It’s getting “scary in Amerikkka when they start rounding up peaceniks in Iowa”:www.nytimes.com/2004/02/10/national/10PROT.html
bq. To hear the antiwar protesters describe it, their forum at a local university last fall was like so many others they had held over the years. They talked about the nonviolent philosophies of Mahatma Gandhi and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., they said, and how best to convey their feelings about iraq into acts of civil disobedience. But last week, subpoenas began arriving seeking details about the forum’s sponsor — its leadership list, its annual reports, its office location –and the event itself.
Mild-mannered protesters wearing 1980s-style Guatemalan clothing, talking about Gandhi and climbing the fences of National Guard bases are not a threat to state of Iowa. But this kind of strong-arm tactic is a clear threat free speech and a clear act of intimidation to those who might join the peace movement. How sad. Unfortunately I know lots of people who are already afraid to speak out to loudly – this will silence at least some of them.
Of course, it’s hard to get too worked up about Iowa subpoenas, when much more serious civil rights violations have been going on since the start of the Afghanistan War. The “prisoners of war” down in the American base at “Guantanamo Bay have been held without charge or trial for two years now”:http://web.amnesty.org/pages/guantanamobay-index-eng.
Quaker Ranter
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Tag Archives ⇒ civil disobedience
Sheen: Appealing to almighty God
November 14, 2003
In the Bruderhof magazine, an “interview with actor Martin Sheen”:www.bruderhof.com/articles/sheen.htm?source=DailyDig. It’s a profile that focuses not only on his acting fame or activist causes but on his religious faith and how it underpins the rest of his life. Read, for instance, Sheen on civil disobedience:
bq. It is one of the only tools that is available to us where you can express a deeply personal, deeply moral opinion and be held accountable. You have to be prepared for the consequences. I honestly do not know if civil disobedience has any effect on the government. I can promise you it has a great effect on the person who chooses to do it.
Sheen’s radical Catholic faith is not a superficial confession that provides him with a place to go on Sunday morning, and it’s not passive identity from which to do political organizing. Rather, it’s a relationship with God and truth that demands witness and sacrifice and suffering. It’s the faith of someone who has personally gone through the depths of spiritual hedonism, and who has watched his country become the “most confused, warped, addicted society,” and who has found only God left standing:
bq. God has not abandoned us. I don’t know what other force to appeal to other than almighty God, I really don’t.
I could quote him for hours, but read the interview.