Peace
That afternoon seeing
the small child play in the snow
watched over by his father,
I remembered I’d never seen a snowman
here.
In the fading winter light,
I went out to the same little plaza
and with a gloved hand
lifted three small lumps of snow,
delicately, each in one piece,
and placed them
one on top of the other
to make a tiny snowman,
something like a Jizo,
the roadside statues seen
in Japan to remember the souls
of dead children and the aborted.
Yuki no Jizo
Jizo of snow
It was Martin Luther King Day
in Martin Luther King Plaza
right beside the library.
January 19, 2010
revised December 25, 2010
Williams College is offering a course in Political Aikido during its winter session. Robert Kent, the instructor, believes that this is the first time that a course combining physical practice in the art along with deep discussion of the principles of non-violence has occurred in a college environment. It’s about time.
Continue reading Political Aikido at Williams CollegeFrom Maggie Zhou, MA delegate to GPUS, to the peace contingent gathering for the 10/2/10 One Nation Working Together march in Washington, D.C.
Brothers and Sisters,
We are here today because we are angry at the multitude of problems that our government is responsible for, the many ways the system has failed us, and we recognize the root causes of all these problems are the same, and therefore they require common solutions.
Many of us here are peace activists. For nine years, we have been trying to stop the ongoing US wars for oil and for the expansion of the military-industrial complex. In fact, the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan are epicenters of the larger war we’re waging against Mother Earth & her children. It is where our death-dealing empire bombs the planet, drill her, bleed her for her oil, poison her with radioactivity, and rape her out of the life she had, the innocent lives of men, women and children, and the fertile soils that once was the food basket of the Middle East.
But, there are many other epicenters in this larger war against Mother Earth. A massive hemorrhage was just inflicted in the Gulf of Mexico by one of the worst perpetrators in this war. Mountain Top Removal coal mining has been denuding, defacing & poisoning the beautiful mountain ranges and streams of Appalachia and the entire coal country. Hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking, for “natural gas” extraction, has been poisoning our groundwater, and consequently food production, anywhere it touched, and it’s taking over America with a vengeance. Looking around the globe, the gazillion mines where we humans extract the insides of Mother Earth & poison her outside with it, the many shopping malls and pavements and parking lots we built in place of her life-giving forests and grasslands, the many dams we built that chokes the life out of her ecosystems, the diversion of her rivers & streams & precious groundwater reservoirs for monoculture, chemical-laiden farming operations, and now devastatingly, the crazed worldwide expansion of “energy crops” for biofuel, biomass & biochar production…
Continue reading Maggie Zhou’s speech to the peace contingent