BRANDYWINE PEACE COMMUNITY - P.O. Box 81, Swarthmore, PA, 19081--(610)544-1818 BRANDYWINE PEACE COMMUNITY - P.O. Box 81, Swarthmore, PA, 19081--(610)544-1818
LOCKHEED MARTIN THE PROFITS OF WAR CRUCIFIXION TODAY
Good Friday Stations of Justice & Peace
April 2, 2010, Lockheed Martin, Valley Forge, PA
Beyond War/Beyond Lockheed Martin: A New Economy is Possible
NEW! Good Friday Video by Rich Conti
Photos: Paul Sheldon
PROGRAM:
Luke 23:33-49
All: Let us pray that we will break the chains of violence and war; that we may resist war-making and stop Lockheed Martin with acts of justice and Jesus’ love. May the cross, which over time was transformed from a means of violence to a symbol of liberation and peace, be our symbol of nonviolence and justice, a sign of nonviolent resistance to Lockheed Martin, militarism, injustice, and war.
*Litany*
Leader: By the cross and resurrection...All: We Stand Against War!
Leader: By Jesus’ witness to truth...All: We Act for Justice and Peace!
Leader: By Jesus’ passion and death...All: We Resist Lockheed Martin!
Leader: By Jesus’ victory over the grave...All: Beyond War, a New Day and New Economy is possible!
1st Station: Pilate Condemns Jesus to Death - Reading and Litany
(large cross taken into the main drive walk way)
Except where noted, after each station, reading, and litany, a cross will be driven into the ground (remembering the casualties of war, Lockheed Martin, and injustice resulting from the economy of war ) as the bell is intoned.
2nd Station: Jesus Carries His Cross (Reading and Litany)
3rd Station: Jesus falls the 1st time (Reading and Litany)
4th Station: Jesus meets his most afflicted mother (Reading and Litany)
5th Station: Simon of Cyrene is forced to help Jesus carry the Cross (Reading and Litany)
6th Station: Veronica wipes the face of Jesus (Reading and Litany)
7th Station: Jesus falls the 2nd time (Reading and Litany)
8th Station: Jesus consoles the women of Jerusalem (Reading and Litany)
9th Station: Jesus falls the 3rd time (Reading and Litany)
10th Station: Jesus is stripped of his garments (Reading and Litany)
11th Station: Jesus is nailed to the Cross (Reading and Litany)
12th Station: Jesus Dies on the Cross
Period of silence/bell-tolling /Adaggio for Strings; Civil Disobedience (all - except those prepared to face arrest - should remain on sidewalk) and bell-tolling.
13th and 14th Stations: Jesus is taken down from the Cross and laid in the tomb
All: We mourn all the victims of war in Iraq, Afghanistan, and of war-making around the world. We know that the profits of Lockheed Martin rest on war and militarism. We have for far too long suffered policies of war around the world and the social ravages of a war-torn economy here at home. We insist that where war is business, as here at Lockheed Martin, there cannot be business as usual. We resist war and the making of war. We resist Lockheed Martin, the war profiteer, with acts of Jesus’ love and a continuing commitment to justice, to peace, to the cross of nonviolent resistance.
Leader: By the cross and resurrection...All: We Stand Against War
Leader: By Jesus’ witness to truth...All: Beyond War, a New Day and Economy is Possible
Leader: By Jesus’ passion and death...All: We Resist Lockheed Martin
Leader: By Jesus’ victory over the grave...All: We Act for Justice and for Peace
Thank you and have a joyous Passover and Easter!
Brandywine Peace Community, P.O. Box 81, Swarthmore, PA 19081
LITANY:
1st Station: Pilate Condemns Jesus to Death Reading #1
In a time of empire and military occupation, Jesus knew where he stood.
Betrayed, denied, tortured, facing death, Jesus knew where he stood and what he faced. He faced the Cross, a means of execution, a symbol of imperial rule, of Rome’s might, an announcement of the empire’s will to maintain itself the only way it can: violence and war.
What we see depends on where we stand.
In our time of war and economic dislocation, policies of militarism and military occupation, of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we stand before Lockheed Martin and see the cross of empire and human neglect, of greed and environmental indifference.
We see, mourn, and resist the cross of war that is Lockheed Martin.
Today we stand before Lockheed Martin pitting our commitment to nonviolent resistance, justice, and peace against Lockheed Martin, the face of war profits here and around the world, the face of nuclear weapons, the face of war-making today.
2nd Station: Jesus Carries his Cross Reading #2
Formed in April of 1995 in the merger of Lockheed and Martin Marietta and becoming at the very moment of its incorporation the world’s largest weapons corporation, Lockheed Martin announced itself with the slogan “And This is Just the Beginning!” atop row upon row of pictured weapons systems.
