______
October 19, 2009
“We’re going to organize and change policy”
Congratulations from the national PDA team! Norman Solomon has received the Marin Democratic Party’s first Alex Forman Peace Award.
The award is named after a beloved environmentalist and peace activist. Alex Forman was generous and unflagging in his community work. When he died in July from chronic lymphocytic leukemia, he was serving as board president of the Marin Municipal Water District.
Since returning from a trip to Afghanistan last month, Norman has been speaking widely in the North Bay and beyond, warning against escalation of the war.
You can listen to a report on his journey that aired on KRCB Radio, the NPR affiliate in Sonoma County. Or watch Norman’s appearance on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal and share the link with friends.
The award from the Democratic Central Committee of Marin expresses appreciation to Norman Solomon for his “dedication to the cultivation of peace both at home and abroad.”
When Norman received the award at the annual Dining With Democrats dinner, attended by 200 party stalwarts in San Rafael last Saturday night, he said: “I’m thinking about a little girl I met seven weeks ago. She’s just turned seven years old. She was awakened about a year earlier one morning in Helmand province by the loud noise and then the roar and the shaking of the ground. Her name is Guljumma, and I met her in a refugee camp in Kabul. She lost many members of her family, and she also lost one of her arms.
“We are bound with her, we’re bound with the 700 families in that refugee camp, we’re bound with millions of people in Afghanistan, as we try to create a world where there is healthcare not warfare.
“I just looked it up: The taxpayers of Marin County have sent, to the IRS, dollars that have then gone directly to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001, in the amount of $1.1 billion — not million — $1.1 billion. Imagine . . . what could this county have done with $1.1 billion, if not spent for the wars in those two countries?
“At the time that Alex Forman was organizing to stop a war (in Vietnam) based on deception, Martin Luther King talked about what he called ‘the madness of militarism.’ We may prefer to wish that that madness has somehow ceased, but it is as current as this moment, as current as the spending that in the last eight years has sent more than $100 billion from taxpayers of this state to pay for these wars that continue.
“I just want to close by saying I am very glad to be a Democrat not because Democrats in or out of office always make the best decisions. Sometimes they make terrible decisions. But I’m glad to be a Democrat because we have a tradition and footsteps to follow in that include the voice of Hubert Humphrey in 1948 telling the party dominated often by Dixiecrats that it was time to march out of the shadows of segregation into the sunshine of civil rights. And the same party that had Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening in 1964, against the abuse from the White House and elsewhere, (who) stood up against the pretext for escalating the war in Vietnam. And today we have the likes of Barbara Lee and Lynn Woolsey—and we are going to support them, and *we’re going to organize, and we’re going to change policy.*”
Like Norman said: We’re going to organize, and we’re going to change policy. That’s Progressive Democrats of America for you.
Onward!
Laura Bonham, Conor Boylan and Tim Carpenter
for national PDA
Progressive Democrats of America is a grassroots PAC that works both inside the Democratic Party and outside in movements for peace and justice. Our goal in 2009: Expand progressive influence in Congress as we build on our 2008 electoral successes. PDA’s advisory board includes seven members of Congress and activist leaders such as Tom Hayden, Medea Benjamin, Thom Hartmann, Jim Hightower, and Lila Garrett.
Join a PDA Issue Organizing Team; learn more here .
