Please join our little group of witnesses to the fires of war as we commemorate the 40th anniversary of the bold action of nine nonviolent resisters at the Catonsville, Maryland Selective Service office, May 17, 1968. The nine were aghast at the ongoing carnage in Vietnam and acted with decisive creativity, taking hundreds of files of young men who would be drafted and sent to Vietnam and lighting those files on fire with homemade napalm in the parking lot outside.
Though our little action is not as bold, and not as creative, we offer our nonviolent resistance to Gordon Smith out of the same agony over the lies and greed that produce our current bloody and illegal occupation of someone else's land--in this case, Iraq.
We will meet at the World Trade Center in Portland, 121 SW Salmon Street, Suite 1250, at 11 a.m. on Friday, May 16 (we choose to go on a business day when we can legitimately expect a response from the Senator or his staff, even though the 40th Catonsville anniversary is actually the following day). If we cannot reach his office--and that is standard nowadays at this guarded private building that merely looks public--we will offer nonviolent resistance at whatever point we are stopped.
This war is unacceptable. We cannot avoid our consciences. We are grateful for those exemplars who came before and showed us how to stand up for the truth of peace and nonviolence.
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