TURNING TO KOREA

Yesterday Mary Beth and I went north to Bangor for a mini-conference put on by the Peace & Justice Center of Eastern Maine. The topic was "Organizing in the Obama Era". They had a good turnout and MB did an excellent job on a plenary panel where she spoke about conversion. I shared a Foreign Policy workshop with Maine Veterans for Peace leader Dud Hendrick. We had a spirited discussion in the session. Folks are starting to come around to the conversion idea.

My mind now turns to Korea. Our Global Network annual space organizing conference will be held there on April 16-18. The US and South Korean military forces are now engaged in war games to practice attacks on North Korea. This is a key reason why the North Koreans are so intent on launching a missile in the coming days - to show they can defend themselves.

The US is threatening to shoot the North Korean missile out of the sky and would likely use an Aegis destroyer (made right here in Bath, Maine) to do that job. These ships are outfitted with "missile defense" systems - they should be called missile offense systems.

We are going to have very good attendance at the GN confab in Seoul. From the US we will have activists coming from Maine, Colorado, Nebraska, Hawaii, Florida, and New York. Other key peace movement leaders and GN friends will come from England, Sweden, India, Japan, Australia, Philippines, Italy, and of course from South Korea. I'll post the full conference schedule in the coming days once it is finally complete.

I've got to get my speech written soon for the conference so they can get it translated in time. I am a bit behind in my work and need to get caught up. My Portugal trip report comes first and then I can fully turn my attention to Korea.