SOA Vigil Day 1
We drove beneath the soft drapings of a gray November sky. Surrounded by fields of corn and soy beans stretched out flat in all directions. Some times small wispy clouds seemed to be so low that one could think that they might be reached by ladder. I thought of how it would feel to stand on a tall ladder and have the cloud pass me, the cool droplets hitting my face.
The low gray clouds also reminded me of the day Maylan and I visited the coffee cooperative high in the hills of northern Nicaragua. That day the coffee plants were dripping from an early morning rain. We stood on the high plateau surrounded by coffee plants watching in the distance as the low gray clouds gently swept across the tops of distant lush green hills.
I thought as we drove with the constant cars and trucks around us of those people living at the cooperative in Nicaragua. They lived without electricity, without cars. They walked whenever they needed to leave the mountain top. Which is why our bus seemed so out of place and had such a difficult time getting up to their home. I wonder and had a greater appreciation for what our gluttonous country must seem to them. How arrogant and brutal it is of us to go into these rural isolated cultures of peace and quiet, of harmony with nature and impose our will to extract their resources for our own selfish gain.
I think of Eduardo Galeano saying. “Latin America is the region of open veins. Everything, from the discovery until our times, has always been transmuted into European or later United States-capital, and as such has accumulated in distant centers of power.”
When I come to the SOA Vigil, I feel a connection to those who have suffered the oppression of the U.S government’s and the U.S. corporations’ endless hunger for more. I come to the vigil in part because of my since of kinship with the rural people of Latin America. Because I have seen what has become of the small farms I knew as a child growing up in rural America. We have also plundered and wasted our own resources, we have raped and decimated our own lands, and we have displaced our own people as well. All in the name of profit.
The fields that surrounded us on our drive are not the same fields I knew as a child, they are large corporate floors of production. They would be barren waste lands if it were not for the chemicals they are dependent upon.
So I look forward again to stand in solidarity with those who have lost so much and those who are stuggling to hang onto what they may still have.
May this be the year we raise our government’s conscience. May this be the year that we awaken the moral and spiritual obligation to pay back, to practice stewardship, to honor the sacred land and to respect the people who survive in quiet and peace in all the valleys and hillsides of the world. May we stop our plundering and return home to rebuild our own fields and make reparrations to our own people as well.
Chuck and I arrived beneath a clear star filled sky in Columbus at 4 am eastern time. A 14 hour drive. We slept until 11 and we have made contact with David Stocker of Rockford, as well as our friends from NIU. Now we are headed out to the Puppetista building. Also I plan to attend the Columbia teach-in hosted by Witness for peace. I love coming here even though the trip is so difficult. We listened to music the whole way. I just kept saying just stay in the saddle and hold on …so here we go…