HOW DO WE TAKE LOCAL JUSTICE ISSUES (COMMUNITY SELF-INTERESTS) ORGANIZING TO THE NATIONAL LEVEL AND WAGE PEACE? WE THE PEOPLE MUST, REPEAT MUST DECIDE WHO SACRIFICES, SUFFERS AND PAYS FOR US FOREIGN (MOST OFTEN "FOLLY") POLICY.
I ask as a Marine Vietnam Veteran For Peace and former Community Organizer trained by Saul Alinsky's executive team in the mid-70s. Maybe the following model presents an actionable empower to Wage Peace!
The Media is Mightier Than War ©
WE THE PEOPLES NETWORK (WTPN) ~ A GOOD NEWS NETWORK
The Vision of WTPN is to form dynamic strategic alliances, creating trustworthy information channels that offer knowledge and intelligence from organized communities and open sources communicating awareness, purpose, principals and values, thus stimulating citizens’ imagination, recognizing their Constitutional obligations and achievements within and among U.S. communities, and their active participation in defining our Nation’s role in world affairs.
Thus, they must connect U.S. Folly Policy, especially vast expenditures for preventive wars of choice to our devastated national and local economies! This point of concurrence must enlighten Americans, as independent thinkers so that they can influence and eliminate the propensity to wage WAR by delusional members of the Complex that President Eisenhower warned us about.
Communities must strategically organize nation-wide and participate fully and equally in the foreign policy debates creating modesty, realism, transparency and accountability, keeping in mind that WAR PROFITEERING is the existential threat to humanity! When it comes to protecting and supporting our troops, veterans and their families, herein lies the moral essence of U.S. citizen obligation.
"How does the ubiquity of social media affect U.S. interests, and how should U.S. policy respond to it? As the communications landscape gets denser, more complex, and more participatory, the networked population is gaining greater access to information, more opportunities to engage in public speech, and an enhanced ability to undertake collective action." Clay Shirkey, “The Political Power of Social Media,” Foreign Affairs, J/F 2011
"Most Americans care little about the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. However, foreign policy often has expensive and even deadly results at home. It is time for American citizens to demand that policy makers treat matters of war and peace as something more than just another battle among special interests." Doug Bandow, “Lobbyists,” The National Interests, March 2010
As citizens of a democracy, we must, repeat, must demand and integrate the facts (genuine intelligence and public knowledge) to fully comprehend the enormous challenges before us. We must rethink our political and diplomatic relations, passionately reflecting on and changing our values and allegiances that has had and continues to have brutal effects on our fellow humans. We must strongly influence our foreign policy debates and policy making that has profound impacts on hundreds of millions of men, women, and children. Our justice system must hold elected and/or appointed decision-makers and officials accountable with severe sanctions when they break international and US laws ~ crimes against humanity and peace...etc.
Arthur Engendorf, a Vietnam Veteran author notes, “healing is the way we restore ourselves...with a little help from our friends, we can heal ourselves, even from war...healing culminates in a renewed vision of what is possible for us and our world. In light of this vision, our individual healing shifts from being the center of attention to an instance of much more encompassing possibility ~ healing for all humanity.”
Legitimacy of moral life depends on the willingness of men and women to struggle with such questions before they decide what to do. Also Karl Jaspers, a Jewish-tainted German WW II philosopher notes, “all men, like all nations, are tested twice in the moral realm ~ first by what they do, then by what they make of what they do. A condition of responsibility denotes a kind of second chance: men are, as if by a kind of grace, given a chance to repay to the living what it is they find themselves owing the dead.”
President Dwight D. Eisenhower ~ “I have come to hate war...[it] settles nothing...under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron."
For Our Children Worldwide ... Wage Peace ... Treasure Life.
David
