Tuesday, March 7, 2023

 Jose Vega Explains the Next Steps for Anti-War Activism

https://rageagainstwar.com/  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZItp7lJhwiw  

LENGTH   4 minutes, 38 seconds       80  lines , 22 paragraphs,

 

Unidentified woman[ek1] :

 

Over the next couple of weeks we're going to be getting ready to go and protest at our Congressional Representatives offices.  We're going to train you with the help of Jose here so that you can go out and help us affect meaningful change and actually get some bills passed and get some things repealed so that we can get out of this miserable hell machine[ek2] .

 

My walk is going off. [Woman hands mike to man- Nick?]

 

Man [Nick]?


All right, so what we're going to be doing in a few weeks from now is we're all here in DC now but we're all going to go back to our congressional districts after this.  We're gonna go back home and what we're going to do is we're gonna do sit-ins.  We're gonna have another day of action but it's gonna be back where all of you are.  So we're going to do a day of action where everybody's going to go to their member of Congress is how they're either their home or their congressional district office you're going to do a sitting you're going to protest there and we're gonna bring it because the war is something that has been brought to our house hasn't it
[ek3]  ?

 

We can't avoid the war.  We didn't get a vote[ek4] .  None of us voted to start this war- to start a third world war.  None of us are cheering for a nuclear war. That's not our choice. Well

they need to feel that so we're gonna bring it right there and so get ready for that more coming from that in the next few days .

 

Turning it over to Jose.

Jose Vega:

 

Now for a couple minutes. Okay.  Hi all. Can we hear from Nick and Angela

putting this together?  Yeah. I'm really happy to see all of your faces here and I also want to give thanks to Diane Sayer.  She ran against killer Chuck Schumer and I worked on her campaign.  And you know people always ask me like how do you how do you just start doing that?  How do you just stand up and start going after politicians?

Well, the truth is I'm an American citizen and I know what that means. You know there's an old saying that goes:  “Know where you stand and then stand there”.

And where are we standing today a hundred years ago this Lincoln Memorial was constructed and inside there's a sentence from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address which says that “ we highly resolve that government of the People by the people and for the people shall not perish from the Earth.”


How do you actually do that? My answer is WE have to be that free government that we intend to preserve to improve or to create.  We, not our elected representatives,  are the fourth branch of government. We are not congressmen, we are not judges, we are not the executive branch.  We are more than that.  We are the people.  We are not a political party.  We are the people and we have the responsibility not to be divided in the face of Injustice.  What we do in America affects the whole world.  So why are we the people doing nothing to stop our unjust Wars? The bankers of Wall Street, City of London, the (  ?  ) ,  the Bank Rollers and the War Profiteers hate you/us as much as they hate Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping and maybe more.  Judge them by their deeds and if you don't believe me look at our cities.  They are in they are destroyed and it's even worse now.

 

You know I'm from the Bronx in New York City and we used to say it's burning but look what's happening in Ohio. It's burning down too.  Will you, the people,  rise up to stop it?

 

And so to close I would like to say that we have to listen to other nations and reject the idea that war is a form of diplomacy.  Martin Luther King who spoke here and is with us here on the mall made the point that there is such a thing as being too late. It is not yet too late but only if we unite above party ideology and personality. We have to establish

principles for a new strategic and development architecture that treats All Nations equally.  And only when we remember that we are the people, that we have the responsibility to reverse injustice, foreign and domestic, will we create something better- a more perfect union.  If we do our job we will be the government that we and the whole world wants to see.

So let's get to it!

 

foreign

[Applause]

English (auto-generated)

 


 [ek1]AOne of the two organizers?  Can anyone identify her? Angela?

 [ek2][ Nick]Offers training to protest at local Congressional Representatives office,

 [ek3]Proposes sit-ins in local Congressional Offices. 

 I (erich) think this idea should be explore. Some in this group have experience with protesting at local  Congressional Offices, and certainly should Pols show up in our neighborhood, using that event to break the ceiling on admitting dissent in a narrative/discussion is an action I would support.

 [ek4]Part 2. of Jose's talk: War happening w/o our vote/consent. Sit-ins

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