President Trump Pardon Whistleblower And Veteran Reality Leigh Winner-We Will Not Leave Our Sister Behind

Courage to Resist<refuse@couragetoresist.org>

9/17/2018 3:41 PM

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Pardon Whistleblower Reality Winner Hi Alfred. On June 3, 2017, NSA contractor Reality Leigh Winner was arrested and charged under the Espionage Act for providing a media organization with a single five-page top-secret document that analyzed information about alleged Russian online intrusions into U.S. election systems. Reality, who has been jailed without bail since her arrest, has now been sentenced to five years in prison. This is by far the longest sentence ever given in federal court for leaking information to the media. Today, she is being transferred from a small Georgia jail to a yet-unknown federal prison. Several months before her arrest, the FBI’s then-Director James Comey told President Trump that he was (in the words of a subsequent Comey memo) “eager to find leakers and would like to nail one to the door as a message.” Meanwhile, politically connected and high-level government officials continue to leak without consequence, or selectively declassify material to advance their own interests. Join Courage to Resist and a dozen other organizations in calling on President Trump, who has acknowledged Winner’s treatment as “so unfair,” to pardon Reality Winner or to commute her sentence to time served. Sign the petition ~ Read more ~ StandWithReality.org D O N A T E towards a world without war Upcoming Events Feds holding last public hearing on draft registration Los Angeles, California Thursday, September 20 At California State University Los Angeles More info 50th anniversary events of the Presidio 27 mutiny San Francisco, California Panel discussion on Saturday, October 13 Commemoration on Sunday, October 14 At the former Presidio Army Base More info D O N A T E to support resistance

COURAGE TO RESIST ~ SUPPORT THE TROOPS WHO REFUSE TO FIGHT!
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“And The Choir Kept Singing Of Freedom”- Birmingham Sunday-1963-A Reflection After Viewing "Dawoud Bey: The Birmingham Project" Photograph Display At The National Gallery Of Art

“And The Choir Kept Singing Of Freedom”- Birmingham Sunday-1963-A Reflection After Viewing "Dawoud Bey: The Birmingham Project" Photograph Display At The National Gallery Of Art

Richard Farina's Birmingham Sunday 

Dawoud Bey: The Birmingham Project

September 12, 2018 – March 24, 2019

West Building, Ground Floor

Dawoud Bey, Mary Parker and Caela Cowan, 2012, 2 inkjet prints mounted to dibond, overall: 101.6 x 162.56 cm (40 x 64 in.), National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of the Collectors Committee and the Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund

For more than 40 years photographer Dawoud Bey (b. 1953) has portrayed American youth and those from marginalized communities with sensitivity and complexity. Dawoud Bey: The Birmingham Project marks the National Gallery of Art's recent acquisition of four large-scale photographs and one video from Bey's series, The Birmingham Project, a tribute to the victims of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama. Coinciding with the 55th anniversary of this tragedy, the exhibition focuses on how Bey visualizes the past through the lens of the present, pushing the boundaries of portraiture and engaging ongoing national issues of racism, violence against African Americans, and terrorism in churches.

On September 15, 1963, four girls were killed in the dynamiting of the church, and two teenaged boys were murdered in racially motivated violence. Each of Bey’s diptychs combines one portrait of a young person the same age as one of the victims, and another of an adult 50 years older—the child's age had she or he survived. Alongside these photographs, the exhibition features Bey's video 9.15.63. This split-screen projection juxtaposes a re-creation of the drive to the 16th Street Baptist Church, taken from the vantage point of a young child in the backseat, with slow pans that move through everyday spaces (beauty parlor, barbershop, lunch counter, and schoolroom) as they might have appeared that Sunday morning. Devoid of people, these views poeticize the innocent lives ripped apart by violence.

This exhibition is curated by Kara Fiedorek, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow in the department of photographs, National Gallery of Art, Washington.

By Seth Garth

Sometimes things, events, ideas, and such lead into one another. Recently I had written a short piece based on hearing a segment on NPR’s Morning Edition where the reporter was ruminating about the effect that folk-singer/songwriter Bob Dylan’s “anthem” The Times They Are A-Changin’ had on her and the Generation of ‘68 when it first hit the airwaves in 1963. That reportage got my attention since I have spent plenty of cyber-ink throughout my journalistic career highlighting various aspects of the tremendous push on my generation, that Generation of ’68 or the best part of it, of events in the early 1960s which were harbingers of what we expected to have occur that would change the world, would turn the world upside down. I thus need not go into detail here about my notion that Bob Dylan’s song set him up as the “voice” of a generation whether he wanted to be that or not. Nor about what effect that song, and songs like his had on us, gave us our marching orders.          

