Sherry Chandler

It is the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Guernica and Poppysmatus has drawn my attention to Joseph A. Palermo’s blog post at the Huffington Post:

In his latest book, A Power Governments Cannot Suppress, the historian Howard Zinn writes: “If we want to break the addiction [to war] we need to teach history, because when you look at the history of wars, you see how war corrupts everyone involved, how the so-called good side behaves like the bad side, and how this has been true from the Peloponnesian War all the way to our own time.” Few events illustrate Zinn’s point more graphically than the bombing of the small Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, which took place 70 years ago today.

As Palermo’s post reminds us, when Colin Powell made his now infamous presentation to the United Nations, the one in which he showed the spurious evidence in favor of our invasion of Iraq, our government demanded that the U.N.’s reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica painting be draped.

So it goes…

Read this whole post.

You can’t save the world by standing in the park. That is what we have armies for … Everyone knows you have to have banners and slogans to save the world.

But the Standing Women think differently. They hope to save the world by standing in the park and they invite you to stand with them:

Please stand with us for five minutes of silence at 1 p.m. your local time on May 13, 2007, in your local park, school yard, gathering place, or any place you deem appropriate, to signify your agreement with the statement [above]. We ask you to invite the men who you care about to join you. We ask that you bring bells to ring at 1 p.m. to signify the beginning of the five minutes of silence and to ring again to signify the end of the period of silence. During the silence, please think about what you individually and we collectively can do to attain this world. If you need to sit rather than stand, please feel free to do so. Afterwards, hopefully you and your loved ones can talk together about how we can bring about this world

May 13, 2007 is Mother’s Day. Here, from the Standing Women’s blog is Julia Ward Howe’s original Mother’s Day Proclamation:

“Arise, then, women of this day! Arise all women who have hearts, whether our baptism be that of water or of tears!

Say firmly: ‘We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.’

From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says ‘Disarm, Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.’ Blood does not wipe our dishonor nor violence indicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing after their own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.

In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality may be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient and at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.”

To learn more and sign up, follow the link.

The proper answer to guns is not more and bigger guns.*

Thanks to Rosalie for the tap on the shoulder.

*Yesterday on WUKY, I heard Kentucky’s possibly senile U.S. Senator, Jim Bunning, repeat that old saw that tighter gun controls would only keep guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens while doing nothing to keep them away from criminals. The logical outcome, armed-to-the-teeth outlaws running rampant in the streets and Ma and Pa with no way to defend themselves.

Later that day, I heard an otherwise intelligent co-worker, a middle-aged man with a son in Iraq, say that, when the terrorists start their insurgent ways in the United States, it will only be the fully-armed citizenry that will stop them, because obviously armies can’t stop them. “What people can’t understand,” he said, “is that there are people out there in the world who would just as soon blow you away as look at you.”

Such a fine line between vigilante justice and mob rule.

We are all so frightened.