A ZombyPeace Thread - Veterans For Peace

http://www.veteransforpeace.org/

Veterans For Peace is a national organization founded in 1985. It is structured around a national office in Saint Louis, MO and comprised of members across the country organized in chapters or as at-large members. There is an annual convention in August for members from across the nation. Members receive periodic VFP publications.

The organization includes men and women veterans from World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, other conflicts and peactime veterans. Our collective experience tells us wars are easy to start and hard to stop and that those hurt are often the innocent. Thus, other means of problem solving are necessary.

Veterans For Peace is an official Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) represented at the UN.

Whether or not you wish to participate in chapter activities, please consider becoming a Veteran For Peace member. As an organization, we are what our members make us. You can be part of that effort. Help us put an end to war.


I would like all DUers, regardless of your differences, large or small, past or present, to put them aside in this one thread and make your voice heard NOW for the ending of the violence, bloodshed, chaos, and suffering in Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, and wherever else war, hatred, strife, and killing are prevailing over peace, stability, compassion, and love.

If you have a favorite organization for peace, tell us about them here, and ask us to get involved.

I will donate a dime for every post this thread gets until it is either archived or reaches 500 posts. I would prefer the latter, if only it will get out the message of peace, now. NOW.

Help the Veterans for Peace, or your favorite peace organization.

Much love and peace to ALL of you at the DemocraticUnderground. :loveya:

:yourock:

Technically speaking, I was not a vet ... I was a private contactor. Can I still join?

I am not a vet, but I can contribute. Anyone can. Only full membership requires that you be a veteran. But associate membership is for anyone who supports their statement of purpose. :-)

Browsing the site, now. I have a couple of buds who are were talking about this org a couple of weeks ago.

www.wncpeacecoalition.org

I hope to be out with some of them Sat. with signs on a busy street corner. We also have a Veterans for Peace chapter here and hope to see some of them too.

:kick:

:kick:

In the Dallas area, please check in at least once a week at www.dallaspeacecenter.org

VfP is very active within the Peace Center and several member groups. We are starting an action next week on April 15th, in front of Halliburton in Dallas, that we want to see continue on a weekly basis, every Friday through the summer. Help us to spread the word, Weekly Vigil in Dallas against war profiteering and Halliburton. 2601 Belt Line Rd, Dallas, Tx, April 15, 12:00 - 2:00pm, every Friday thereafter, through Labor Day.

Forgot to mention the Activism Forum here at DU. Please check in and encourage others to as well. Let it be the place to check in and find out what is happening when and where.

I am not a veteran, but my husband recently returned from Iraq and has been a member of the U.S. Army for 9 years.

I like to visit this website and see what veterans are saying about this war:
Veterans Against The Iraq War
http://www.vaiw.org/vet/index.php

There are a number of other assorted anti-war sites I like to visit, too numerous to list.

My local peace organization is AWARE (Anti-War, Anti-Racism Effort)
http://www.anti-war.net/

:kick:

is an original member of the Vets for Peace. He was also part of the Gainesville Eight mess why back when.

http://www.heathermillsmccartney.com/index2.php
and from front page:
http://www.landmines.org.uk/Iraq+Appeal

"Everyone needs peace of mind. The question is how to achieve it. Through anger and hatred we cannot; I believe it is most easily achieved through the practice of kindness, love and compassion.
-- His Holiness the Dalai lama



I have a few Peace organizations that I am involved with and would like to share with Y'All, although Most DUers are probably already familiar with these Orgs.

United for Peace and Justice
http://www.unitedforpeace.org/

Voices in the Wilderness
http://www.unitedforpeace.org/

Global Exchange-- an International Human Rights Org.
http://www.globalexchange.org/

And lastly
Peacemamas International
http://www.peacemamas.com/voice.htm


I learned of the horrors of War from my Mother, and other family members who served, in times of Peace and War.
They were influential in shaping my philosophy of peace and understanding and activism.
And, my distrust of government.

