The Great Peace Race
See important postnote #2 at the end of this post.
The ‘meat’ of this post is the link in the next line. But see the postnotes as well.
This link, Peace Race (1) (3), opens to a very interesting 8-page commentary on a very noteworthy citizen initiative through the 1960s calling attention to, and mobilizing citizen action, about the Arms Race. Author Jim Nelson, an active member of United Nations Association MN for over 50 years (1972 photo below), was and continues to be an outspoken advocate, and bears witness to the virtue of persistence. and the quest for peace in our world. This article, published in 2024, speaks for itself, and I’m proud to present it here for your reflection, sharing and discussion. Great work, Jim.
A key character in Peace Race is Hubert Humphrey, former Minneapolis mayor, U.S. Senator and Vice-President of the United States. through the late 1940s through the 1970s. On Friday evening, Twin Cities Public Television airs a program on Humphrey, live streamed to where you live. Details are below the photo. This is a unique opportunity, and Jim’s article is a major contribution to understanding how Humphrey fit in to the politics of peace.
Also below, are links to other activities which highlight that we have a long way still to go towards a peaceful world, but actions like Jim and many others give reason for hope. As Churchill so famously said:”never give in, never, never, never“.
Jim Nelson, United Nations Association State Fair Booth, 1972
Friday evening Sept 13 at 8 p.m. CDT, TPT Channel 2 in the Twin Cities will air a special on Mayor Humphrey of Minneapolis. This program will be live-streamed https://www.tpt.org/watch-live. It will air again, though not live-stream, on TPT Life Channel channel on Sep 19 at 8 p.m. Here’s the TPT descriptor from their program magazine: Hubert Humphrey on TPT Sep 13 and 19 2024
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POSTNOTES: other programs for anyone interested:
- Middle East Peace Now is sponsoring a zoom program about Hamas, Saturday morning Sep 14
Date/Time
Date(s) – Saturday, September 14, 2024
10:00 am – 11:30 am
“What Hamas represents politically,
why most Arabs support it,
and how Israel-US should deal with it”
with Rami G. Khouri
Saturday, September 14, 2024 MEPN Zoom Webinar
10:00am – 11:30am CT
About the Speaker: Rami G. Khouri is a Palestinian-American academic and journalist whose family resides in Beirut, Amman, and Nazareth. During his 50 years as a journalist in the Middle East, he was editor of the Jordan Times and the Daily Star (Beirut) newspapers, and contributed reporting and opinion pieces from the region to the Financial Times, NPR, BBC radio, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and other outlets.
Rami founded and managed the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs (IFI), at the American University of Beirut, where he also taught journalism for a decade. He has been a Harvard Nieman Journalism Fellow and a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, and a Fellow of the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs in Arab East Jerusalem. He was a visiting scholar at Villanova, Oklahoma, Mt Holyoke, Syracuse, Northeastern, and Tufts universities. Rami is currently a distinguished fellow at IFI, a senior fellow at the Arab Center Washington, DC, and a regular contributor to Aljazeera online. His texts and interviews are available on X @ramikhouri.
Rami Khouri’s latest book, co-edited with Helena Cobban, is entitled Understanding Hamas and Why That Matters and is scheduled for release in early October.
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The program descriptor
Media attention was jerked back to the West Bank Friday following the horrifying news that a 26-year-old American peace advocate had been shot dead by Israeli forces.
The news comes amid ongoing reports of an unprecedented rise in settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, increased IDF military operations and a near-total lack of accountability for soldiers and settlers alike – with over 500 Palestinians killed since October 7, including more than 140 children. Israeli and Palestinian human rights organizations warn that the situation is going from bad to worse, with security experts alarmed that simmering violence risks boiling over into full-scale conflict
Here’s what you can expect:
- Lior Amihai will take us right into the situation on the ground in the West Bank and unpack the indispensable work Peace Now is doing, the high level of danger posed to Palestinians and peace advocates, and rising Israeli and Palestinian extremism.
- Michael Sfard will share his analysis of the damning international legal implications of decades of occupation, including this summer’s significant ruling by the International Court of Justice that found Israeli occupation of the West Bank to be illegal.
- Celine Touboul will offer expert policy analysis and recommendations for defusing the growing crisis in the West Bank, protecting human rights and safety there, and charting a better course.
We will also discuss the role that sanctions on those most responsible for violence and instability in the West Bank can play in holding perpetrators accountable and impacting the reality on the ground.
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3. Twin Cities Nonviolent for several years has sponsored programs related to nonviolence for twelve days, this year beginning on Sept 21 through October 5. Here is this years Program.
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4. 9-11-01. Sunday evening CBS’ 60 Minutes gave a full hour reprise of it’s 2022 special honoring the fire fighters of New York for their heroism at the time of 9-11-01. NYPD lost hundreds of its own in the aftermath of the attack. The report brought tears to my eyes, as it always does and will. I had basically finished the draft of this post before watching.
Those who knew me then, and now, know that there are two “me’s” when it comes to 9-11-01. The first is the early weeks after the disaster itself,. I was working on a Habitat for Humanity build in Minneapolis the week of, including 9-11, and only heard about it on a radio at the site during the day. This was before cell phones, and obviously there was no TV either. We didn’t know the towers collapsed until arriving home late in the afternoon. The e-mail network which years later became the Outside the Walls blog, thence Thoughts Towards a Better World originated in late September, 2001 – it was sort of a group catharsis venture, which some readers would remember.
In early October my mood changed as the decision was made to bomb Afghanistan in response. To get al Qaeda. That and other actions were applauded by the general public. Often at this space I’ve shown the news article that I kept at that point in time. It is below. In my opinion, retribution was not a worthwhile response. It was a lonely time: I was in the 6%….. But it was also became the entry point for me into the peace movement, of which I’m still a more informal part.
The debate will go on forever, I suppose, about 9-11-01 and what it means. I’m not alone. To remember is important. To disagree is okay. Our war on Afghanistan, then on Iraq, then back to Afghanistan, really has not ended, 23 years later. When will we learn?
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4. Public television: I am a long-time contributor to TPT, for the last six years $1,000 per year as AMillionCopies. If you would like to be a co-participant, send me a check for any amount, made to TPT, post-dated to October 31, 2024, and I will add it to the 2024 contribution. Every little bit helps. Interested by don’t have my address? Just ask.
POSTNOTE #2 3 p.m.: Shortly after I published this post, the breaking news was about the just released Congressional Report on the withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. That debate can go on with out me. In the Sep 2 post, I included a recent column from John Rash in the Minnesota Star Tribune interviewing the American ambassador to Kabul, Minnesotan Ross Wilson, at the end of the Trump years, and beginning of Biden years, 2020-21. He was a direct witness to particularly policy considerations in those difficult months. You can read it here: John Rash 8 31 24 STrib Afghan. It is an important addition to this conversation.
Re the “Debate”: I will likely watch it, but that is about all I’ll have to say about it here.
POSTNOTE #3 Sep. 11: I did watch the entire debate and quite a bit of the post-debate discussion, and I’m glad I did. Kamala Harris was pitch perfect. Still won’t make the rest of the campaign any easier.
Many thanks for keeping the “Peace Race” story alive. Among other things it is a great case story of citizens working together to create very important solutions to complex national security challenges. As long as people follow in the footsteps of the McLaughlin’s, we can tackle current challenges from armed conflicts to climate change and many more.
When will we learn? Answer: never, so long as men who run this planet insist that revenge and retaliation are justifiable causes for attack, war, or anything else. It’s never resolved anything, ever. Yet it still poisons our world and our belief systems.