Luckily I have to work and can’t participate in the nonsense called the J&P annual meeting. You see, the J&P has no other general membership meetings but just one poorly organized charade of a participatory event per year.
CS city council woman, Jan Martin, is the headlined speaker, and was chosen by nobody other than an irresponsible office staff that couldn’t think of any thing better to do with its time than to listen to Jan. Why Jan Martin of all possible choices? She’s not exactly an outspoken voice for peace and justice at all, now is she?
The choice was simply made and stupidly done because the J&P has office staff that think it most important to nuzzle up to ‘responsible violence’ …I meant ‘responsible power’… so they can curry favor. Last year they invited Ken Salazar’s local voice, Poor Pathetic Richard, to speak to the annual gathering. That was where he argued that it would be dangerous to withdraw from Iraq. It could hurt the Iraqi people he said with regret dripping from his cynical forked tongue. A great choice for a pro peace gathering, right, this Pathetic Richard? In short, it was a bad joke having him there! He is not pro peace at all. Merely pro career.
So not having learned anything but merely blundering repetitively ahead, the J&P administration has invited another such type to this years gala ball. We should be demanding that the Colorado Springs city council pass resolutions against this war, against the use of torture, and against Fort Carson Expansion. But no! The office staff want to ‘dialog’ with power, and any power that will throw them a bone, too. They will not make demands on anybody, and they will only try to triangulate into the lowest common denominator.
Jan Martin will speak to how good is good, and bad is bad, no doubt… Clap, clap, clap. Yawn, yawn, yawn. Boo, boo, boo… And the J&P hides in the shadows of the city because it is too scared and gutless to push forward with any fervor and passion, which would all involve taking some powers on instead of hugging them.
The problem with the J$P is that it is an organization run on bigger donations that are mainly used to fund a rather conservatized, rather do little, paid staff. These staff look at non salaried J&P members at times, as if they were trespassers by having other agendas than their own ‘united way’ funding approach. In fact, some salaried staff do graduate from the J$P funding school approach and do go directly into United Way funding afterwards for their new jobs. That has happened.
So what happens when people want to meet and there is only one annual meeting? They just give up PUNTO. It certainly turns new people away with this type of doing business ‘peace organizing’. They would have more democracy in their local church working together with Pastor Pretense running the entireshow.
At the J$P, new folk run around scratching their heads trying to find what they can do to fit in? They can eventually fit in some eventually, but only if they spend hours and hours and hours getting to know the various social grouplets that are administered to by the paid office staff. They have to be baptized by immersion into the jello pudding like ‘consensus’ adminstered by the salaried staff huddled in the office.
Is all this really anyway to organize against the war and injustice? Or a gigantic waste of time? Maybe Jan Martin can tell us at the annual meeting? Jan, is it good to be good? I don’t want to be bad to be bad. Think God I am having to work today. Isn’t this a sad and corrupt way to fight for justice and peace? We deserve better than this if we are against The Wars and looking to fight them.
Paid office people…. ‘Oh no. Don’t fight! Come together.’
And this year they brought in somebody who once again is little for Peace to talk to the more liberal who are. Counselling to the annual members extreme I guess it must seem to them, those paid and conservatized ‘peace activists’ who think that their way is the best way.
They get paid to think like that… ‘consensus’ always… and never quite understand why others seem to disagree with their choices? That’s because we are not adminstrators, Dudes. In fact, we prefer an organization not divided into a caste system of paid adminstrators and general members.
We have been watching from afar the activities of the Thai Monarchist mob as they have occupied Bangkok’s airport and received the complicit support of the Thai military, which refused to disperse them. This has been no ‘people’s protest’ at all but rather a Right Wing mob, all comparable to the one the US mobilized recently in Eastern Bolivia to try to divide Bolivia into two parts and remove Evo Morales from power there.