My mother's hand in the uprising
This page has not yet been built, but this is the jist of it:
This is just my biased, unsubstanciated opinion, but I believe my mother's
hand to be in this uprising. Briefly, & I'll wait 'til later for a broader explanation:
For years my mother, Jean, has been beating her head against the brick wall that is the
cranial cavity within which the international peace and social justice community
rests, trying to get them to acknowledge the wrongheadedness of our policy vis a vis Puerto
Rico's status, to little avail (she did, at least get the Women's International League for
Peace & Freedom (WILPF) to grant her representative status in order to address the
United Nations Committee on Decolonization a number of years back. As the only Anglo speaking
on behalf of the Puerto Rican people, she was the only person quoted by name in the New
Youk Times the next day. Harumpf!)
Well, on the way to Vieques one sunny day, John Lindsay-Poland of the Fellowhip of Reconciliation's
Task Force on Latin America and the Caribbean so much as admitted that, had it not been for my
mother's persistence, the international delegation we were on (to study the effects of the U.S. military
on Puerto Rico and Vieques) would have never come about. That evening there was a huge town
meeting with all the movers & shakers of the resistance present, and I believe that there had to have been
a feeling of empowerment on the part of the people of Vieques. Here, after all, were pacifist peace activists
from all over the United States, plus from Panama, the Phillipines and Okinawa, acknowledging their
struggle, and, perhaps even more important, listening to them.
It took a tremendous amount of courage and will to rise up against the might of the U.S. Navy. Might a
measure of that have come from that town hall meeting? I cannot say, but I believe that Ismael
Guadalupe, Carlos Zenón and Bob Rabín, all of whom are profiled in my mother's book,
Voices for Independence, and know and love her, would
admit as much. Who knows? Of course, her son would think that!
Please come back when the page's completed. Thank you for caring! –Daniel.