We Live In A Political World: #237/ At One Point

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Felipe Luciano is a poet, community activist, journalist, media personality, and politician. Wikipedia tells us that he is of Afro-Puerto Rican heritage, and is "known for his significant involvement in the awakening of the new consciousness-raising radicalism among Puerto Ricans in New York and across the country in the late 1960s and 1970s." I found the quote, above, in the June 2024, edition of Sojourners magazine.

It is pretty clear to me (and I do like to think of myself as someone ready for "revolutionary" change) that there could hardly be anything more "revolutionary" than a movement that begins organizing to eliminate future wars.

In my opinion, that movement needs to be based right here, in the good old United States of America, which devotes so much of our national energy, and money, to advancing wars (to be fought elsewhere, of course).

During World War II, it was U.S. planes, mostly, that bombed German cities into rubble. (Germany was defeated, so that was a strategy that seemed to work). We all remember that it was U.S. planes that dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, too. (Japan was defeated, so that was a strategy that seemed to work). Now, weapons largely made in our country are obliterating Gaza, and are deeply implicated in the ongoing war in Ukraine.

I am sparing you pictures of the destruction in which we have been involved in those places, and in all those past and present places that our ability to "wage war" has been mobilized. You have seen those pictures, I know. Click this link if you have forgotten.

But here's my question: Have we reached that "point" that Felipe Luciano mentioned - the point where we know that we need to take the sword and beat it into plowshares?

I think that the answer had better be "yes." Felipe Luciano is giving us some appropriate guidance.

If we don't, as Pete Seeger used to sing, "put an end to war," then war is going to put an end to us.

We have reached that point. Just like Pete Seeger - listen to him sing! - I can see it in my dreams!