More than anything this year’s conference is about cultivating hope through life-affirming action. IT IS GROUNDED IN THE BELIEF THAT BY linking our collective efforts together WE WILL AMPLIFY our voices and INTENSIFY our work to create the very much needed dynamics for life-affirming change.
Perversely and sadly our government and weapons industry (aka the Merchants of Death) enshrine war as the necessary promoter and preserver of peace ensuring a condition of endless global conflict. This homage to the arms merchants blinds both our decision makers and much of our citizenry to the nonviolent solutions and peaceful alternatives to violent conflict. The driving force and convergence of this societal control is found on the economic level with the manufacture and sale of weapons. Consequently, rivers of blood money flow endlessly, spreading the implements of monumental destruction. A mind boggling 858 billion dollars plus has gone to the Pentagon, war, and weapons this year. THIS OBSCENE REALITY TAKES WITH IT our creative will and commitment to social uplift and the capacity to address creatively and comprehensively so many of the urgent and critical issues of the day which threaten our very sustainability and future on a global scale. Climate collapse, famine, and disease, economic inequality, and racism, THE EXISTENCE OF ENDLESS WARS to a large degree remain unaddressed and unchecked.
In direct defiance of and confrontation to this death spiral we have assembled a group of presenters and teachers with a DEEPLY-ROOTED belief in the preciousness of all life and the knowledge and ability to present needed solutions and inspiration so that we might discard the hypnotic and controlling illusion that war is normal, necessary, inevitable, that “war is peace,” AN ILLUSION WHICH DISABLES OUR CAPACITY TO BRING SOLUTION TO SEEMINGLY INTRACTABLE GLOBAL CHALLENGES.
Our speakers include Kathy Kelly, David Swanson, Martha Hennessy, Debra Sweet, and Gloria Caballero-Roca. All are veteran peace activists with outstanding knowledge and experiences to share and inspire.
Join us in Fonda, NY on Sept 8 and 9 to speak, listen, reflect. Find inspiration and solutions along with the ability and will to act, to confront and reverse the current downward death spiral, to convert swords into plowshares and find our way past war AND ALL TO WHICH IT BLINDS US.