VFP friends -- please have the peace and peace-loving people and organizations you know sign on to this letter, below... sign-on responses go to peace@agapecommunity.org
A time-sensitive message from the Agape Community:

 

Would you like to join the growing list of signees in support of Veterans For Peace still disallowed from marching in the St. Patrick’s Day parade.

 

Here is the final statement (BELOW).

 

Can you send your names to Suzanne Shanley by tomorrow (Sunday, March 9) so that we can send to media outlets as we attempt to express our concerns as peacemakers in MA and beyond.

 

Many thanks.  Please also support Veterans for Peace by attending the alternative Peace Parade, described in the flier and statement below.  Please forward to peacemakers you know and ask them to contact media to express their alarm and this ongoing treatment of veterans as well as to mention this document.  People may simply send their names and how they want to be listed to  peace@agapecommunity.org.

 

 

Peace and gratitude.

 

Suzanne Belote Shanley for Agape

Massachusetts Peace Communities Statement of Support

for Veterans for Peace inclusion in St. Patrick’s Day Parade

 

We the undersigned represent a number of peace organizations across the religious spectrum, interfaith and ecumenical, who wish to express our deep concern about the grave injustice, disrespect and clear discrimination against veterans who are voices of peace, through their exclusion from Veterans for Peace from Boston’s Annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade.  

 

It is our conviction that the history of such exclusion in Boston is based on secular and political maneuvering.  Such posturing prevents our veterans from expressing the ravages and trauma of war and their collective statement about their experiences and wounds, both physical and mental, in a public forum such as the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, meant, ironically, to honor veterans.  Visible reminders of the scourge of war such as members of Veterans for Peace bring to the public forum are consistent with our work as peacemakers in our war-addicted society.

 

We are aware that The Saint Patrick’s Peace Parade is currently mired in a debate about the exclusion of LGBT sisters and brothers from the main St. Patrick’s Day Parade. 

 

As communities of peace, we wish to make a clear and consistent statement of support of our veterans, across the gender spectrum, as peacemakers whose civil rights are violated, and who by turning from war, characterize a conversion from killing, to peacemaking, honored by all faith traditions. 

 

We note that St. Patrick, the Irish Catholic saint, after whom this parade is named, renounced war emphatically when he said in his writings:  “Killing Cannot Be of Christ.”

 

The Boston Chapter of Veterans for Peace, known as the Smedley D. Butler Brigade, is part of a national veterans’ organization of the same name with 140 chapters around the country, members from WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Gulf War, Iraq and Afghanistan.

 

For the past ten years, members of Veterans for Peace have attempted to walk in the St. Partrick’s Day Parade, and in 2011, they were denied participation by the parade organizers, one of whom stated:  “We do not want to have the word peace associated with the word veteran.”

 

We echo and support the words of Veteran for Peace, Tony Flaherty, LT, USN, Ret. of WWII, a member of the Boston Chapter, and one of its most eloquent spokespersons as an Irish Catholic who has renounced war, spent his entire life in South Boston, and who recently penned the following words to Mayor Walsh of Boston:

 

“Vets for Peace has been banned, simply for advocating peace and a dedication to offering our children a message that war is not the answer at spectacles glorifying militarism since 2003 (invasion of Iraq) and since initiating the Peace Parade in 2011, have been subjected to insult and calculated obstruction in which City Hall has been complicit. …”

 

Peace Parade key organizer, Pat Scanlon, a decorated Vietnam Veteran, comments that veterans experience this obstruction as an insult, especially, “to those of us who have experienced the horrors of war and know the real cost of war.” 

Veterans, some in their eighties, have waited for hours in the blazing sun, to march after street cleaners and other public employees finish their post-parade obfuscating and deliberate degradation of impact—under the guise of cleanup.  They are greeted, sometimes with applause, often with jeers and sullen stares, by the handful of dwindling numbers of parade participants.   A court order has altered these delay tactics, but the exclusion remains.

 

Veterans for Peace have clearly stated their desire: “One parade, welcoming and inclusive of any group.”

 

We representatives of Peacemaking Communities in Massachusetts want to make clear our support of the Veterans for Peace and our desire:

 

The make visible the flags for peace carried by VFP, the nobility of the tradition of rejection of war by warriors through the centuries, and the consistent message that we have learned as a nation from our great peacemakers, Lucretia Mott, George Fox, John Woolman, Martin Luther King Jr., Dorothy Day, Daniel and Philip Berrigan, Sr. Megan Rice, Howard Zinn and the countless numbers of the great cloud of witnesses who live on nationally and internationally and across the faith spectrum.

 

We the undersigned peace communities carry with us the voices of hundreds, if not thousands of our peacemaking constituents who are appalled at the blatant disregard for the movement of conscience, courage and nonviolence embodied in the lives of our brothers and sisters, Veterans for Peace in Massachusetts.