America - A Crisis of Conscience

A Powerful Speech by Our Friend John Schuchardt

CAMBRIDGE ENCAMPMENT FOR PALESTINE August 24,2024

To start on a personal note: When I was a junior in college, young and idealistic, I joined the marine corps. Five years later the first marines landed at Da Nang March 8, 1965. April 13, 1965 my

first child, Wee Geordie, was born and in June I was a First Lieutenant in Advanced Infantry OfficersSchool, Quantico, Virginia, training for Viet Nam, a country none of us knew anything about, nor couldwe find on a world map. In the evening I was singing lullabys like the tenderest of mothers, and nextmorning we were back in the field screaming “Kill, kill, kill” like homicidal maniacs.

It was a moral crisis for me. Who was I? What was the meaning of life, my life? I resigned my commission, refused Viet Nam, and was discharged Under Honorable Conditions August 31, 1965.

I was told I was ruining my life.

Our country now is in such a crisis of conscience. Who are we? Where is our humanity? Makinga moral decision usually has a cost. What price are we willing to pay?

Veterans for Peace holds this Truth to be self-evident: War is a Lie. We are Abolitionists. Ourgoal and purpose is to abolish war as slavery was abolished. We stand in the footsteps of Fredrick

Douglas and William Lloyd Garrison. War is the most colossal of all evil, said Dr. King. War is “humanity hanging on a cross of iron” as Gen. Eisenhower said.

GWOT, Global War on Terror, is linguistic absurdity. Don't they teach English in the schools anymore? War is terrorism, Endless Wars Against Invisible Enemies. (Howard Zinn) Hell intentionally brought to Earth... in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Guantanamo....and now Palestine.

Wall Street intoxication with making a living in killing. Raytheon the biggest employer inMassachusetts. Money for war and can't feed the poor. Wall Street plundering our hospitals to bankruptcyin Massachusetts at the same time as profiting by bombing hospitals in Gaza.

Truth is on the scaffold, and Falsehood is on the throne. But can we rise? Can we rise?

Kamala Harris sent me a letter, scolding Trump 10 times and never a whimper or a whisper about Gaza. Never a mumbling word about a thousand billion dollars for war every year, destroying Palestine and Ukraine for oil, gas and pipelines. Never a murmur about a thousand billion dollars in interest on the$35 trillion dollar war debt. We are financially bankrupt, but much worse, morally bankrupt. It is timeto declare insolvency and liquidate this “filthy rotten system” as Blessed Dorothy Day said.

We don't need elections, we need prosecutions. We don't need ballots, we need arrest warrants. Gaza is a U.S.bought and paid for Genocide. Gaza is a concentration of every unspeakable cruelty and crime. Gaza is barbarism wide-screen, real time, and everyone knows it.

The blind are leading the blind and the sheep are without the shepherd. The wolves are ravaging the flock, and the clergy say nary a prophetic word. It's all Good News for the Rich.

If the preachers are too comfortable to cry out, “Stop the crucifixion of Gaza!” we must. From this encampment, we cry out the cry of Archbishop Romero for El Salvador, “We beg you, we beseech you, we order you in the Name of God: Stop the Slaughter of the innocent and defenseless families.”

The political process is polarized; we have been set against each other, all accusation and no conversation. Foreign policy has come home to roost: our nation has been de-stabilized. Politics and pulpit have been paralyzed.

The vote we must make, the choice we have is a moral choice, to choose between truth and untruth, between morality & our humanity, or barbarism. Violence or non-violence. Now, with nuclear weapons, non-violence or non-existence, as Dr. said. We have choices to make, because there is a solution. “Love is the only solution” observed blessed Dorothy Day.

When did this all start? Wars are justified by untruth and myths from the time of Myles Standish, when bounties were paid in Massachusetts for Indian scalps, and Africans were imported as commodity for the first 2 1⁄2 centuries, 245 years, building the White House, Jefferson's plantation, and damn near everything else: canals, railroads, harbors and cities.

It is lies that initiate war, the Gulf of Tonkin, World Trade Center implosions, “bright shining lies” from the Father of Lies. We forget that we are born kind, generous and loving people..... and invade the lands of other loving people, always in the name of “self-defense”, strangely always somewhere across the oceans or south of the border.

Dr. King called us to revolution. The Poor Peoples Campaign planned to shut down Washington until war was ended and people were given their human rights...a revolution of values. He named the giant triplets of evil: racism, militarism, economic exploitation, an inseparable threesome of evil.

This encampment is where our revolution of values moves forward. Today we are few in numbers. This may be our Valley Forge, but we are ”winter soldiers, not sunshine patriots.” This is going to be hard and long.

The prophet spoke: “If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, strength without sight.”

Have we as a people ever been dragged down a darker more shameful corridor than the U.S. money, weapons, and Congress committing genocide in Gaza, industrial mass murder of beautiful, defenseless Palestinians, beyond our heart's capacity to bear?

We should be clear about the cynical, cruel cowardly and criminal U.S./NATO geopolitical goals.

