August 5-9
Saturday, August 9, 6:30-9:30
The Most Dangerous Place on the Face of the Earth
Updates on Nebraska's tiny reservation border town.
Impeachment is on the table.
By Paul Olson, NFP President
By Professor Bruce E. Johansen
Omaha NFP Newsletter
An Injury to One is an Injury to All…
On Liars that Figure
It’s the War, Stupid
Forty & Counting
The Wind from Somewhere
Crying Wolf & Becoming the Too Fat Frog
Paradise Lost, Hell’s Apples & the CIA
Downwind from Nuclear
Holocaust and WackoAn Ethic of Life
An Ethic of DeathRed State: Blue State
The Burning Of Earth
Wahoo Memories & Iranian Democracy
On Bullying
War and Debt: The Don Reeves Alternative to a Draft
Killing the Huddled Masses Yearning to Be Free
How to Win in a Gilded Age
On Fear
Holy Lands, Unholy Wars
On Sacrifice
Education & Tax Justice
Forty & Counting
Paul Olson
UNL Professor Emeritus
Mark your calendars! Get ready to celebrate! Not Presidents Day or Arbor Day. But NFP’s birthday. Forty years of NFP and RNFP. RNFP is Rural Nebraskans for Peace — that little band of farmers and preachers and never-say-yes men from Central Nebraska and a few other locales who said ‘no’ to the war in Vietnam, ‘no’ to prejudice… that rabble that ran tractorcades for civil rights and held signs for peace, and generally raised hell about the state of the country. With them came the Quakers like Marge and Dan Schlitt and the Church of the Brethren people like Dwight Dell and the civil rights leaders like Hughes and Lela Shanks and Reuben Snake.
I remember my first NFP rally in 1970 — a huge event behind the UNL Teacher’s College building with rock bands and speeches by Reuben Snake and Nick Meinhardt and David Rice (now Mondo we Langa) and many others condemning the unilateral U.S. invasion of Cambodia and the Kent State killings. The rock bands were there and the hippies and speaker after speaker analyzing the war and the related shootings at Kent State and Jackson State. We were stopping Fascism, we thought. (If we had only known. It was just getting revved up.)
Since then Nebraskans for Peace has had less mellow times. It experienced some times of real poverty in the ’70s. We saw Nebraskans’ implication in the central episodes of the Watergate scandal, and then the post-Watergate decline in interest in peace issues because people thought ‘the struggle was over.’
When my former wife, Betty, was made state coordinator of NFP and with Mary Alice park ran the organization, I believe that NFP had fewer than 100 members, virtually no money to pay her, and so little cash on hand that she mimeographed her first issue of the Nebraska Report. Times that were hard to take came with these meager resources: the tiger cage torture prisons in Vietnam with Don Luce’s exposés, Nixon’s destruction of democratic Chile that led to Isabel Letelier’s visit to tell us of her husband’s assassination and American interventionism, the hostage crisis in Iran and Darryl Rupiper’s trip there on behalf of NFP. Nothing fully succeeded. We seemed impotent before the ‘Blue Meanies.’
Reagan built up NFP as no one else could have. He seemed to want war all over: in Europe with his missile build-up, in Central America with the Contras and death squads, in Eastern Europe and Asia against the Soviet Union with his ‘Star Wars’ proposals. (I have often wondered why we name anything ‘civilian’ after Reagan.) We saw NO MX here and with Marilyn McNabb in Utah; we saw Ernie Chambers’ drive for divestment from South Africa; Larry Zink’s and Marsha Fangmeyer’s drive to Freeze the nuclear arsenals; Bob Epp’s leadership in peacebuilding in Central and South America. We seemed to be able to get things done.
Then the Clinton years produced another lull until George W. Bush strengthened us as no one else could have. Now we have the big fights on our hands again: Iraq, Iran, StratCom, endemic military pollution and global warming. Bush is even better than Reagan as our organizer. We now know that we are in the belly of the beast here in Nebraska, and if we do not try to change things, we’re not sure anyone else will.
Though we can look strong and pound our collective chests about what we have done with StratCom and Whiteclay and the bullying bill and our anti-war actions, we are not so strong as we would like to think:
• We are 40 years old and only about 1000 households (1500 members) strong. I ask you, “Will you take it on yourself to ask five new members — Peace & Justice people — to join?” This week I am going to send an email to my network of friends to ask them to become NFPers. Will you? We need to double our size soon if we are to be effective;
• We are 40 years old, and we can barely make our budget. Admittedly, our budget is now $150,000 — compared to the little over a $1000 when Betty started. But we still lack money to staff our needs and do the research and organizing required to get the job done. Mary Alice and Loyal Park have rescued us from absolute bankruptcy with the money the Cat Lovers Against the Bomb calendar brings in, and they and the Nebraska Peace Foundation board have taken in enough foundation money each year to keep us afloat. Now Loyal and the Foundation are trying to raise $3 million dollars for an endowment that will keep us afloat in hard times. Will you look in your money sack to see if you could send a good chunk to the annual foundation drive or make a will for the endowment? We still pay our staff peanuts and get by on part-time appointments without much in the way of benefits.
• We are 40 years old and still need a stronger board. Under Mark Vasina, we have improved our planning and recordkeeping capacities enormously, as we improved our organization and resistance capacities under Marsha Fangmeyer and Carol McShane before him. We have great board members. Now we need young board members, more people of color, some fundraisers, and a few strong advocates for our priorities. Will you look around for them, perhaps in your own heart?
• We have 40 years under our belts and we still need to resuscitate the NFP chapters around the state by serving them better. The Lincoln, Omaha and Grand Island groups associated with NFP are strong, but I am not so sanguine about the other groups we list. We need to have a conversation about supporting the chapters without using much staff time through finding itinerant speakers, films, slide shows, common actions and the like that will energize them. Otherwise our ‘statewide’ claim is a little hollow, and we isolate ourselves as urban pinkoes. We are doing better in getting college Peace & Justice groups going.
• We’ve worked for 40 years and still need to maintain a tight focus on the causes of violence and injustice in our society, and the building up of their alternatives, while not duplicating what other groups do. We are not the left wing of the Green or the Democratic Party. We’re Nebraska’s Peace & Justice organization — the oldest in the entire country.
If you have suggestions about how we can get more members and strengthen the foundation and the endowment, how we can get new board and committee members that are eager to act for NFP, how we can energize the chapters and better focus our mission, please write to us at NFPState@NebraskansforPeace.org with suggestions or to volunteer to help with the problem. Will you do some of our work? What will you do? I am old (75) and often torpid. I will not be the greatest of NFP presidents. But if you will do all that you can, I can promise that I will do my very best.
We do not face an easy time. The military and the military/industrial complex have the money and the power. We have the strength of our bodies, our consciences, our mental fight, and our meager fiscal resources. With those, we will try to celebrate our 40th anniversary years, 2008-2010 (the years of our maturity), with events at the annual conference, with write-ups in the Nebraska Report, and — most of all — with accomplishments for Peace & Justice. Will you join in the struggle all over again?
