I am posting this message from a Green Party colleague in Arizona in honor of Veteran’s Day which was sent to urge people to support the Green Party which is the only political party with a platform that promotes peace:
The Green Party is the Peace Party, the one voice in the political array that doesn’t rely on about-face justification for continuing international violence underpinning notions of a superior calling for our nation. What does that mean? On Veteran’s Day, what is the price of war?
I’m from a military family. My dad went into the Navy right out of high school, and is a Pearl Harbor survivor. After the war, he went Army, to finish his twenty years. Growing up, I attended 13 schools before I finished 9th grade, most of them in rural villages, where the Nike missile base was a barracks for the privates, the missile "silo" was a cramped metal trailer, and the two families with kids were temporary outsiders.
Except for aunt Marianne, who was a navy nurse, the military didn’t want women, so we four daughters were not expected to enlist. As a woman, I was often told I had no right to an opinion in favor of peace, unless I had a brother or a cousin in combat. Like many of you, I decided that the way you best fight war is to get there ten years beforehand, and prevent despair by fixing what was wrong.
My husband’s family was also military. In their Appalachia, no one was drafted– they were Volunteers. His dad never saw a plane close-up, til he climbed into one, to learn to fly it for WWII. He re-upped, and finished his military career by teaching ROTC, in a building on campus that a Quaker-led group, including me, would stumble into one day, and occupy long enough to pray for the dead, and the still living. My as-yet-unmet husband’s only brother was among the unnamed for whom we prayed. His unarmed reconnaissance plane was shot down, the last fatality from Tucson. Until the next war.
Deanna Dee-Dee Taylor 