OUR MESSAGE IS BEING HEARD

We were back at the space symposium this morning at 9:00 am for an hour of bannering and leafleting. I tried my hand at passing out leaflets and had pretty good luck. It was a cool but sunny morning, with the snow-capped Pikes Peak so near in the background. All of this put me in a particularly good mood and I greeted all the conference attendees with my sunny outlook as they were moving from the hotel to the convention building. It seemed that they were startled a bit by my being so friendly and I had better luck than expected with people taking my leaflets. That is except for the Air Force officers dressed in their uniforms, only one of them (a woman) would take one. I did invite the officers to help hold a banner - none agreed to help but several did have a laugh over it.

At 3:00 pm we moved to another part of the city to vigil at the front gate of Peterson AFB which is the headquarters for the Air Force Space Command. We stayed there for an hour as the shift was changing and big gas guzzling cars by the hundreds moved on and off the base. (About 18,000 military personnel and civilian contractors work at Peterson AFB.) We held our big new banner (above) that was given to me when I recently attended the Pacific Life Community retreat in Santa Barbara, California. The banner was painted during the retreat and used just once at the protest we held at Vandenberg AFB that weekend.

In between the morning and afternoon vigils today I went with Bill Sulzman and Jan Tamas to Colorado College where Jan spoke to a large class of students taking a course on the European Union. They had been studying politics in Central Europe and were eager to hear Jan's analysis of the Czech Republic "missile defense" radar deployment controversy. He did a fine job with some small assistance from Bill and myself.

So in spite of near total media blackout of our protests here in Colorado Springs we are still reaching many people with our message. When the corporate media won't cover our protests we've got to get out on the streets where we can still be seen by the public.

In Wednesday morning we go back to the Broadmoor Hotel for yet another day of vigiling outside the space warfare confab.