Seven Years Witnessing for Peace – Join Us!

Join us in marking 7 years of . . .

Witnessing for Peace

Friday, October 24, 2008
5:00 – 6:00 p.m.
Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial
2400 N. Flagler Drive,
Currie Park, West Palm Beach, FL

A memorial service will be conducted in remembrance of all who have died and those who continue to suffer as a result of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It will include the solemn reading of the names of U.S. military personnel from Florida whose lives have been lost. (Black clothing is suggested)

Since October of 2001, people of faith and conscience have gathered at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial every Friday from 5:00 – 6:00 p.m. to stand in witness against war and violence. This on-going, unbroken vigil began following the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.

The MLK, Jr. Memorial is on the east side of Flagler – look for the flags!

Sponsored by Pax Christi Palm Beach, a local chapter of the International Catholic Peace Movement

All are welcome.

We never see the smoke and the fire, we never smell the blood, we never see the terror in the eyes of the children, whose nightmares will now feature screaming missiles from unseen terrorists, known only as Americans.
~Martin Kelly

They tell us that we live in a great free republic; that our institutions are democratic; that we are a free and self-governing people. That is too much, even for a joke. … Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder… And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
~Eugene Victor Debs

Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that The State has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.
~Arthur Miller, playwright

For most Americans the Constitution had become a hazy document, cited like the Bible on ceremonial occasions but forgotten in the daily transactions of life.
~Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. – (1888-1965)

To preserve their [the people's] independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude.
~ Thomas Jefferson

When I tell the truth, it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those that do. ~ William Blake

The Roots of Violence: Wealth without work, Pleasure without conscience, Knowledge without character, Commerce without morality, Science without humanity, Worship without sacrifice, Politics without principles.
~ Mahatma Gandhi: Indian leader, 1869-1948

We kill at every step, not only in wars, riots, and executions. We kill when we close our eyes to poverty, suffering, and shame. In the same way all disrespect for life, all hard-heartedness, all indifference, all contempt is nothing else than killing. With just a little witty skepticism we can kill a good deal of the future in a young person. Life is waiting everywhere, the future is flowering everywhere, but we only see a small part of it and step on much of it with our feet.
~ Hermann Hesse, German poet and novelist.

All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of humankind.
~ Adam Smith – The Wealth Of Nations

When troubles come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.
~ Shakespeare (1564-1616)

The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to the point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism – ownership of government by an individual, by a group or any controlling private power.”
~ Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945), 32nd US president

Our economy is facing a moment of great challenge. … We’re in the midst of a serious financial crisis.
~ George W. Bush, September 24, 2008

No provision in our Constitution ought to be dearer to man than that which protects the rights of conscience against the enterprises of the civil authority.
~ Thomas Jefferson: American 3rd US President (1801-09).

Social Change According to Einstein

Social Change According to Einstein
quoted as an Introduction to Chapter 49 of Einstein’s Violin by Joseph Eger:

The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of evil….Private capital tends to be concentrated in a few hands….[resulting in] an oligarchy of private capital, the enormous power of which cannot effectively be checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true beause the members of legislative bodies are elected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists….The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interest of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover….private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases, quite impossible for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his or her political rights.
The crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as preparation for his or her future career.

~ Einstein, 1949

You don’t put robbers to work in a bank.
~ American Proverb

The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.
~ John Kenneth Galbraith

I hate banks. They do nothing positive for anybody except take care of themselves. They’re first in with their fees and first out when there’s trouble.
~ Earl Warren (American Republican Governor of California and Chief Justice, U.S. Supreme Court, 1891-1974)

The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor.
~ Helen Keller

A hundred years from now it will not matter what my bank account was, the sort of house I lived in, or the kind of car I drove…but the world may be different because I was important in the life of a child.
~ Forest E. Witcraft

Each candidate behaved well in the hope of being judged worthy of election. However, this system was disastrous when the city had become corrupt. For then it was not the most virtuous but the most powerful who stood for election, and the weak, even if virtuous, were too frightened to run for office. ~ Niccolo Machiavelli  (Italian writer and statesman; Florentine patriot, author of ‘The Prince’) 

An election cannot give a country a firm sense of direction if it has two or more national parties which merely have different names but are as alike in their principles and aims as two peas in the same pod. ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt  (American 32nd US President,1933-45, cousin of Theodore Roosevelt, 26th US president,1882-1945)  

If the United States of America or Britain is having elections, they don’t ask for observers from Africa or from Asia. But when we have elections, they want observers. ~  Nelson Mandela  (South African Statesman; First democratically elected State President of South Africa (1994), 1993 Nobel Prize for Peace, b.1918)  

Elections are won by men and women chiefly because most people vote against somebody rather than for somebody. ~ Franklin Pierce Adams (American Journalist, Columnist and Translator, (1881-1960)  

Win or lose, we go shopping after the election. ~ Imelda Marcos