About Hope

On Nov. 18, several of us testified at the Montgomery County delegation's annual Joint Priorities Hearing. About 25 state senators and delegates heard our message: we want them to take a stand in support of moving Federal money from the Pentagon to our communities. Here is some of our testimony:

We believe that you have a responsibility to the people of Montgomery County to represent our interests, and that includes with the Federal government. People in Montgomery County are spending on average $2,000 per person per year on military spending. . . You are faced with huge and growing social and infrastructure needs in Maryland and no money to address them. It doesn't have to be this way.

We ask you to advocate forcefully the idea that the current level of military spending is a terrible misallocation of limited resources, and that it is, in fact, a hugely important local issue.

It was shocking that in the recent election, the wars and the military budget were never discussed. By anyone. We ask our young people to fight and die and come home traumatized for life. We spend a greater proportion of our taxes on the military than at any time since WW II.

And no one even mentions it?

We ask you tonight to break silence:

To support our troops by making it your highest priority to bring them home.
To support our veterans by demanding that we create no more of them and by taking care of those who have served.
And to support our teachers, our nurses, our librarians, our children, our poor, by demanding a significant reallocation of Federal resources, away from military spending and towards community needs.

We ask you to speak out publicly, often, and with passion.

We ask you to pass a formal resolution to reallocate money from military spending to constructive use. If a resolution is undoable, then please consider a letter and make it your mission to get all your colleagues to sign.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period . . . was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people."

We implore you, do not remain silent.

Real Hope Is About Doing Something

. . . unless we physically defy government control we are complicit in the violence of the state. All who resist keep hope alive. All who succumb to fear, despair and apathy become enemies of hope. They become, in their passivity, agents of injustice.

If the enemies of hope are finally victorious, the poison of violence will become not only the language of power but the language of opposition. And those who resist with nonviolence are in times like these the thin line of defense between a civil society and its disintegration.

Hope has a cost. Hope is not comfortable or easy. Hope requires personal risk. . .

Read the entire article here.