Peace! :loveya: :grouphug: :loveya: :grouphug: :loveya:

"Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality--not as we expect it to be but as it is--is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily; that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love." --(Carl) Frederick Buechner

I forgot about the peacemamas! I've been trying to get one of their flags to fly outside of my classroom.

We pray that someday an arrow will be broken,

not in something or someone, but by each of humankind,

to indicate peace, not violence.

Someday, oneness with creation,

rather than domination over creation,

will be the goal to be respected.

Someday fearlessness to love and make a difference

will be experienced by all people.

Then the eagle will carry our prayer for peace and love,

and the people of the red, white, yellow, brown, and black communities

can sit in the same circle together to communicate in love

and experience the presence of the Great Mystery in their midst.

Someday can be today for you and me. Amen.

It's time that I donate to a peace organization.

and my thanks brother :loveya:

I see them at all the major peace events. Thanks to Dick Underhill and all the other veterans of the Austin Chapter for their hard work.

VFP rocks!

is September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows.

www.peacefultomorrows.org

Their site is well worth visiting - you'll probably spend a very long time on it. Probably cry some too.

If you click onto Links, you'll see lots of other peace organizations listed, including Veterans For Peace. Scroll down to the bottom and you'll get a list other 9/11 orgs, including the Family Steering Committee. Most of these orgs are demanding accountability from the government over 9/11.



:thumbsup:

looking forward to meetin you :-)

http://www.brethren.org/oepa/

In 1974, M.R. Zigler gathered a group of peacemakers in New Windsor, Maryland, for the first meeting of a "hands-on" peace program within the church that became known as On Earth Peace Assembly. Since that day, On Earth Peace has helped thousands of youth and adults learn how to live as Christian peacemakers. Although the practical ways of living out Jesus' teachings have changed over time, the message remains the same.

...at one of our meetups.....
Tony Van R :)


:hi: Zson...great thread!!! thx


:loveya: :hug: :loveya: :hug:
D Mom

But I had no graceful way of inserting that in the post. :D :hug: :loveya:

One more week to go...

nothing compares to the morning of April 16th!
( well OK...make that around noon LOL)

:hug: :hi: :loveya:
DMom

Are ya watching Condi?? :puke:

I'll watch the spin later, so to minimize her screen time. Too early in the day to get my blood pressure up.

Been watching the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS lately. They are the first newscast to actually call those privatized troops killed in Fallujah 'mercenaries '- not 'contractors' or other euphemisms. They had an in-depth analysis of what is wrong with the increasing privatization (accountability to the people being key) of everything and WHY it is happening. Plus, no commercials, no logos with theme music, REAL liberals as guest commentators, like Molly Ivins. Not perfect, but I ask myself why I don't watch more often.

Oh, and no crawlers across the bottom of the screen OR mindless celebrity updates either.

On that note, and knowing that there is no peace without justice, and no liberty without security, I'll go off on a bit of a tangent.

Oxfam and CARE.

http://www.oxfam.org/
http://www.care.org/

On the Veterans for Peace theme, let me put in a plug for Country Joe McDonald:
http://www.countryjoe.com
(he has a link to vets for peace, which he has been very involved with).

Thanks for doing this.

What a great thread, ZW.

I spend my time with small local groups, that do not have an affiliation with larger organizations. But here are a couple more organizations that I check in with now and then:


NATIONAL PEACE FOUNDATION is a non-governmental membership organization
concerned with the development and implementation of conflict
resoluation education and training in the United States, and with peacebuilding and
demoncracy-building internationally.
Address: 1819 H Street NW, Suite 1200, Washington D.C. 20006.
Tel: 202-223-1770. http://www.nationalpeace.org

And Pathways to Peace:

The purpose of PATHWAYS TO PEACE Organization is to ignite the
collective will of humanity to make PEACE a practical reality in the
21st Century, to build cooperation among existing organizations and
programs which demonstrate PEACE in its multifold expressions.
Contact: Tel: 415-461-0500. http://pathwaystopeace.org

And I have a poem somewhere on this site:

http://www.poetsagainstthewar.org/

(Poets against the war)

A THOUGHT

People that walk the earth have a heart inside,
Put aside differences and join hands,
When prayers and dreams are answered,
Only then will we realize that
World Peace and harmony make us one.