Lockheed Martin is the common denominator in the production of every major weapon system–nuclear and non-nuclear–in the U.S. arsenal and sold by the U.S. around the world. Lockheed Martin received from the public treasury more than $42.7 billion this year. The empire of U.S. war-making has its cross
Lockheed Martin–across the country and around the world, here in Valley Forge and throughout the Delaware Valley–means weaponry: nuclear weapons, Trident missiles, cruise missiles, F-35 Joint Strike Stealth fighters, combat satellites and computers, Aegis warships and ballistic missile defense, the Airborne Laser System and a host of other “Star Wars” missile defense weapons for the continued militarization of space.
Among the numerous Pentagon weapons contracts here in Valley Forge, PA, at the Management & Data Systems division, Lockheed Martin builds Weapons Control Systems for U.S. Navy Tomahawk Cruise Missiles and battlefield computer systems.
Unmanned aerial drone bombings in Afghanistan and Pakistan have killed untold thousands of civilians. The remote-controlled drones have become central to an escalating policy of war in Afghanistan, and have introduced a whole new approach to warfare. Lockheed Martin produces drones that are now being used in near daily airstrikes, as well as the military satellites that direct and control the drone bombings from the Continental United States at the Creech Air Force Base in Nevada outside of Las Vegas.
Every weapon produced by Lockheed Martin means billions of dollars transferred from the public treasury to private wealth, from public need to corporate greed. Every weapon produced by Lockheed Martin means another bombing run, another missile attack, another war.
Jesus carried a cross of wood. At a cost of nearly one trillion dollars per year, we too carry a cross. We carry the weight of militarism and empire–the weapons it builds, the wars it wages, the lives it destroys, the societies and economies it cripples. Certainly, no less our’s.
We all carry the weight of Lockheed Martin.
3rd Station - Jesus Falls the First Time Reading #3
“The revulsion against war not too long hence will be an insuperable obstacle for us to overcome and for that reason I am convinced that we must set in motion the machinery of a permanent war economy...It must be an ongoing program and not the creature of some emergency.”
So spoke the president of General Electric, Charles E. Wilson, in July 1944, one year before the first atomic bomb was tested in the desert area of Alamogordo, New Mexico named Jornada del Muerto or Dead Man’s Trail.
Today, we stand in the social order which Wilson called for - a culture of weaponry and militarism, a permanent industry of war, embedded so deep in our society that it is quite immune to political change and democratic oversight - and extends itself into virtually every society on earth.
That is empire which could be likened to the Orwellian notion of unending war - hot, cold, lukewarm - in which we become so accustomed to it that we don’t even realize it is happening any longer. Weapons are built, some are cut back in order to fund other weapons, but the industry and economy of war just goes on and on.
Troop cuts in Iraq (U.S. “combat” troops that is, no mention of private military contractors which now outnumber the 98,000 U.S. troops) have begun with a promise of full withdrawal (though military planners are now raising questions as to that promise). As to Afghanistan: more and more troop deployments (by the end of summer 2010, 100,000 will be on the ground), regular drone bombings for the war there and in Pakistan, more talk of “victory”, more war, more death.
We have a long way, and a lot deeper to go, before we can really speak of peace.
4th Station: Jesus meets his most afflicted mother 4th Reading
From Walt Whitman’s "By Blue Ontario's Shore":
Oh I see flashing that this America is only you and me,
Its power, weapons, testimony, are you and me,
Its crimes, lies, thefts, defections, are you and me.
The war, (that war so bloody and grim, the war I will henceforth forget), was you and me.
Natural and artificial are you and me,
Freedom, language, poems, employments, are you and me,
Past, present, future, are you and me.
I now know why the earth is gross, tantalizing, wicked, it is for my sake,
I take you specially to be mine, you terrible, rude forms.
(Mother, bend down, bend close to me your face,
I know not what these plots and wars and deferments are for,
I know not fruition's success, but I know that through war and crime
your work goes on, and must yet go on.)
5th Station: Simon of Cyrene is forced to help Jesus carry his cross. Reading #5
Lord, forgive them for they know not what they do? Will we ever?
Weeks after the start of the U.S. bombardment of Afghanistan in October 2001, the Pentagon announced that Lockheed Martin would receive the contract to build the Joint Strike Stealth Fighter, the F-35, extending well over the next several decades, the largest military contract in human history.
At a cost that will probably reach well over a trillion dollars, more than 2,443 F-35s will be built for use by the Air Force, Marines, Navy, and various NATO allies.
On March 19, 2003, the U.S. with a policy of “shock & awe” began bombing and missile attacks throughout Iraq. “Shock & awe” was followed by a ground invasion leading to what has been U.S. occupation for the past seven years and 4, 386 U.S. deaths. We never, of course, heard the names and numbers of Iraqi dead. A number of medical studies placed Iraqi deaths at nearly one million. Another four million Iraqis have according to the UN been made refugees.
