Reject Raytheon

  I've been in the garage today making signs for our next roadside vigil to Stop P&W. It's one of those chores that comes with organizing events for a campaign, and - truth be told - it's kind of a fun thing to do. It's a little art project for the cause. You can mess with stencils and paints, occupy your hands, not just your head, and even listen to loud rockin' music. All good. Besides the satisfaction of having a new visual for our demo, I also appreciate the lesson in patience that comes with this task. And it's also a nice way to accept my own imperfections. So, you know, there are spiritual benefits to this work as well. Actually, the spiritual benefit comes from doing the resistance work in the first place. Making signs is not going to change the world and won't persuade the powers that be that they should just forget about this Pratt & Whitney deal. But it's part of my witness, humble as that may be. As Dan Berrigan once said, " I do...

  It's one thing to know in your head that there is an atrocity or an injustice or evil going on, but it's quite another to see it face-to-face and feel it in the pit of your stomach. Today, I watched the destruction of a mountainside and it affected me emotionally. I knew this was happening, but seeing it actually in process hurt. I stood across the river and stared at a large swath of deforested hillside and at the heavy equipment and dump trucks continuing to hack away at the trees and soil. They are making a road to site of the new plant up the hill. All in the name of economic development. Here, right in front of me, were some of those jobs so coveted by the locals, tearing away at Mother Earth. I trembled in sadness and anger. Do the movers and shakers who are so proud of bringing us such economic development actually come out to the scene of their crime to see what they have wrought? If so, are they at all conflicted with the decisions they have made? Do they think about...

  I had a camera crew in my living room this afternoon. The two men had driven up to Asheville from Greensboro to film my 3-minute comments for Rev. Dr. Barber's annual Moral March on Raleigh and HKoJ event. Usually this event takes place in Raleigh, but this year it is virtual. As a representative of Veterans for Peace, I was asked to speak for the peace groups in the state. Here's what I said: Greetings from Asheville, where our Veterans For Peace chapter has joined with environmentalists and other grassroots movements to oppose Raytheon, the 2nd largest defense contractor in the world. Raytheon’s subsidiary, Pratt & Whitney, has just gotten approval - and financial support - to build a plant that will make engines to power the state-of-the-art F-35 fighter jets. These killing machines are sold and used in conflicts all over the world, and could be used by Saudi Arabia and the UAE in the genocidal war against Yemen. What’s happening here in Asheville is not unique. The m...

  The site for the Pratt & Whitney (P&W, a division of Raytheon Technologies) plant being planned for Asheville is now being cleared of trees so that construction on the 1.2 million sq. ft. plant can begin soon. It looks like mountaintop removal, a not unfamiliar occurrence here in the Appalachian Mountains.  It breaks my heart to see it. P&W builds engines for commercial and military jets, most notoriously for the state-of-the-art F-35 Lightning Fighter Jet . Raytheon is the 2nd largest arms manufacturer in the world, a major war profiteer. Our local coalition of resistance to this project, called Reject Raytheon, is now just over 2 months old. We started out as members of 3 organizations - Veterans for Peace (VFP), Sunrise, and Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) - who showed up at the Buncombe County Board of Commissioners to object to the $27 million incentive agreement being offered for P&W to locate here. Since then, we've gotten organized and are acti...