B Peace Walk – Washington D.C. September 2010 – Yom Kippur
In September 2010 Zoe Kopp and T. Namaya drove to Washington D.C. to commemorate the 5,000 plus US servicemen and women killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
There had been an ongoing Twitter and social media campaign to bring people together to walk from the staging area of the Washington Monument to the WW II memorial, and then finally to the Vietnam memorial.
Said Namaya, ” We wanted to commemorate the loss of these young men and women, the tens of thousands of wounded soldiers, and as importantly, the possibly hundreds of thousands of dead civilians. As we walked from the Washington Monument with our “B4 Peace” banner and spoke to dozens of people, we encountered many active duty and retired military personnel, and we found that not a single one supported the war. This was surprising, as we met WWII vets with their campaign ribbons, and, to the person, there was a uniformity of opinion: ‘The war is wrong and a folly, and it should never have been started.’”
Zoe said, “One women veteran had just come back from Iraq and spoke with us. As she cried and hugged me, she said, ‘Thank you so much for being here and for what you are doing.’”
We continued to walk to the Vietnam Memorial. It is always painful and tremendously sad to see the names of the 60,000 dead Americans. We wished there was a wall to remember the 2 million Vietnamese also killed. Then, some 40 yards away from the Vietnam memorial, Zoe and Namaya took turns reading the names of the 5,000 soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and rang a small prayer bell. A number of people walked by and joined in the reading of the names.
WWII veterans came by, and some took off their hats, while others nodded their heads and said thank you.
Zoe said, “One ten-year-old boy came by and told us that he had become opposed to war in this past year. His grandmother had been taking him and her other grandchildren to anti-war events for years.”
Namaya said, “It is unfathomable that there is such consistent opposition to this war across all classes and sectors, and, yet, this war in Afghanistan and Iraq continues. It is also bizarre that this ongoing militarism is bankrupting the USA, and no one is talking about this. Many oppose the war, but rarely are people questioning the entire premise of militarism. The military industrial corporations and their lobbyists continue to push for the United States military that spends as much as 51% of the total global military spending. With up to 2 million homeless and the unofficial jobless rate well over 10%, it is time to bring the soldiers home.”
Namaya, at his website http://www.namayaproductions.com/, is asking for volunteers for his B4 Peace Campaign. “The Peace Education Arts projects are exciting and fun,” said Namaya. One project is for students to do a Cost of War, whereby the students write the cost of war on price tags and consider how the cost compares to activities around their community. For example, an M16 costs approximately $15-20,000 and the price of community college for one year is less than $15,000. One director I worked with in Boston used one of the Children’s plays, On the Island of Binga Bonga, as the basis for a conflict resolution curriculum for children.”
Zoe said, “We continue to engage in our peace work through the community development projects we do with our foundation, Grace Cares (www.gracecares.com). It is a grass roots community self help organization that sponsors projects like our new poultry and egg project, the placement of an electric water pump in a community in the Dominican Republic, and the education and orphanage projects we are managing in India. I am on the Board of the Berhorst Foundation in Guatemala where we provide healthcare to over 20,000 Mayans in the highlands near Antigua. ”
Namaya said, “This was a profoundly moving experience, to read the names of the 5,000 US soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, at the Vietnam memorial. With these small observances of peace we hope to remind people of the consequences of war. Peace for us is not the absence of war, but the presence of love, and the means for a life of dignity and worth.