Sunday, June 11, 4pm: Meet Sister Megan Rice, and Speakers on Nuclear Disarmament
Sunday, June 11 @ 4:00 pm, All Saints Parish, Brookline
(Beacon St and Dean Road, 1773 Beacon Street, Dean Road T stop on C Green Line)
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· -- On film, Dr. Ira Helfand, Chair, Security Committee, Physicians for Social Responsibility:
Can we prevent Nuclear War? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUm82W7B2BY
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· -- Subrata Ghoshroy, MIT research affiliate and frequent contributor to Bulletin of Atomic Scientists:
· The current state of nuclear disarmament negotiations.
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· --Joan Ecklein, WILPF, Boston organizer of The Women’s March to Ban the Bomb, NYC:
· Why we should support the UN Nuclear Disarmament negotiations by Marching in NYC, June 17.
-- Excerpt from new film "The Nuns, The Priests, and The Bombs" by Helen Young, an Emmy award-winning writer and producer.
The complete film is to be shown at the UN June 29. The film focuses on activists who have undertaken dramatic Plowshares protests
in an effort to raise awareness on the global threat posed by the world's 15,000 nuclear weapon. It features 3 activists, Sister Megan Rice,
Greg Boertje-Obed and Michael Walli who trespassed onto the Y-12 National Nuclear Security Complex.
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· -- Pat McSweeney: on Plowshares actions and introducing her long-time friend, Sister Megan
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· -- Meet Sister Megan, and converse with her.
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· -- Joseph Gerson, American Friends Service Committee, In closing:
· Nuclear Disarmament, its necessity, and what forms can our activism take?
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· Joseph Gerson, Director of AFSC’s Peace and Economic Security Program. has been interviewed by and published in numerous outlets including the BBC, Voice of America, the Boston Globe, and Associated Press. He is also the author of the renowned Empire and the Bomb. Joseph has served as co-convener of the NPT Review 2010 International Planning Committee for Nuclear Abolition, Peace and Justice and of Network for a NATO-Free Future. He works closely with Gensuikyo (Japan Council against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs) and other Asian and Pacific peace organizations.
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Dear Folks,
Tomorrow, Sunday June 11, we have the splendid opportunity to meet
Sister Megan Rice, and hear from renowned speakers knowledgeable on the
dangers of nuclear weapons, and the status of nuclear disarmament negotiations.
I hope you can come and share in this experience--
Next weekend, Saturday June 17, there is a march in NYC,https://www.womenbanthebomb.org/
The following day Sunday, June 18, our speaker Joseph Gerson, through Peace and Planet,
will be hosting an international conference in Brooklyn, Pre-registration NOT required.
Mobilization for a Nuclear-Free, Peaceful, Just, and Sustainable World.
--Amy
Who is Sister Megan?
The recent film, "The Nuns, The Priests, and The Bombs" and a book: Almighty- Courage, Resistance, and Existential Peril in the Nuclear Age, written by Washington Post reporter Dan Zak, describe the life, work, and thought of Sister Megan.
Sr. Megan Rice's legacy of anti-nuclear weapons work
https://www.ncronline.org/preview/sr-megan-rices-legacy-anti-nuclear-weapons-work
National Catholic Reporter, Patricia Lefevere.
If a prize is ever presented for "protestor prodigy," Sr. Megan Rice may well be in the running. The Holy Child Jesus sister, now 85, has been arrested almost 40 times and has spent some three years in jail in her quest to rid the world of nuclear weapons.
One might think she's been doing this all her life, but most of her activism and subsequent arrests came after she'd spent 33 years teaching science and running schools in Nigeria and Ghana. In the late 1980s and 1990s she returned to the United States twice from Africa to help move and care for her mother, Madeleine Newman Hooke Rice. She even took her along on a few protests while back in the States on leave.
Why has Rice trespassed at the nuclear test site in the Nevada desert? Why has she served two six-month prison terms for protests outside the gates of Ft. Benning, Georgia, with the SOA Watch? Why did she break into the government's premier nuclear storage facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee?
"Being an anti-nuclear activist satisfied my need to do what is just common sense," Rice told GSR in an extended interview in mid-November, when the nun addressed some 150 members and supporters of New Jersey Peace Action. She challenged them to take on the disarmament task now that she's been released from a three-year jail term after serving two years. She pointed to international laws that ban the development of weapons of mass destruction, repeating "it's just common sense."
Even before she broke into the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., Sister Rice had been arrested dozens of times for acts of civil disobedience. She and other peace activists once blocked a truck rumbling across a nuclear test site in the Nevada desert. Twice, she served six-month jail sentences.
The pacifists belong to the Plowshares movement, a loose, mostly Christian group that seeks the global elimination of nuclear arms.