On March 19, 2010, we observed the 7th anniversary of the war in Iraq and U.S. occupation, remembering what with cruise missiles slamming into Baghdad began on March 19, 2003. That’s really not true though, is it? Remember Bush #1's “Operation: Desert Storm” Gulf War of 1991, followed by 12 years of economic sanctions, no fly zones, and repeated bombing campaigns during the Clinton Administration. Remember UN reports of a million Iraqi deaths as result of the economic sanctions that embargoed the most basic human needs to live. More than 5,000 Iraqi children died each month according to these same reports.
The occupation of Iraq and the escalating war in Afghanistan that began, or more correctly stated, continued nine years ago is but a legacy of empire and war that lies deep in the American soul of “manifest destiny”.
In the words of Thomas Merton: “Few are guilty, all are responsible.”
6th Station: Veronica wipes the face of Jesus. Reading #6
Lest we ever (ever) forget, it was the United States that created and unleashed the very definition and reference for global terror: Nuclear weapons.
One Trident submarine (there are 18) carrying 24 missiles, with eight nuclear warheads per missile, is capable of 1,000 Hiroshimas. Lockheed Martin manages much the US nuclear bomb complex, including the Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico , which at an annual cost of $2.3 billion, is the nation’s chief nuclear weapons engineering lab. Lockheed Martin manufactures Trident missiles. Ninety-nine percent of all high-level radioactive material in the US has been generated by nuclear weapons production. Plutonium, which fuels nuclear bombs, has a toxic life of 240,000 years — 10,000 human generations.
Nuclear weapons have poisoned our earth, our spirits, our imagination, and our judgment with the threat of unimaginable death and destruction.
The threat posed by the 10,000 nuclear weapons in the U.S. stockpile didn’t cease with the end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War and it won’t end with pledges for a nuclear-free world tied to missile defenses and fears of so-called rogue nations.
The U.S. and Russia are about to sign the latest START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) that, if ratified, would reduce nuclear warheads on both sides to 1500.
Hardly in keeping, howeve,r with the goal of the abolition of nuclear weapons that President Obama spoke about in Prague a year ago, the Obama Administration is committed to increasing nuclear weapons expenditures by $5 billion, to about $35 billion annually.
The threat posed by nuclear weapons will end when the United States, the supreme nuclear superpower, decides to relinquish the terror that has been at the heart of U.S. power around the world since the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
7th Station: Jesus falls the 2nd time. Reading #7
There are (according to the US State Department) 190 independent countries in the world. Last year, 154 countries either took delivery of or signed new contracts for US arms. That’s about 80% of the world receiving arms made in the USA by arms manufacturers. Lockheed Martin accounts for the largest number of weapons sold internationally by any single corporation in the worldwide and multi-billion dollar export of violence and death
The US policy on Foreign Military Sales explicitly states that the benefit to the arms industry will be considered when deciding on arms sales. The profitability of arms sales is assured with the US government providing loan guarantees and assistance worth of billions of dollars.
Oh, if only the U.S. could export something other than violence? Maybe then we wouldn't be observing Good Friday today at Lockheed Martin, the world's largest war profiteer.
A lot of blood flows through the Lockheed Martin money trail. We can only imagine the death and carnage caused by Lockheed Martin weaponry and ask, in the words of Bob Dylan’s Masters of War, “Is your money really that good?...When your death takes its toll, All the money you made will never buy back your soul ”
8th Station: Jesus consoles the women of Jerusalem Reading #8
March 2009, From Celeste Zappala, Gold Star Families Speak Out Mother of Sgt Sherwood Baker, Killed In Action, Iraq on April 26, 2004
I am but one of the families who have been directly touched by violence, my son National Guard Sergeant Sherwood Baker was killed in Baghdad on April 26, 2004 while searching for the weapons of mass destruction.
He was one of the 4,386 American casualties of the war that never had to be, never should have been, now must be ended. And it is with great dismay and fear that I listened to the call for thousands of new troops to go to Afghanistan- and a Senator asked "when will we know we are winning?" Oh my God, did we not do this already, weren’t the same questions asked about Iraq? When do we learn? When do we learn the cost of war?
Across God’s Earth this day, voices of agony rise up, of mothers who tend the burned flesh of their children, of father’s who sit stunned next to white draped bodies. I am but one of the voices- those who are newly grieved wail inconsolably near fresh graves- in Arlington, Philadelphia, Gaza, Kabul, and Baghdad and for those whose tears have dried, their loss is joined - to the lament of all humanity for loved ones lost in war and violence, for a potential of goodness gone with those, the broken, the fallen, who are no more.
