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NFP Year in Review

Tim Rinne, NFP State Coordinator

We all like to win.

With an election next month, lots of Nebraskans for Peace supporters are hoping for major shake-up in Congress to set this country on a new direction.

Having put up with a far-right majority in the House of Representatives for 12 straight years, and one-party control of both the House and Senate for the past four, we feel like it’s our turn and we deserve to win one again.

But the fact of the matter is, we don’t always. Sometimes, hardly at all.

Whether that’s due to chance, a cruel fate, our sinful nature or some kind of spiritual test we’re having to undergo, I leave to you to interpret according to your personal philosophical or religious views.

But for whatever reason, right doesn’t always seem to make might, justice doesn’t always prevail, and bad things do happen to good people.

As the State Coordinator of Nebraskans for Peace, I’d love to be able to tell you that in the past year NFP led the way in ending this tragic war. StratCom was dismantled and disarmed. President Bush endorsed the Kyoto Protocol to combat global warming. We put an end to school bullying. And Nebraska stopped selling alcohol in Whiteclay.

It didn’t happen though. And it may not in the coming year either.

So, with such little return, why do we keep doing this stuff and beating our heads against the wall?

There are lots of good reasons. But now that I’m over 50 and more chastened, the one I keep coming back to was told to me by a devoutly religious person almost two decades ago:

“We do this work less to change the world, than to keep the world from changing us.”

Some observers have described our issues priorities as less organizing initiatives, than ‘quests.’

And how right they are.

What could be more quixotic than wanting to end war, stop school violence, save the earth from ecological destruction, and undo 150 years of physical and cultural genocide against the Oglala Lakota Nation on Pine Ridge?

Can’t mount any bigger quests than those.

But despite these formidable odds, we continue to persevere — because these are our convictions. And even though we may never live to see the scales of justice balance and a world at peace, it’s the vision we hold and wish to pass down to the generations who will come after us.

Much as we’d like to, we can’t ever guarantee victory...

...Only that we’ll act with conviction. The same sort of conviction that has emboldened us to say that attacking Iraq was wrong and our government should never have gotten us into that mess to begin with—both when 70 percent of the public was supporting the war (as they were in April 2003), as well as today, when support has tumbled to barely 30 percent.

Anti-War Priority

Without question, progress is being made on our Anti-War Priority. Four years of pounding away (counting the six months leading up to the war) about the wrongheaded and counter-productive nature of the Bush/Cheney Administration’s “War on Terror” has started to pay off. At least half of the population of Nebraska now agrees with us about the War on Iraq — which in a ‘red state’ like ours is darn close to miraculous. Nor, thank goodness, have we had to make this point alone. Affinity groups like the Nebraska Coalition for Peace in Lincoln and Central Nebraska Peace Workers are playing a critical role helping change the public’s attitude. The war in Iraq is a long ways from over (and we worry daily about the administration trying to start yet another in Iran or North Korea). But the court of public opinion is now weighing strongly in our favor. And you can bet the farm that NFP will never abandon the issue that serves as our namesake — whatever the stakes, however long it takes.

TOTV Priority

That same doggedness and durability was displayed in our Turn Off the Violence Priority. Working closely with the Nebraska Indian Commission, NFP helped prevent budget cuts in the State Department of Education that would have hampered anti-bullying education in our schools. Two hundred of the 600 school buildings in Nebraska are currently working to develop anti-bullying programs, and the Nebraska Department of Education has committed thousands of dollars of its discretionary and grant funds to this cause. We not only succeeded in staving off a major setback to this work, though; we’ve been planning for the future. And in the upcoming 2007 Legislative Session, Sen. Gwen Howard will introduce a bill making bullying illegal and requiring every school in the state to implement antibullying education. We’re hopeful about the bill’s prospects this session, partly because of what the education groups are doing, partly because of what the Nebraska Department of Education is doing, and partly because of the advocacy structure we are organizing. If we have any hope of seeing nonviolent, socially constructive behavior among grown-ups, we need to start inculcating these techniques and practices in the young.

