Video - Veterans for Peace Protest at the Whitehouse.
Examiner | Each veteran answered why they had had gone to the gates of the White House to get arrested. The first veteran, out of the military for two and half years, answered:
"I can't sit by anymore and let these atrocities continue. I was with 10th Mountain Division in New York in the initial surge..deployed August 6, 2006. I was injured.. came back stateside... deployed back, wounded."
There to be arrested was what the veteran said was "very difficult and at the same time, very easy" because of the others standing with him.
"Hope has a cost," Hedges told those soon to be arrested. "Hope requires personal risk."
"It is not about the 'right attitude' or 'peace of mind.'
"Hope is action. Hope is doing something.
Hope which is always non-violent... knows that an injustice visited on our neighbor is an injustice visited on all of us."
A second veteran said he knew when he went to Iraq, "it wasn't right."
"You can't come home from that... You can't know you took human life and not want to do something... being there five years... blowing their homes apart and watching the infrastructure degrade instead of improve.
"There was nothing going on benefiting the people of Iraq," he said. "Consistent night raids, check points and harassment was the daily routine of what we did in Iraq. From a moral standpoint, nobody would agree with that."
Hedges oration included:
"Be afraid, they tell us. Surrender your liberties to us so we can make the world safe from terror. Don't resist. Embrace the alienation of our cheerful conformity. Buy our products. Without them you are worthless. Become our brands. Do not look up from your electronic hallucinations. No. Above all do not think. Obey."
The resisters at the gathering chanted loudly as they resisted police orders to get away from the White House fence: "They say, "Get back." We say, "Fight back.
"Hope, from now on, will look like this," Hedges said. "Hope will not come in trusting in the ultimate goodness of Barack Obama, who, like Herod of old, sold out his people.
"It will not be realized by... attempting to influence the Democratic Party. It will not come through our bankrupt liberal institutions -- from the press, to the withered stump that is the labor movement.
It is not having a positive attitude or pretending that happy thoughts and false optimism will make the world better.... Hope does not mean that our protests will suddenly awaken the dead consciences, the atrophied souls, of the plutocrats running Halliburton, Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobil or the government.
"If the enemies of hope are finally victorious in this station, the poison of violence will become not only the language of power but the language of opposition. And those who resist with nonviolence are the last thin line of defense between a civil society and its disintegration.
"When you put your body on the line and you say you won't let this happen anymore and you'll do whatever it takes to make that happen, it's something spiritual," explained a Veteran for Peace.
"I did things I'll never forgive myself for. I did my job. Those were just people trying to defend their homes. not have the intestinal fortitude to stand up when I knew I should have refused to serve."
Examiner | Each veteran answered why they had had gone to the gates of the White House to get arrested. The first veteran, out of the military for two and half years, answered:
"I can't sit by anymore and let these atrocities continue. I was with 10th Mountain Division in New York in the initial surge..deployed August 6, 2006. I was injured.. came back stateside... deployed back, wounded."
There to be arrested was what the veteran said was "very difficult and at the same time, very easy" because of the others standing with him.
"Hope has a cost," Hedges told those soon to be arrested. "Hope requires personal risk."
"It is not about the 'right attitude' or 'peace of mind.'
"Hope is action. Hope is doing something.
Hope which is always non-violent... knows that an injustice visited on our neighbor is an injustice visited on all of us."
A second veteran said he knew when he went to Iraq, "it wasn't right."
"You can't come home from that... You can't know you took human life and not want to do something... being there five years... blowing their homes apart and watching the infrastructure degrade instead of improve.
"There was nothing going on benefiting the people of Iraq," he said. "Consistent night raids, check points and harassment was the daily routine of what we did in Iraq. From a moral standpoint, nobody would agree with that."
Hedges oration included:
"Be afraid, they tell us. Surrender your liberties to us so we can make the world safe from terror. Don't resist. Embrace the alienation of our cheerful conformity. Buy our products. Without them you are worthless. Become our brands. Do not look up from your electronic hallucinations. No. Above all do not think. Obey."
The resisters at the gathering chanted loudly as they resisted police orders to get away from the White House fence: "They say, "Get back." We say, "Fight back.
"Hope, from now on, will look like this," Hedges said. "Hope will not come in trusting in the ultimate goodness of Barack Obama, who, like Herod of old, sold out his people.
"It will not be realized by... attempting to influence the Democratic Party. It will not come through our bankrupt liberal institutions -- from the press, to the withered stump that is the labor movement.
It is not having a positive attitude or pretending that happy thoughts and false optimism will make the world better.... Hope does not mean that our protests will suddenly awaken the dead consciences, the atrophied souls, of the plutocrats running Halliburton, Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobil or the government.
"If the enemies of hope are finally victorious in this station, the poison of violence will become not only the language of power but the language of opposition. And those who resist with nonviolence are the last thin line of defense between a civil society and its disintegration.
"When you put your body on the line and you say you won't let this happen anymore and you'll do whatever it takes to make that happen, it's something spiritual," explained a Veteran for Peace.
"I did things I'll never forgive myself for. I did my job. Those were just people trying to defend their homes. not have the intestinal fortitude to stand up when I knew I should have refused to serve."
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