The Tennessee action took place on a Saturday night in July 2012. Sister Rice, then 82, Michael Walli, 63, and Gregory Boertje-Obed, 57, cut through barbed-wire fences at the Oak Ridge complex. Making their way to the inner sanctum, full of uranium, they splashed human blood on the windowless building, spray-painted its walls with peace slogans, hammered at its concrete base and draped it in crime-scene tape.
A Tale for Our Time
| Updated
Excerpts:
America’s nuclear weapon launch codes and the question of whose fingers will or will not be in close proximity to them, is the subject of much debate these days… it’s an opportune time for the publication of a new book:Almighty- Courage, Resistance, and Existential Peril in the Nuclear Age, written by Washington Post reporter Dan Zak and published by Blue Rider Press.
From left: Michael Walli, Sister Megan Rice, and Greg Boertje-Obed
undertook a Plowshares action at Y-12. They were convicted of sabotage.
For Sister Megan Rice, the octogenarian nun who’s at the heart of Zak’s book, every dollar spent on a nuclear weapon is one robbed from society’s most vulnerable, i.e., the American underclass living in poverty, and suffering from inadequate healthcare, housing and education
PBR/U.S. government -- The three activists reached the Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility where they splashed blood and painted peace statements in a protest against nuclear weapons.
The three activists never intended to expose security failings at Y-12, instead their protest action was designed to draw attention to the multi-trillion dollar nuclear weapons industry which, they say, is siphoning off tax payer dollars from real needs like healthcare, education, housing and jobs. The U.S. spends more on nuclear weapons than all the other countries of the world combined and four times more than Russia. Over the next 10 years additional spending is planned as the nation ramps up to modernize its entire nuclear arsenal: submarines, missiles and bombers, at a cost of $1.2 Trillion.
The activists are members of Plowshares an international movement opposed to nuclear weapons, whose mission is the conversion of resources from weapons of mass destruction to that which is life giving and can benefit humanity.
================
National Catholic Reporter
https://www.ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/sr-megan-rice-people-are-miseducated-about-nuclear-weapons
Sr. Megan Rice holds up a measuring scroll produced by the American Friends Service Committee showing that United States spends 57 percent of its revenue on militarism, more than other nuclear-armed nations. (GSR/Patricia Lefevere)
Janice Sevre-Duszynska, along with Max Obuszewski of the Baltimore Nonviolence Center,interviewed Rice July 10 at the Jonah House in Baltimore, less than a month before the 71st anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Sevre-Duszynska: Why is it important to talk about nuclear weapons, especially as we commemorate the 71st anniversary of Hiroshima-Nagasaki?
Rice: Mainly, I think it's important to wake people up. They've gone to sleep for 70 years by the intent of the government from the beginning. People weren't consulted in the building or use of these horrific weapons. It was all very secret and very contained. Even during the production of nuclear weapons, one worker didn't know what the other was doing.
… What happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki is not in the textbooks. It was unspeakable to have any discussion of the suffering and death of hundreds of thousands of Japanese in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Moreover, the decision-makers were in denial. There were scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project who did try to warn government officials about using these awful weapons. After the Trinity Test at Los Alamos, N.M., in 1945, Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Manhattan Project, recognized the destructive nature of the atom bomb and (possibly) began to have reservations about its use. The test proved that the bomb worked and that it would cause tremendous devastation. There was never a weapon like it in history.
… After Germany was defeated, a number of scientists did not want the bomb to be used. One alternative would have been to explode it over a deserted island with the hope that Japan would recognize its destructive nature and surrender. … Unfortunately, the development of nuclear weapons continues. One or two of today's atomic bombs could destroy the planet.
So when you look back at your action at Oak Ridge, what are your thoughts?
I feel gratitude as we were able to do what we planned to do or hoped to do: To enter a base and inform the workers (as well as the rest of the country) of the illegality of nuclear weapons is a success. It was very difficult to get into the place, so we had to go where you wouldn't be seen.
It's a crime scene: Crimes against humanity. Crimes against international laws and treaties. That shouldn't even have to be said. The powers that be wouldn't allow us to say this in our defense. The government, including Congress, is engaged in a cover-up, which results in the limiting of media coverage, and thus the criminality is not allowed to be exposed in a court of law.
There are moral laws, ethics, and values obviously. And so, therefore, any laws that protect the production or use of nuclear weapons are invalid because a law has to be enacted to protect the common good. The Rev. Martin Luther King said a law that is not a just law is not to be obeyed. Otherwise, you're promoting the crime.
Sister Megan at the Isiah wall at the UN, New York Times -- ``and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall
they learn war any more.''
Sponsored by Brookline PeaceWorks, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom,
Massachusetts Peace Action, PAX Christi, and Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility.
-- More info: Amy Hendrickson, 617 738-8029, amyh@texnology.com
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