LONG LIVE THE DISARMAMENT NUNS!

Dominican Sisters, Ardeth Platte and Carol Gilbert, spoke in nearby Brunswick last night and showed their excellent documentary video called Conviction. The video tells the story about their 2002 nuclear disarmament action at a Minuteman missile silo in Colorado. They, and one other nun Jackie Hudson, ended up doing more than 30 months each in prison.

I've known the sisters for several years now and they live, when not in jail, at the Jonah House intentional community in Baltimore that was founded by Phil Berrigan and Elizabeth McAlister.

Ardeth and Carol have been instrumental in helping to educate people around the country, and the world, about the dangers of moving the arms race into space. Their 2002 plowshares action was called the Sacred Earth and Space Plowshares II.

Ardeth was a speaker at our annual Global Network space organizing conference in Berkeley, California in May of 2002. I will never forget part of her very moving speech when she said, "We are a killer nation. We can kill them fast, and we can kill them slow."

We will be very honored to host these two courageous women at our Addams-Melman House here in Bath tomorrow for a pot luck supper. They are once again able to travel and are back on the road doing what they do best - that is calling on people to do more to stop this deadly cycle of endless war and threatening to use nuclear weapons. Their power lies in their own personal example of speaking truth to power in a loving and non-violent spirit.

They clearly point out the total hypocrisy of the U.S. as our country lectures and attacks others for even thinking of building nukes while new generations of nuclear weapons are today under development in the U.S. Department of Energy nuclear laboratories sprinkled around the nation.

Long live the disarmament nuns!