Letters to the Editor ― War… More War… and Change

Voices Against War
San Pedro Neighbors for Peace and Justice, Codepink San Pedro and Jewish Voice For Peace Held Two Actions Calling For a CEASEFIRE in Israel/Gaza-Save ALL Lives

Activists call on President Joe Biden in front of the USS Iowa Oct. 22 to: “Send Hospital Ships, not War Ships to Gaza.”

Of the United States Navy’s 490 ships, only two are hospital ships (USN Comfort and the USN Mercy). The U.S. could set an example for the rest of the world by sending one of these hospital ships to the Israel Palestine war. President Biden rallies us to be a “beacon to the world.” We should be a Beacon for Peace, then, not for War. The U.S. claims to care about every human life, yet its actions and policies are always about military solutions. These actions call on the U.S. to STOP the aid of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza with U.S. tax dollars.

After more than an hour-long demonstration at the USS Iowa, protesters moved to rally in front of Vons supermarket at 13th and Gaffey Street in San Pedro.

We call for a veasefire now by U.S.-backed Israeli forces and all Gaza militants. 

Half of Gaza residents are children and hundreds have already been killed. The Israeli decades of right-wing apartheid policies and land-grab “settlements” in Palestinian territories, backed by U.S. tax dollars, have caused this current crisis. U.S. taxpayers and people of conscience, say to our country: stop the U.S. war on the Middle East, stop funding Israeli human rights abuses! War is killing people, the planet, and the economy! War is making us poor. We call for a Peace Economy now, and a shift to a non-racist U.S. foreign policy. Stop U.S. funding of Israeli apartheid. Ceasefire now in Gaza.

These events were also recorded for KPFK Radio 90.7 Rebel Alliance News.

Rachel Bruhnke
San Pedro

More on the War
You made some good points about the fact that we are always involved in a war. [In your last editorial]

It is my personal opinion (after living so many years observing wars and humans), we will NEVER stop killing each other. We will never learn how to live peacefully together and our incredible intelligence and advanced technology has given us even more deadly weapons to kill more and even faster. 

I just realized last week, an interesting but previously ignored fact; the dinosaurs went extinct about 100 million years ago … .but  (and my new understanding) the dinosaurs had actually lived on this planet for 160 million years together BEFORE they went extinct. We humans haven’t even been around a million years yet, and we still can’t figure out how to stop fighting and killing. 

Strangely too, we keep pumping up and burning the fossil fuels the dinosaurs left us with, in order to make the technology to kill us all with.

IMO, it won’t be much longer that we will become extinct too.

 The earth will shed humans like a dog sheds fleas. 

— Kevin Costner, Yellowstone 

Richard Pawlowski
Oregon

Richard,
Hope always springs eternal up until the point that it doesn’t. It’s going to take us some time and it won’t happen all at once like the dinosaurs, my fear is that it will be a slow agonizing death up until the point that it isn’t.

James Preston Allen
Publisher

Change is Your Choice
Another mother’s child is being killed tonight.

The sounds of gunfire breaking the nights mood is followed by screams, drowned out by loved ones’ tears.

The neighborhood is scared, overwhelmed and frustrated, altering between fear and rage, and yes. growing outrage, usually ignored by the powers to be.

No leadership, just pointing fingers.

And what are the powers to be but adult mobs acting as politicians, businessmen, capitalists joined together in self-righteousness to push a system that respects

No value of life…. but it does have two parties. We are “Americans” jailing violent youth for 25 years, or 50 years to life; sentencing others to a life of poverty, hopelessness and seduction by those who kill by example and hypocrisy.

How are our youth gangs different than those we elect to divide and conquer and manage by the press, and credit, and other plastic forms of power leading to fragile balance and one upmanship!

The game of power, diminishing chairs without music, and often with music to camouflage the seduction of identity, yours for theirs, squashing concepts of self and confidence for profit.

Jails are now the business of the day, housing our failure to care as a society, an expeditious solution, a new industry, a new game, caging those of us considered waste for profit.

What have we done?

Has power so blinded those of us that know better to just stand by and get a piece of action, to just get by and not rock the boat and watch

As life just goes by — another good bye, while another mother’s screams drown out the helicopters and sirens, and smell of death of a child, a community, and our humanity.

There must be grief to heal, there must be rage to change.

There must be outrage to organize to survive, to salvage, to be courageous, to break the cycle.

Kids are what they see

They see us.

Written on Nov. 6, 1997 by 

Luisa Gratz
Los Angeles