I really like this. -----> Part 1. (Berrigan On The Failure of The PeaceMakers)
Roy Bourgeois steadfastly maintains that one of the Berrigan Boys actually said this while they (the Boys) were awaiting sentencing after getting caught pouring sugar into The Emperor's gas tank: The Angel of the Lord asked him, "Suppose that ten thousand, fifty thousand, one hundred thousand American and European war resisters came unarmed from America to the border between Iran and Iraq, fasted there, prayed, and marched right in. In sum, they risked their lives, with one thing in mind: to bring sanity, an alternative, to a mad situation. Suppose they hung in, refused to go away, and placed their bodies where their mouths were, and inserted themselves as human shields between the Iraqi and Iranian people and the full force and might of the American military and the international coalition sent to pulverize those lands and peoples into dust?" "WAIT a minute," he said. "Suppose they failed? Suppose they were carpet bombed, or strafed, or machine gunned, or rounded up and carted off to concentration camps? Then what?" The Angel responded by breaking into song and jig: "Everybody want to go to heaven, nobody want to die..." He (Bourgeois says Berrigan) continued: "...We have assumed the name of peacemakers but we have been unwilling to pay any significant price for peace. "We want peace with half a heart and half a life and half a will. The war continues because the waging of war is total but the waging of peace is partial. "I think of the good, decent, peace loving people I have known by the thousands and I wonder. How many of them are so afflicted with the wasting disease of normalcy that, even as they declare for peace, their hands reach out with an instinctive spasm in the direction of their loved ones, in the direction of their comforts, their homes, their security, their incomes, their futures, their plans -- that five year plan of studies, the ten-year plan of professional status, that twenty-year plan of family growth and unity, that fifty-year plan of decent life and honorable natural demise. "'Of course, let us have the peace,' we cry, 'but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties.' "And because we must encompass this and protect that and because at all costs -- at all costs -- our hopes must march on schedule, and because it is unheard of that in the name of peace a sword should fall, disjoining that fine and cunning web that our lives have woven, because it is unheard of that good men and women should suffer injustice or families be sundered or good repute be lost -- because of this we cry peace and cry peace, and there is no peace. There is no peace because there are no peacemakers." "Peacemaking is hard. Almost as hard as war."
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I admire Bob a lot. It is said that if you want to know what a person believes you simply observe what the person does. I know one thing, Bob believes in no more war. This was his talk to a group of citizens (Will County Green Party (wcgp.org) and Potluck Democracy) who had gathered at the train station in Joliet on their way to the October 27, 2007 peace rallies (the Chicago and the Homewood rally).