Whiteclay Priority

Seven years after Whiteclay burst into the news, four liquor licenses are still selling over 12,500 cans of beer a day to the dry Pine Ridge Reservation. Of all the issues NFP works on, Whiteclay is perhaps the most heartbreaking — if only because this human tragedy is visibly taking place right here in our own midst, and by our own hand. The alcoholism rate on Pine Ridge is conservatively estimated at 80 percent. One out of every four children is born with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. And yet, despite the priority NFP has given Whiteclay, the sales go on.

Slowly but surely, however, the moral and political support for licensing dealers there is being whittled away. This past spring, the Legislature adopted a bill that gives the Liquor Control Commission more authority over granting liquor licenses. While this new power does not impact the current licensees, it places any future licenses in doubt. Last summer’s proposed tribal blockade to interdict the transport of alcohol onto the reservation generated national news coverage, and even caught the eye of Martin Luther King III (see NFP President Mark Vasina’s attached article.) Plans for reviving the blockade, with even greater tribal government support, are in the works.

NFP, as you may have read, was honored by the Nebraska Commission on Indian Affairs at the 2nd Annual Standing Bear Commemoration as the “organization of the year,” specifically for our work on Whiteclay. And after seven years of carrying this banner, you can, accordingly, count on us to persevere on our side of the border until the State of Nebraska’s role in this ongoing tragedy is at last brought to an end.

Economic Justice Priority

Economics is central to the subject of justice. Just look at the $3 million alcohol industry in Whiteclay. The corporate tax giveaways funded at the expense of our children’s education. The resource grabs in the Middle East that dredge up memories of crusades and colonization. And the quote/unquote ‘Free Trade’ agreements that enrich the ‘haves’ even as they swell the ranks of the ‘have-nots.’ As part of our Economic Justice Priority this past year, Greg LeRoy of “Good Jobs First” spoke about a fair and just state tax policy at the 2005 Annual Peace Conference. Dry as it can oftentimes be, tax policy largely determines what our society looks like — whether through an unjust reliance on property taxes to support education, which disproportionately punishes farmers, seniors and homeowners; or through favoring Big Business and out-of-state stockholders with tax breaks at the expense of our in-state residents. The same sort of structural inequities that we find in our state economy, however — with a handful of winners at the top, while everyone else congregates at the bottom — informs the entire theory of economic globalization. NFP will continue to publicize the economic connections between all of these things. Because as our motto so accurately notes, “There is no Peace without Justice.”

Environmental Priority

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the undeniable evidence of global warming, NFP specifically adopted an Environmental Priority this past year. Throughout our 36-year-long history, we have consistently opposed both nuclear weapons and nuclear power as too inherently risky to the planet, advocating instead renewable forms of energy as an alternative. Believing as we now do that protecting the environment is central to peacemaking, we have begun seeking out allies who share our sense of urgency about the environment, and will continue to promote public awareness of the dangers of human-induced climate change.

StratCom Priority

The nuclear arsenal of the U.S. Strategic Command (or what used to be known as SAC, the Strategic Air Command) has been a perennial concern of NFP since our founding in 1970. With the raft of dangerous and destabilizing ‘mission changes’ that have taken place at the Omaha command center in the wake of 9/11, however, the NFP State Board voted in September to create a separate StratCom Priority. In addition to commanding the U.S. nuclear arsenal, StratCom has now been given the task of offensively waging the “War on Terror.” Operating under a policy of ‘shoot first, and ask questions later,’ StratCom is responsible for preemptively neutralizing any alleged threat to our national security, with either nuclear or conventional weapons.

But that’s just the start. Its component commands of SpaceCom and the National Security Agency conducted the “warrantless wiretaps” of American citizens, and its mission of “Missile Defense” is no less than an outright bid for the “domination of space.” And just this past month, StratCom successively weaseled its way into academia, when it dedicated a new, top-secret “Global Innovation and Strategy Center” on the University of Nebraska-Omaha campus. Through its membership in the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, NFP has begun developing contacts with like-minded organizations around the world. Having StratCom housed in our own backyard gives NFP a special opportunity to alert the rest of the nations of the earth of this menace. But it also gives us a special obligation. Because the next war the U.S. gets into will be started right here in Omaha.

In 2007, NFP will continue doing what it is we do best: Act on our convictions, regardless of the odds, to continue the ‘quest’ and keep the world from changing us. And if by chance we ‘win’ one, we’ll just take that as a bonus.