Defeaning Silence On The Carbon Belching Elephant In The Climate Room

How lucky was I to be in action with family and friends at yesterday's Rise for Climate, Jobs and Justice march in Portland, Maine. These powerful banners created by Ellen Davidson of Veterans for Peace in New York were trundled up to Maine by Ellen and Tarak Kauff, a VFP member who spoke at our Peace Hub preceding the funeral march for the cod.

Gigi, seen here helping grandpa and me hold the "Stop the Wars, Stop the Warming --People, Peace and the Planet" banner, held several signs throughout the course of the day. Gigi is a tireless social justice warrior whose mom, Selene Spivak, spoke at the end of the Peace Hub reminding us that the next generation is counting on us to leave a habitable world.

Videos of all the Peace Hub speakers will be available soon thanks to dedicated Peace Action Maine videographer Martha Spiess, and I will share them when I see them. For now here's a short video I made of Bruce Gagnon speaking about the need for conversion of the military-industrial factories to building sustainables: a win for jobs, a win for unions, a win for peace, and a win for the environment.

Maine Public Radio managed to cover the march without a whiff of the fumes constantly belching from the Pentagon's war machine. A glimpse of one banner did sneak in behind the dead cod puppet, but six hundred words was not enough to get "public" radio to mention the elephant in the global warming room. Their coverage was focused on the covert Democratic Party agenda for the entire climate march: register and get out voters. As if voting for Democrats would reduce Pentagon budgets and their CO2 exhaust, a bi-partisan problem that continues under any administration. ("Progressive" rep for Portland Chellie Pingree just voted along with Tea Party rep for the poorer half of Maine, Bruce Poliquin, to authorize the biggest Pentagon budget in history. Nuff said.)

The Maine Natural Guard was out in force yesterday reminding folks to connect the dots between militarism and climate change. Pictured here in our team shirt is Jason Rawn. Mary Beth Sullivan is wearing hers behind the banner, too, and Cynthia Howard rocked her shirt while holding this excellent banner which mimics the popular book series _____ for Dummies.

My remarks at the Peace Hub were excerpted from this excellent article by Stacy Bannerman, "Is Climate The Worst Casualty of War?" We handed out nearly 100 copies of Bannerman's article along the way of the New Orleans funeral-style march through Portland's downtown. And I continued to share these with high school students assembled at City Hall to hear many of their own, including water warrior Luke Sekera, who called out the Nestle Corporation for its theft of Maine's groundwater. Luke mentioned that he has been at this for seven years now. Yup, since he was 9 years old.

Colorful banners created by the Union of Maine Visual Artists' Artists Rapid Response Team (ARRT!) were everywhere, including this beauty created for and carried by the Maine Poor People's Campaign.

This national campaign -- founded to combat Martin Luther King Jr.'s evil triplets of racism, militarism and extreme materialism -- sees how all the pieces of our corporate oppression are connected.

It's time to stop pretending that the Democratic Party will do anything to save us.

Image: Anthony Freda