[Mb-civic] Ray McGovern: Can't Make it to Crawford?

[Mike Blaxill]

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20050819/cant_make_it_to_crawford.php

Can't Make It To Crawford?
Ray McGovern
August 19, 2005


Ray McGovern works for Tell the Word, the
publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the
Saviour in Washington, DC, and is co-founder of
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. 
On Wednesday, he arrived home in Arlington, Va.,
after five days in Crawford, and shared these
remarks with 300 neighbors at the close of a
candlelight observance in honor of Cindy Sheehan
that evening.


President Bush still refuses to meet with Cindy
Sheehan, the Rosa Parks of Crawford, Texas, but
there is some good news.  While Crawford’s Camp
Casey (named after Cindy’s son killed in Iraq on
April 4, 2004) continues to be short on
amenities, a sympathetic neighbor has given the
hundred or so friends I left there on Wednesday a
field in which they can pitch their tents.  No
longer will they have to try to sleep in the
seven-foot wide ditch alongside the road, with
local pick-up trucks and Secret Service SUVs
whizzing by honking reveille at 5:00 a.m.  In
addition, newly donated tarps are providing some
protection from fire ants by night and the
105-degree sun by day.


A rumor ran through the camp that Karl Rove set
loose the fire ants into the ditches in the same
way he has loosed the rabid talk-show-dogs that
have been barking at Cindy.  But it turns out the
ants are indigenous—like other local pests.


Folks ask me what I think Cindy Sheehan and her
devoted supporters need most at Camp Casey.  In
my view, the answer is simple: They have built
it; will you come?  Your bodies are needed on
site to help petition our government for redress
of the grievance of reckless endangerment of the
bodies and the souls of the young men and women
sent off to wage an unnecessary war.


At Riverside Church  in 1967, Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr. began by quoting a statement by Clergy
and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam: “A time comes
when silence is betrayal.” Dr. King added, “That
time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.”


And that time has come for us in relation to
Iraq.  But where are the "Clergy and Laymen
Concerned About Iraq"?  Where are the successors
to Dr. King?  “There is only us,” says Annie
Dillard, and she is right of course.  We are the
ones we’ve been waiting for.


Dr. King was typically direct: “We must speak
with all the humility that is appropriate to our
limited vision, but we must speak....there is
such a thing as being too late....Life often
leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with
lost opportunity....Over the bleached bones of
numerous civilizations are written the pathetic
words: “Too late.”


I believe Cindy Sheehan provides prophetic
example for us all.  She let herself be guided by
the spirit within.  President George W. Bush had
said that the sacrifice of our dead soldiers,
including Casey, was “worth it.”  And earlier
this month he added that it was all in a “noble
cause.”  Cindy, while giving a talk at a
conference in Dallas, spontaneously asked if
someone would come with her to Crawford, because
she needed to ask the president what it was that
he was describing as a “noble cause.”  You know
the rest of the story.  The point I would make
here is simply that she was open to the spirit
within, decided to follow its prompting, and did
not hesitate to claim the help she needed.


Cindy used her conference speech to speak out
clearly, as she has been doing for these past
several months, and then she acted.


Is it not time for us—each of us—to be open to
such prompting.  Is it not time for us, amid the
carnage in Iraq, amid a presidentially
promulgated policy permitting torture “consistent
with military necessity,” amid growing signs of
an attack by Israel and/or the U.S. on Iran—is it
not high time for us to speak...and to act.  How,
in God’s name, can we not act?


Dr. King enjoined his listeners at Riverside
Church to “seek out every creative means of
protest possible,” in matching actions with our
words.


Not all of us can go to Crawford.  So let’s be
creative.


I wear a T-shirt with a representation of
Arlington West on the front.  At 7:30 AM every
Sunday, Veterans for Peace in the area of Los
Angeles bring white crosses, stars of David and
crescents down to Santa Monica beach as a
poignant reminder of those troops killed in
Iraq.  The crosses, stars and crescents are
arrayed respectfully in lines as hauntingly
straight as those here in our own Arlington
Cemetery.


When, a few months ago, I had the privilege of
helping my veteran colleagues set up Arlington
West, there were 1,600 crosses, stars, crescents
and it took three hours to set them in place.  We
are fast approaching 1,900; I don’t know how long
it takes to emplace them now.  When the veterans
of Arlington West heard of Cindy Sheehan’s
courageous witness in Crawford, they packed up
800 and drove all night to ensure that a large
slice of Arlington West could be emplaced in
newly created Arlington Crawford at Camp Casey.


That’s creative, no?


Here we already have “Arlington East” to honor
the dead.  But what about the thousands and
thousands of wounded?  Can we be imaginative
enough to discern visually creative ways to
witness to and honor our wounded?   And what
about all those dead Iraqi civilians—“collateral
damage,” in military parlance—who, absent the
war,  would be alive today?  The number of
civilian dead was put as high as 100,000 a year
ago.  Our government does not consider Iraqi
casualties worth counting.  Is this a way of
saying that, in our country’s view, Iraqis don’t
count?  Have we become so callous as to ignore,
and thus acquiesce in that?


These are some spontaneous thoughts...the only
suggestions that occur to me this evening
regarding things we might consider doing to walk
the talk.  No doubt, you will have more
imaginative, more creative ideas.  Don’t wait. 
Remember: There is such a thing as being too
late.


The fire ants were not the only pests in
Crawford. There were a few unfriendly folks who
kept telling us to go to hell.  That brought to
mind the dictum of the 18th century English
statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke: “The
hottest places in hell are reserved for those
who, in times of crisis, remain neutral.”


Let’s not oblige the pests; I understand that
hell is even hotter than Crawford.