****** *****, Grade 5
Clayton B. Wire Elementary School
Sacramento, California

:kick:

for Peace.

William and Congressman Jim McDermott gave speeches. I was almost in tears being with these Veterans, I was so proud of them. I felt so alive!

One time when I was in the East Bay I met a WW2 Veteran with a VFP cap, we talked for about 30 min. I soaked him in admiration and will never forget his passion for peace.

When I find work I plan on donating money.

:kick:

I'm already a V4P member.

I'm not much of a joiner, but I'll look into this. Thanks ZW.
John
US Army (SigC)
1974-76

Zomby, :yourock: !!

is the president of VFP. An amazing persn who was deeply scarred by the Vietnam war and has dedicated his life to trying to prevent others from going thru the same hell.

I am trying to keep individual replies to a minimum so I don't inflate the post count too artificially.

Just want to say thank you for the support of ALL of the peace organizations and thanks for informing me about the ones I hadn't heard of. :thumbsup:

Like Arlo Guthrie said, "You gotta sing louder if you wanna end war and stuff." :-)

it might just become a movement.

Don't forget this one:

http://www.pepeace.org/index.html

"Founded by Yale Professor Jerome Davis in 1952, Promoting Enduring Peace--"PEP"--conducts peace education activities to promote sustainable world peace. Since its founding PEP has distributed over 10 million free peace education articles to peace educators around the world."

Peace is the greatest issue in the world.
Let us abandon narrow nationalism.
Let us encourage interchange of the peoples of different races and nations....

--Dr. Jerome Davis

In addition to their other activities, they are the creators of the Ghandi Peace Award.

Recipients of the Gandhi Peace Award:

Eleanor Roosevelt
The Rev. Dr. Edwin T. Dahlberg
Rabbi Maurice Eisendrath
The Rev. John Haynes Holmes
Dr. Linus C. Pauling
James Paul Warburg
Dr. E. Stanley Jones
A.J. Muste
Norman Thomas
Jerome Davis
The Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Jr.
Dr. Benjamin Spock
Senator Wayne Morse
Dr. Willard Uphaus
U Thant
Dorothy Day
Dr. Daniel Ellsberg
Peter Benenson and
Martin Ennals Prof. Roland Bainton
Dr. Helen Caldicott
Dr. Corliss Lamont
Randall Watson Forsberg
Robert Jay Lifton
Dr. Kay Camp
Dr. Bernard Lown
Prof. John Somerville
Cesar Chavez
Marian Wright Edelman
Senator George McGovern
Ramsey Clark
The Rev. Lucius Walker, Jr.
Father Roy Bourgeois
Edith Ballantyne
The New Haven/Leon Sister City Project
Howard and Alice Frazier
Michael True and NEPSA


The 2003 recipient is Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio)

That's a good organization. One of my favorites as well is Amnesty. While they aren't exactly directly an anti-war organization, they are the pinnacle of organizations fighting for human rights, which can not coexist along with war. Peace, buddy! :hippie:

n/t

Can we move on. This Condi stuff is almost as bad as watching the celebs paraded before us for various offenses (including all the corporate criminals, ie Martha, where is Ken Lay, mistrial of Tyco exec, etc).

Can we get back to the business at hand. We all knew what Condi and BushInc were going to do today, didn't we?

This is a very active group of wonderful people. Sad to say it took an idiot president, a criminal administration, and a war in order for me to meet them, but I've made wonderful friends.

Arlington West is one of our projects, jointly with the Town Hall Activists and numerous volunteers. As we had hoped, the idea is spreading to other parts of the country, and now that the ground is defrosted everywhere we hope the project will really take hold.

It's labor-intensive but done with so much love, and the response of the passersby is nearly all positive. Every effort is made to keep politics out of it. No campaign buttons or inflammatory T-shirts, for instance.(As I told one lady who wanted to know what I was doing about Bush, "That's the other 6 days of the week.") We want everyone to experience the ultimate costs of war in their own way, to know that we respect the sacrifice of the troops who have been sent there in our names, and begin to think about what is really going on in our country. The way the installation is set up invites people to come into it and interact.

