What should a free man do?

What should a free man do?

AND OPEN LETTER TO WE THE PEOPLE

                                                                                                      Joseph F Barber Aberdeen
                                                                                                            Proving Grounds
                                                                                                                  MD 1989

As I looked out at the people my heart was bounding I think I could almost hear it sing
I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation and it's citizens . This speech is not addressed to Washington or to the government or any other political or religious organization. It is not addressed to China or to Russia or any other nation of our world . Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan. Neither is it an attempt to make Islam or the National paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they must play in the successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reasons to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides.


                                                                                  Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with the people of all nations and the corporate states of America , but rather to my fellow Americans, who, with me, bear the greatest responsibility in ending all conflicts and Homelessness and hunger that has exacted a heavy price on all are citizens in one form or another !!!
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Since I am a Soldier by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing wars into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the wars in our world and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor - both black and white - through the poverty programS. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Iraq and Afghanistan and soon to be Seria continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.

So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such. Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and sisters their husbands and wives to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black and white and that of all the cultures that make up our country who have been crippled by our society and sending them thousands of miles away to guarantee liberties in the Middle east which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem or anywhere else in this nation called America. And so we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys and the many other culture that make up our great nation on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools without conflict among them . And so we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village and towns or communities of foreign nations , but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My reasons moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the Nation in which we live over the years - especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men women and children of this country , I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask - and rightly so - what about ,Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria and the destruction of our way of life by our own government? They ask if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today - Our own government. For the sake of those boys , young women and childen, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under it's violence, I cannot be silent.

For those who ask the question, "Aren't you a civil rights leader? and a man of God " and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1990 when a group of us formed the Resistance,Southern Christian Leadership , we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of America brother to brother,sister to sister in life and death ." We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for white people, black people or of any culture or creed , but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself until the descendants of its slaves of all colors and races were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear.

“We cannot have peace if we are only concerned with peace. War is not an accident. It is the logical outcome of a certain way of life. If we want to attack war, we have to attack that way of life.” “The problem after a war is with the victor. He thinks he has just proved that war and violence pay. Who will now teach him a lesson?” “No Big Power in all history ever thought of itself as an aggressor. That is still true today.” There is no way to peace; peace is the way.

When the typical reformer or revolutionist proclaims the new order, he goes on to urge men to organize, agitate, get out the vote, fight. Jesus also proclaimed The Kingdom of God [i.e., the revolution] is at hand; but immediately added in true prophetic fashion, Repent. That is to say, if we are to have a new world, we must have new men; if you want a revolution, you must be revolutionized. A world of peace will not be achieved by men who in their own souls are torn with strife and eagerness to assert themselves. In the degree that the anti-war or pacifist movement is composed of individuals who have not themselves, to use Aldous Huxley's phrase, achieved detachment, who have not undergone an inner revolution, it too will experience the same failure to achieve self-discipline, integrity, true fellowship among its own members which has afflicted other movements for social change.

So I ask the world and the American people what must a SOLDIER do to save his world when the very laws he has sworn to protect force him to do nothing?
It is not a question of what a AMERICA citizen should do, nor a husband, nor a BROTHER OR SISTER. Instead, ask yourself, my FRIENDS, what should a free man do?

“we must come to understand that It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.” and many do but at a price of being placed on a watch list or to be detained hounded and arrested held and without due process , or assassinated they are the heroes those whom have chosen to speak out at any cost from veterans to soldiers to the citizen STAND AND BE COUNTED




Pro Deo et Constitutione – Libertas aut Mors
Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Joseph F Barber- https://twitter.com/toptradesmen
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