#anti-war-speech

#anti-war-speech

"I'm out here as a veteran because I think we have a particular awareness and a particular stake in service. Service to our country, service to the Constitution, selfless service."

Public Citizen president Rob Weissman set the tone for the day, telling the cheering rallygoers, 'We have to persist to end this illegal, unconstitutional, and devastating war on Iran—and make sure that Congress does not give a penny more to pay for or extend this war.'

The reckless murder of more than 150 little girls in the name of liberating Iranian women fills you with rage. The worst part? You and I literally paid for this.

For a nation whose founding symbols were carefully engineered around the balance of peace and war, that omission is hard to read as accidental. Dropping the olive branch from the dime isn't just a design choice: it's a cultural signal.

A key reason so many young people in the 1960s threw themselves into the fight against US military involvement in Vietnam was that the civil rights movement had recently demonstrated the power of mass action. As Students for a Democratic Society's founding manifesto in 1962 put it, 'the Southern struggle against racial bigotry...compelled most of us from silence to activism.'

Today every senator, every single one, will pick a side: Do you stand with the American people who are exhausted of forever wars in the Middle East? Or stand with Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth as they bumble us headfirst into another war?

This is a difficult time for me. It is very difficult to see just a lot of places that I love being destroyed [and] neighborhoods being bombed. The stress of it is so much. I think a lot of people are not ready to be mobilized or to be planning and thinking about what is next and what to do - just watching in horror.

On the night of Saturday, March 6, Israeli forces struck three sets of oil depots ringing Tehran - west, east, and south - simultaneously. The explosions were massive. Nearby residential areas were destroyed. Millions of liters of gasoline, diesel, and petroleum derivatives ignited, sending columns of black smoke thousands of feet into the air.

The word that comes to my mind is dissidence. If we want to understand why the whistleblowing, camera-wielding people of Minneapolis have caused the Trump administration-and Donald Trump himself-to flinch, I believe we need some added history, and a bigger map. What we've been watching is part of a long, established tradition-one that might help Americans unlock a different kind of future.