As part of her presentation the reporter mentioned that some events, some events down South around the black civil rights movement against one Mister James Crow like the beatings, the water-hosing and the unleashing of the vicious dogs by the police on innocent protestors had on her growing political consciousness, her desire to work for social change. Although she did not specifically mention Birmingham Sunday, the bombing of a black church killing four innocent children and wounding others that event triggered the activism button of many young people, including myself. 

I have detailed elsewhere some of the events like the black civil rights struggle down South, the fight for nuclear bomb disarmament, the emerging struggle against the escalating Vietnam War as acting as catalysts to action. Also tried to convey a more general sense of the mood of the times among young people that the world, a world then on the brink, on as one song had it on the “eve of destruction” was not responding to their needs, was not changing in ways that we could understand. Most of all that we had no say, had not been asked about what had been created in our names. And nobody in power seemed to think that they needed to consult us.  

All of this came to mind as well by a recent visit to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. where on the ground floor there was a small photographic exhibit centered on that Birmingham Sunday bombing. A kind of what if, or rather what would those who were killed or maimed look like today if they had been permitted to live out their precious lives. That got me to thinking the thoughts I expressed in that “voice of a generation” commentary and about the changes in people who did survive, who now have aged, gracefully or not, and who are thinking about, are summing up their lives and what they did, or did not do. Powerful stuff although when one realizes what is what in the world today one has to be very circumspect about the little changes we have made. Not profound but something to think about whatever generation designation.

On Armistice Day, Let’s Celebrate Peace by Kathy Kelly November 10, 2017

On Armistice Day, Let’s Celebrate Peace

by  Kathy Kelly

November 10, 2017

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U.S. National Archives

Thousands massed on all sides of the replica of the Statue of Liberty on Broad Street in Philadelphia, cheered unceasingly, upon the announcement of the armistice on November 11, 1918.

Wilfred Owen, an English poet who was killed in action exactly one week before the Armistice that finally ended World War I was signed, wrote about the horrors of living in trenches and enduring gas warfare.

Wikimedia

In “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young,” he revises the Biblical narrative about Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Believing God willed the slaughter, Abraham prepared to bind Isaac and slay him. Owen transforms Abraham into the European powers who were willing to slaughter youthful generations in the trenches of World War I.

Only in this telling, Abraham refuses to heed the angel who urges that the son be spared. The old man “slew the son, and half the seed of Europe, one by one.”

Thirty million soldiers were killed or wounded and another seven million taken captive during World War I. Some 50 to 100 million perished from a flu epidemic created by the war. “Never before,” writes author and activist David Swanson, “had people witnessed such industrialized slaughter, with tens of thousands falling in a day to machine guns and poison gas.”

A stunned and exhausted West greeted November 11, 1918, the day the war came to an end, as its delivery from horror.

In 1938, Congress declared Armistice Day a legal holiday dedicated to the cause of world peace. In 1954 the holiday was renamed Veterans Day and morphed into an occasion for flag waving and military parades.

Veterans for Peace are working to recover the original purpose of Armistice Day—calling for adequate psychological and material support for veterans, and above all to abolish wars.

Now, members of the group Veterans for Peace are working across the U.S. to recover the original purpose of Armistice Day. They are using it to call for adequate psychological and material support for veterans, to help them cope with the terrors they have been forced to endure. Above all, they work to abolish wars.

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This year on Nov. 11, at 11 a.m., Veterans for Peace chapters across the United States will ring bells, recalling that minute in 1918 when, as Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another.”

“This event is more than just a historical remembrance,” says Ed Flaherty, a member of the Iowa City Chapter of Veterans for Peace. “It is about today, about our pressing need to reverse the war-momentum and to take up the sweet burden of creating lasting peace.”

This year on Nov. 11, at 11 a.m., Veterans for Peace chapters will ring bells, recalling that minute in 1918 when, as Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another.”

Writing on behalf of the group’s Tom Paine chapter in Albany, New York, John Amidon explains that the veterans will be “purposefully walking” in the local Veterans day parade because “we ain’t marching anymore.”

The tragically stubborn “old man” in Owen’s poem rejected the angel’s intervention urging him to choose life over death. We do not have to keep making that same mistake.

Armistice Day gives us an opportunity to acknowledge the brutal futility of armed conflict, the wastefulness of our military spending, and the responsibility we share to abolish all wars.

Kathy Kelly   co-coordinates the group   Voices for Creative Nonviolence.