A recent addition is a set-aside area called Conversation Cafe, where people can learn and practice techniques of respectful listening.

I can't be there often, but there is a core group that is there every Sunday... You can see photos of the project below.

Hekate

ARLINGTON WEST, SANTA BARBARA CALIF.
http://www.veteransforpeace.org/Default.htm
click on the large photo of AW to go here and scroll down:
http://www.veteransforpeace.org/Arlington_west_121003.htm

DU's activists are the BEST. :thumbsup:

:-)

More than ever, we demand peace.

Women in Black around the World

The international movement of Women in Black began in Jerusalem in January 1988, one month after the first Palestinian intifada broke out, with a small group of Israeli women who carried out a simple form of protest: once a week at the same hour and in the same location - a major traffic intersection - they donned black clothing and raised a black sign in the shape of a hand with white lettering that read "Stop the Occupation". The idea spread quickly and spontaneously to other places in Israel, a form of protest that women could do easily. “We didn't have to get to the big city, we could bring our children, there was no chanting or marching, and the medium was the message.”

Within months, vigils sprang up throughout Israel, and several months after the first Women in Black vigil in Israel, "solidarity vigils" began in other countries. Initial reports came from the United States and Canada, and these spread to Europe and Australia. Some vigils were primarily Jewish while in other cities the groups were mixed Jewish and Palestinian. Around 1990, Women in Black vigils took off with a life of their own forming in many countries, and many of these had nothing to do with the Israeli occupation. In Italy, Women in Black protest a range of issues, from the Israeli occupation to the violence of the Mafia and other organized crime. In Germany, Women in Black have protested neo-Nazism, racism against migrant workers, and nuclear arms. Women in Black in Belgrade and Zagreb set a profound example of interethnic cooperation that was an inspiration to their countrywomen and men. And, in India, Women in Black hold vigils that call for an end to the ill treatment of women by religious fundamentalists.

Women in Black has become a movement of women of conscience of all denominations and nationalities who hold vigils to protest violence in their part of the world: war, interethnic conflict, militarism, the arms industry, racism, neo-Nazism, violence against women, violence in the neighborhoods, etc. Each vigil is autonomous, setting its own policy and guidelines, though in all the vigils the women dress in black, symbolizing the tragedy of the victims of violence. What unites us all is our commitment to justice and a world free of violence.
(so just get your friends together and stand at an intersection w/signs)
The movement of Women in Black in Israel won the Aachen Peace Prize (1991); the peace award of the city of San Giovanni d'Asso in Italy (1994); and the Jewish Peace Fellowship's "Peacemaker Award" (2001). In 2001, the international movement of Women in Black was honored with the Millennium Peace Prize for Women, awarded by the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM). On June 8, 2001, over 100 groups of Women in Black from around the world held vigils to protest Israel's ongoing occupation of the Palestinian territories. This international protest was initiated and organized by the Coalition of Women for a Just Peace (http://www.geocities.com/endtheoccupation ), an umbrella organization of ten Israeli women's peace organizations.

Those who may be interested in learning more about international efforts of women of diverse backgrounds who have come together in these troubling times are encouraged to investigate http://www.batshalom.org , an international movement of Women for Peace.
here is a bit about austin women in black
Austin Women in Black

Austin Women in Black began standing together in Austin the week after Sept 11, 2001. Since that day Austin area women have met to stand against violence every Wednesday from 12:00 to 1:00 in front of the Texas State Capitol. Standing against the violence of individuals, governments and corporations and for peaceful solutions instead of war, we are women of all nationalities and religions who come together as a positive statement of cooperation and caring. We wear black to mourn the victims of violence everywhere. We honor the Palestinian and Israeli women who began Women in Black in Jerusalem in 1988 and have been taking this stand for peace together ever since then. All women are welcome to join us. Wear black. Men sometimes wish to stand with us, and though we welcome them, it is as women that we are taking this stand.