Today I walked onto the grounds of Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest war profiteer, in order to ask employees to reconsider their working on nuclear-related systems, including drones that could deliver weapons that, instead of obliterating whole cities and killing 100,000 people at a time as in August 1945, could potentially obliterate the whole world and kill billions.
Arrest is not a goal in itself. I told the arresting officer and the booking officer that my intent was to provide Lockheed Martin employees with information (I am a educator, after all) about the nature of their work – information that their employer and our government does not provide them.
I now experience arrest at Lockheed Martin as an expression of Faithfulness to the cause of peace and as an expression of living outside of mindless control by our government. I do this in the spirit of the original Plowshares Eight (including Dan and Phil Berrigan), who were arrested at this same facility in 1980.
There were fourteen at the demonstration and six of us were arrested. I counted twenty-two security and police. Maybe the good news is that the few of us are seen as such a significant threat to “law and order.”
Comment by admin — August 6, 2013 @ 3:42 pm
“The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians. But that attack is only a warning of things to come…We thank God that it (atomic bomb) has come to us, instead of to our enemies; and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His ways and for His purposes.” (President Truman, August 9, 1945) http://www.trumanlibrary.org/publicpapers/index.php?pid=104
Gross ignorance and blasphemy, all in one statement. Such are the fruits of war
Comment by admin — August 6, 2013 @ 11:31 pm