Dear Friends: The United States, Russia and China are closer to nuclear war than at any time since the Cuba Missile crisis in 1962. If there is a full-scale nuclear war, billions of people will be killed immediately and whole cities destroyed and the debris in the atmosphere would lead to nuclear winter in which over seven billion people would die of starvation.
Dear Friends: I want to highly recommend a new discussion paper, “Dismantling Racism and Militarism in U.S. Foreign Policy,” recently published by the Friends Committee on National Legislation. It does an excellent job challenging the present paradigm of Racism and Militarism in the U.S., shares a possible new paradigm, and explores how we can get from here to there.
Dear Friends: Great News!! Five excellent films on the power of nonviolent action and nonviolent movements are now available for free all over the world in twenty different languages. These are powerful films and will hopefully educate and inspire people to build powerful nonviolent actions and campaigns for peace, justice, and environmental sanity in their own communities and cities.
Reports by David Hartsough and Lucy Duncan of these Friends’ public protests in Spring 2018.
I learned about the power of nonviolence and nonviolent action in the spring of 1960, while participating in sit-ins at lunch counters in Maryland and Virginia with African American fellow students at Howard University. Most Saturdays we would go to a People’s Drug store, sit down at a lunch counter, get arrested, and then sing freedom songs in our jail cells all weekend.
Dear Friends: Crimes against humanity are being committed by our government in our name and with our tax dollars: We are bombing people in seven primarily Muslim countries. We are killing tens of thousands of people in the Middle East (most of them civilians) and creating millions of refugees.
The Hartsoughs' 2017 letter to the IRS, explaining their withholding of the portion of their taxes that would go to the military.
