Friends,
Patrick O’Neill will speak on August 9 at Homewood
Friends Meetinghouse in Baltimore, as part of the 34th annual
Hiroshima-Nagasaki Commemoration. Our good friend Elizabeth McAlister
remains incarcerated in Georgia since April 4, 2018.
Kagiso, Max
OPINION
Why we brought hammers
to a nuclear fight
BY PATRICK O’NEILL
JUNE 15, 2019 01:41 PM, UPDATED JUNE
16, 2019 12:00 AM
Naval Submarine Base, Kings
Bay, Georgia. (AP Photo / Oscar Sosa)
On April 4, 2018, the 50th anniversary
of the Rev. Martin Luther King’s assassination, I joined six other Catholic pacifists
in an attempt to symbolically enflesh the prophet Isaiah’s command to “beat
swords into plowshares” (Is. 2:4).
After cutting a lock, we entered Naval
Station Kings Bay in St. Marys, GA with hammers, baby bottles of blood and
crime scene tape to expose the horrific D-5 nuclear weapons aboard the Trident
submarines that imperil life as we know it on Planet Earth.
Kings Bay is home port to six Trident
submarines. Each Trident can carry 24 D-5 missiles, each of which can carry up
to eight 100-kiloton nuclear warheads. Trident is the most insidious and evil
weapon of mass destruction ever constructed.
Once inside Kings Bay, in an attempt to
smash an idol, I hammered and poured blood on a cement statue of a D-5 at a
missile shrine display. The government charged the seven of us with three
felonies (depredation of government property, destruction of government
property, conspiracy) and misdemeanor trespass.
Three of our group — Fr. Steve Kelly,
S.J., Elizabeth McAlister (widow of the late Catholic anti-war prophet, Philip
Berrigan), and Catholic Worker Mark Colville, remain incarcerated in the Glynn
County Jail in Brunswick, GA. McAlister turned 79 and Kelly turned 70 while
incarcerated.
The others, Martha Hennessy
(granddaughter of Catholic Worker Movement founder, Dorothy Day), Clare Grady,
Carmen Trotta, and I, have been out under a cash bond and on house arrest with
a curfew and electronic ankle monitors for more than a year. Kelly, McAlister
and Colville refused the bond conditions.
For more than a year the case has been
tied up in pretrial motions. We are expecting to go to trial this summer. If
convicted, the seven of us will likely go to prison.
Efficacy was not my motivation for
joining this group. My faith led me to address the sinfulness of nuclear weapons.
We live in a world where nuclear weapons on perpetual hair-trigger alert have
become “normal.”
We used high drama as a wake-up call to
hopefully get people thinking about the fate of the earth and human survival.
Never before has our world been more at risk of the prospect of nuclear war.
The Doomsday Clock, maintained by The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, stands
at two minutes to midnight.
President Donald Trump frequently
engages in chest-thumping, and he bragged that he has the “biggest button,” a
reference to nuclear weapons. Trump alone, under the vested power of the
executive branch, can decide to use nuclear weapons under any circumstances.
Trump backs nuclear weapons expansion,
and he has vowed to pull the U.S. out of the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear
Forces (INF) treaty that was signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. INF
led to nearly 2,700 short- and medium-range missiles being eliminated, and an
end to a dangerous standoff between U.S. and Soviet nukes in Europe. In addition,
in July, 2017, an overwhelming majority of the world’s nations — but not the
United States — voted to adopt the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons
— a landmark international agreement that establishes a pathway to nuclear
disarmament.
The seven Kings Bay defendants are
parents of 20 children. We want to assure a nuclear-free world for the
generations to come. Humans must turn away from war-making, and find ways to
embrace nonviolent solutions to international conflicts. I don’t relish a
prison sentence, but I consider it a small price to pay if we peacemakers can
help prevent the use of nuclear weapons.
We should take to heart the warning of
Dr. King: “The choice today is no longer between violence and nonviolence. It
is either nonviolence or nonexistence.”
(Patrick O’Neill and his
wife, Mary Rider, cofounded the Fr. Charlie Mulholland Catholic Worker House in
Garner, an intentional community that provides hospitality to women and
children in crisis.)
Patrick
O'Neill (N&O file photo)
RALEIGH NEWS &
OBSERVER COPYRIGHT NOTICE
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
No comments:
Post a Comment