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The Ultimate AK-47

April 27, 2018 By Bob Kinsey

Peace Train April 27, 2018
By JUDITH MOHLING
Walking along Broadway in Boulder last Saturday I passed excited people and families, some with guns, flags unfurling in the breeze, signs like “Don’t Tread on Me,” and “Keep Calm & Carry a .45.” It was a gun-rights rally. An hour earlier on the corner had been a Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center anti-war demonstration with peace activists and their signs opposing war and violence. Plus, the March for our Lives movement is challenging the violent status quo in the United States, and changing deeply rooted and prejudicial thinking. Mind boggling.
I was reminded of Toni Morrison, “Forcing a nation to use force is easy when the citizenry is rife with discontent, experiencing feelings of a powerlessness that can be easily soothed by violence.”
This weekend we are celebrating the year-long effort by peace activists 40 years ago to stop plutonium pit production for nuclear weapons at the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons plant eight miles south of Boulder—lengthy, passionate peace activism versus perhaps the ultimate AK-47’s—nuclear weapons. They camped in order to make a round-the-clock demonstration and blocked trains from leaving or entering the complex.
“The Rocky Flats Truth Force was a grass-roots non-violent, anti-nuclear group formed during protests at the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons plant. Demonstrations and railroad track blockages at the Rocky Flats Plant in 1978 resulted in multiple arrests of the protesters. The Rocky Flats Plant was a US nuclear weapons complex which operated from 1952 until 1992, creating considerable radioactive contamination.” Wikipedia
It is also the fortieth anniversary of KGNU Radio, an independent, noncommercial, community radio station “for Boulder, Denver and beyond.” And, we’re celebrating the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center, born to carry on the spirit of non-violent resistance.
There is the opening tonight of Facing Rocky Flats at the Boulder Public Library. It is a group exhibit preceding the planned public opening of Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge using art and oral history to explore the past, present, and future of the contentious site.
A day of panel presentations follows on Saturday at Unity Spiritual Center, Folsom and Valmont, with three food trucks gathering at noon, capped off by a live Skype interactive talk with Dan Ellsberg in the evening. Look for films at the library and attend a Joanna Macy influenced workshop Sunday at Naropa. RMPJC.org

Filed Under: News

About Bob Kinsey

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Disarmament Quotes

Viewing Trinity Test July 16,1945: "Now we are all Sons of Bitches"

Kenneth BainbridgeDeputy Director Manhatten Project

“Everything I did at Kings Bay was a result of my faith and my commitment to challenge the idols whose only purpose is to destroy human life on an unimaginable scale. I went to Kings Bay to use my body to refuse to bow down to these idols. I went to try to bring attention to the idolatry that it is requiring of our nation and its people. I went in a spirit of prayer and repentance. I went in hope that this witness might invite other people to reflect on the obscenity and on the idolatry that it is before God.”

Liz McAlisterKings Bay Protestor 2019

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending he sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children...This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron." --spoken to the American Society of Newspaper Editors 1953

Dwight EisenhowerUS President 1953-1961

We are prone to self-righteousness if we call ourselves peacemakers, and yet do not perceive how the peace issue cuts through all the economic and social issues that we often try to keep separate. If the race for nuclear arms is encouraged by our fear of losing the affluent ways of life that we have taken for granted, then we must see how our fears and desires have left so many other human beings naked and hungry.

Malsolm Warford"The Church's Role in a Nuclear Age

A world free of the threat of nuclear weapons is necessarily a world devoid of nuclear weapons…. Nuclear weapons pose an intolerable threat to humanity and our habitat…. Others subscribe to Churchill’s assertion ‘Peace is the sturdy child of terror.’ For me, such a peace is a wretched offspring, a peace that condemns us to live under a dark cloud of perpetual anxiety, a peace that codifies mankind’s most murderous instincts….The beast must be chained, its soul expunged, its lair laid waste.

General Lee ButlerFormer Commander, Strategic Air Command, April 28, 1996

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