Air Show Glamorizes War




My thoughts on standing against war in a driving rain...










R-news covers the story...



I am soaked. Not quite to the bone. But still, soaked.

Today I stood with about 30 others in front of the entrance to the ESL Air Show to remind people that the jet fighter planes they were oohing and ahhing over are built to kill people -- and they don't just kill enemy soldiers. They kill civilians, including babies and small children.

I know these machines are impressive. When I was a child my dad would take the family to see similar air shows out at Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert. See, my dad used to build these planes -- until he died, in 1976. Woody NeSmith was a terrific aeronautics engineer, and if he (instead of the companies he worked for) could have gotten the royalties from all his aircraft-related inventions, he would have been a wealthy man.

In my teens, however, my dad became a pacifist and became active with the Quakers. As the father of five children, he could not walk away from his career (though on occasion he tried). So he continued to help build those fighter jets even though he would also walk in protest over the ways they were being used in Vietnam.

In fact, my parents took me to my very first anti-war protest in the fall of 1966 -- a candlelight vigil at Sage Hen Stadium at the Claremont Colleges in California. And in 1967, they picked me up at my college in Oakland and we joined the more than 65,000 others who marched in San Francisco (more than 200,000 in New York City) in the historic 1967 Spring Mobilization Against the War, where, among other things, we listened to Country Joe and the Fish sing "The Vietnam Rag."

My father died young of heart disease -- he was only 59, slightly more than two years older than I am now. I have often imagined that his heart was broken over the conflict between how he made a living and what his faith called him to do.

So today I stood in the rain, thinking of my father, getting soaked and bedraggled (even with an umbrella), in solidarity with the others brave enough to turn out in this weather, standing on the side of a busy thoroughfare, holding a sign saying, simply, "We mourn."



Note: the next anti-war vigil, sponsored by a coalition of Rochester area peace organizations, will take place from noon-1:30 p.m. Sunday, June 26, at the Harbor Festival at Ontario Beach in Charlotte. For more information call the Peace Action & Education Task Force @ Metro Justice, 585 442-3383.

Posted: Sun - June 12, 2005 at 03:28 PM          

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