On the U.S./NATO devil's chessboard Ukraine is a pawn, now a country of widows and orphans, in the attempt to Balkanize Russia. With Clash of Civilizations Samuel Huntington mentality, Afghanistan was savaged and abandoned. So too Iraq, the Kurds, Libya. When it is The West vs. the Rest, to win the Middle East prize of oil, gas, and pipelines, Israel and Palestine are both sacrificial victims on the Devil' Chessboard. The U.S./Israeli attack on Gaza is not self-defense, but self-delusion and self-destruction.

Israel itself is at risk, should Iran and Hezbollah choose.

When the pied pipers of patriotism and militarism in Congress rises 58 times to applaud Israel's evil and make mockery of international law, the Constitution, and fundamental rights, we as a people are in our darkest hour.

Yet the eternal law stands immutable, “Those who live by the sword will die by the sword.”

This is an hour of U.S., Middle East, and World destiny. Gaza is our Book of Revelations. Here in the U.S. Church and State are unmasked and marked as instruments of war, by acts of commission or omission. Politics and religion are both complicit, actively or by moral passivity, complicit in “war, the most colossal of all evils” Dr. King Until the Sermon on the Mount is brought back to the sanctuary, and until war criminals are arrested, our tomorrow is in grave doubt.

We must put our own house in order, end resource wars against the 2/3ds world who live in subhuman poverty and deprivation.

We must pray for the spiritual gift of Shame

Shame for those pied pipers of militarism, racism, and economic exploitation in Congress who rise in applause to perpetuate the slaughter of those made in the image of God, of Allah.

Pulpit and Politics must cry out, “Not one more.....not one more infant at its mother's breast, not one more journalist, doctor, aid worker, sick, wounded, or dying patient in their hospital bed, .... not one more young beautiful woman in the ecstasy of child birth... not one more.....not one more.

“Deliver us from evil” is prayed in Christian churches, but God will not and can not deliver us from evil. That is our task, given in freedom, under the iron law of necessity that those who live by the sword will die by the sword; under the iron necessity that we will reap what we sow; under the certain prophecy that those who sow the wind will reap the whirlwind.

Shame on both parties who commit treason against their sworn duty and sacred obligation to serve the common good, to protect the innocent, to end war, and uphold justice. Shame on those colleges and universities, who set loose riot police upon their own students, who see teach-ins like ours here today as a threat to education, Shame on their Trustees who profit from investing in weapons of demonic destruction, their endowments dripping human blood.

Truly Gaza is our moral compass in this fateful hour. The future of the nation, the soul of the people, is being weighed in the balance. If we do not rise, if we do not resist, if we do not reject Democrat and Republican charlatans and rise to speak in our own names, resist on our own two feet, the ghosts of Gaza will roam and disturb future generations forever.

The future of America is being decided today in Gaza. As millions of homes are shattered in Gaza, millions of families are shattered in America. There are two fronts of Gaza, the second is the war against the poor here in the U.S.

More than 2 million of our people are in prisons, mostly rainbow color, all poor. Millions in this country have no home, living in shelters, tents, dark alleys, under bridges, in abandoned buildings.

Maura Healey hasn't said a mumbling word against billions for weapons at the same time as she evicts the poorest of the poor from shelters. When Our Creator mandates us to feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, give sanctuary to those fleeing for their lives from U.S. wars, they sleep on airport terminal floors, evicted then into the heartless streets.

Living in a land of racial and economic apartheid, we keep the economy sputtering along “living by the sword” while all but the 1% are 2 & 3 jobs over-worked, mortgaged, taxed, debt carded, rent and wage enslaved, on the knife's edge, one pay check away from sinking into Prozac depression or suicidal despair.

With the wars of the 20th Century, the extermination bombing of German and Japanese cities, finally with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we must face our nation and ourselves as responsible for descending into barbarism. Setsuko Thurlow, a precious friend of Ven. Kato, the Peace Pagoda community, and of ourselves, was a 14 year old child in Hiroshima. In 2017 she received the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of International Committee for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons and said,

“Nuclear weapons do not signify elevation to greatness but the descent to the deepest darkest depths of human depravity.” “the deepest darkest depths of human depravity.” Can we confess that? Can we feel that?

But can we rise? Can we rise? We must rise for we are dying by the sword every day, in Gaza and Israel, in Ukraine and Russia, in Boston and across the land. Our Creator is in the heavens, the iron laws of necessity prevail; we harvest what we sow; we live by the sword and are perishing; we are sowing the wind and will reap a whirlwind.

We must rise. “No lie can live forever.” Hope is rising with the student encampments. Hope is rising here today. Hope is rising with the Peace Pagodas in Massachusetts, in Grafton, New York, in the Smokey Mountains at Oak Ridge Nuclear Weapons factory, at the Trident Submarine base in Washington, the largest concentration of nuclear weapons in the world.

Dr. King loved music (Coretta a trained voice and beautiful singer), laughter (he was always said to be the life of the party), and this poem:

“Though truth be on the scaffold and falsehood on the throne, Still that scaffold sways the future, Because God stands within the shadows, watching o'er his own.”

Salaam alekum Shalom Peace be with you. Na Mu Myo Ho Ren Ge Kyo

John Schuchardt House of Peace 1 High St. Ipswich, Massachusetts 01938 978-356-9395