Iraq as guests, not invaders; they should see Babylon as tourists, not occupiers. They should be armed with cameras and address books, not guns and flak jackets. I can dream, can’t I?
It has been a long time since I joined my friends in civil disobedience. In fact, it has been more than two years since the final action of a long series of confrontations with Boeing World Headquarters in downtown Chicago, and it has been just a bit longer than one year since the last of the Boeing 11 and our attorney, Tom Brejcha, spent three days in Judge Sheehan’s court putting on trial the Iraq war and Boeing’s role in this war.
Looking back over the past few years, I must say that we really hit the ground running to stop this war. I dare say that we got in the way as soon as we saw it coming. All across the globe, we tried everything. We went to Iraq, we became conscientious objectors, and we did war tax resistance; we organized, we made our opposition public, and we occupied buildings. We confronted the governments, corporations and other entities premeditating and promoting this mass murder. We filled the streets, we filled the courts, and we filled the jails. We fought and fought and fought and…as my friend Pat says, “sometimes we win, and that’s great. But we don’t fight because we can win—we fight because we have to fight.” So, as these atrocities continue, so do our efforts.
We can have our dreams—I know I have plenty. Although we can dream of a better world, we wake up every morning to the atrocity of war and terror. We must not only have the courage to keep dreaming, but we must also have the courage to wake up, stay wide awake, and keep fighting.
