A small group of dedicated peacemakers bundled up on Martin Luther King, Jr’s birthday to honor his legacy with a peaceful vigil at the Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor Main Gate.
photo by Mary Gleysteen
Bangor is homeport to the largest concentration of deployed nuclear warheads in the U.S. The nuclear warheads are deployed on Trident D-5 missiles on SSBN submarines and are stored in an underground nuclear weapons storage facility on the base.
There are eight Trident SSBN submarines deployed at Bangor. Six Trident SSBN submarines are deployed on the East Coast at Kings Bay, Georgia.
One Trident submarine carries the destructive force of over 1,200 Hiroshima bombs (the Hiroshima bomb was 15 kilotons) or the destructive force of 900 Nagasaki bombs (20 kilotons).
Before walking from Ground Zero to the Main Gate participants read the following reflection written by Steve Garnaas-Holmes (unfoldinglight.net):
Every great hero is the tip of an iceberg.
Few of us are called to be the tip.
But all of us are called to take part,
to be the bit that holds the chunk
that lifts the tip that changes the world.
The hero is not the powerful one.
The movement is the power.
The leader is simply asking us
to do our part.
We are made of the same stuff,
all of us, called to the same work,
leaning toward the same dream.
The Creator chooses which bit is at the tip.
But we choose to be part of the movement,
trusting that our small part
is not small.
You may be an even greater inspiration
to your neighbor, without ever knowing.
To be Martin is not our choice,
but to be in the march with him is.
Choose.
photo by Mary Gleysteen
Dr. King did not suddenly become an opponent of war (and nuclear weapons) once the major civil rights struggle was over. As early as 1954 he said in one of his sermons that “the great danger facing us today is not so much the atomic bomb that was created by physical science. Not so much the atomic bomb that you can put in an airplane and drop on the heads of hundreds and thousands of people – as dangerous as that is. But the real danger confronting civilization today is that atomic bomb which lies in the hearts and souls of men, capable of exploding into the vilest of hate and into the most damaging selfishness – that’s the atomic bomb we’ve got to fear today.”
photo by Mary Gleysteen
Dr. King understood that the overt manifestations of violence – war and nuclear weapons – were deadly symptoms of a much deeper malady of the human heart. He understood violence all too well, both through experiencing it firsthand and through a deep study of Christian and Gandhian nonviolence.
As a true modern-day prophet Dr. King was not afraid to warn people in the U.S. that, “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” He hammered away at the need for everyone to speak out and use the most creative methods of protest possible, not just against the war, but also for “significant and profound change in American life and policy.” He believed that, “Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism.”
In these troubled times Dr. King’s words are a clarion call to come together in that spirit to build the kind of world he envisioned – one in which “we learn to live together as brothers [and sisters]..”, because the unacceptable alternative is that we “perish together as fools.”
Editor’s Note: In the reflection, the word “God” was replaced wih “The Creator”.