All the beloved ones lost in Iraq, Afghanistan, the US, Gaza and Israel - and places known only to those who died in them - they too are silent witness to the hope we must cling to for a more peaceful world.
Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also the Scripture tells us, so what can we say of our country where today, too many on our own streets are cold and hungry, yet we spend nearly half of the whole worlds’ military budgets?...What can we say of 8.8 billion for missile defense, 3.7 billion for future combat systems, 750 million dollars a day still spent to occupy Iraq? The mind grows weak beneath such a litany.
We mustn’t forget that those plans and budgets are compiled by civil people, many of whom attend churches and mosques and synagogues. We mustn’t forget that each missile is assembled by human hands, by fingers that on the same day would caress the face of that worker’s child, and then return the next morning to build and pack the hideous products that end the lives of other people’s children.
What must we say to bend their hearts? Can we ask them to remember that no matter what uniform worn, each soldier is part of the human family cherished by the Creator? And it is the creators command that we love one another...that our Humanity must be the armor we carry into all of the struggles we will face -- and that we believe-- as Dr. King did,-- that the first hope in our inventory must be that love is going to have the last word...”
9th Station: Jesus falls the 3rd time Reading #9
This month marks the 35th anniversary of the end to the U.S. war in Vietnam, the U.S.’s longest war. Daniel Ellsberg, who saw combat in Vietnam and later became a strategic analyst for the RAND corporation, and would be charged with divulging classified documents in the form of The Pentagon Papers, a top-secret history of the Vietnam war that chronicled the history of lies by policy makers in pursuing the carnage in Vietnam. In the 1974 film Hearts & Minds, Ellsberg states that: “we haven’t been on the wrong side in Vietnam, we are the wrong side.”
This coming Easter Sunday is April 4, the anniversary of assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. April 4, 1968. Exactly one year earlier on April 4, 1967, Dr. King spoke in New York City at Riverside Church.
He condemned the war in Vietnam, calling the U.S. government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” and drew a connection to the war and its domestic fallout – the impoverishment of people in this country, the export of racism, and an arrogant belief in the absolute rightness of U.S. policy around the world. Moreover, Dr. King in calling for nonviolent resistance to “the evil triplets of American society: racism, materialism, and militarism” was seeking an inseparability and continuum of action for social justice and peace.
Here now hear these words from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., April 4, 1967
10th Station: Jesus is stripped of his garments. Reading #10
The ceremonial groundbreaking for the Pentagon, the most powerful agency in the world today, took place on September 11, 1941, sixty years almost to the minute before American Airlines flight 77 arrowed into the side of building that faces Arlington Cemetery.
Like the child who was able to see that the Emperor was without clothes, can we see what’s before us today?
Can we see the greed, the lies, the violence that lay before us? Can we see the illusions of security that come from making war?
September 11, 2001, all of our imperial illusions of security based on nuclear weapons, Star Wars shields, or trillion dollar military budgets, shattered in a wink. We were vulnerable, just like everybody else on this fragile planet. If there be such a thing as real security then it must rest on something more than what we can do for ourselves with muscle or weapons, something that has to do with relationship with others and the earth, with fairness, with honoring the commonweal and the commonwealth, with being neighbor not the overlord. And that means justice.
How can we restore our suffering society and crippled economy, our war-weary world, our slaughtered environment? Can we really face with weapons and militarism (not live in some hopeless illusion of reality, but really face) the earth altering nature of global warming, the catastrophes in Haiti or Chile?
Bombs may win wars and bring the false peace of victory, but justice will never be achieved with bombs and cruise missiles nor with Star Wars and out of this world plans (however profitable) for the militarization of space. The only victor in war is war itself.
If you want real peace — not dominion or wealth or empire — then work for justice: justice for one another, for the community, for the earth.
11th Station: Jesus is nailed to the Cross Reading #11
“Non-cooperation with evil,” Gandhi preached, “is as essential as cooperation with good.”
There is an uncompromising difference between the privileged wealth secured through every weapon built by Lockheed Martin and the faithful demands for justice and peace. It is nothing less than the difference between crucifixion and resurrection, cooperation and resistance.
The crosses before us today announce the fact of Lockheed Martin - weapons and war. These crosses express our mourning for the toll of war, of human neglect and environmental indifference, of the greed and violence summarized daily and made corporate in Lockheed Martin.
These crosses represent the suffering and crucifixion of Jesus Christ today. Lockheed Martin, War and Weapons, Christ Crucified!
We stand in resistance to Lockheed Martin. We embrace the nonviolent cross of our time: resistance to war and militarism, the works of peacemaking and service to the victims of war and injustice, resistance to the injustice that is Lockheed Martin, the face of war-making today
Today, we remember Jesus’ words: “Peace, I leave with you; my peace I give to you...”(John 14:27)
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