COLORADO SPRINGS- Oh How Sad! After a long and storied legacy, the Pikes Peak Justice & Peace Commission is closing its doors. Why now –a time of rising injustice and vanishing peace on every continent?! Technically they’ve only announced divestment of their goods in order to move into a tiny office, but the PPJPC is also postponing all activity until after the election. The next event planned is a victory celebration of “regime change” even though the presumptive new regime has promised escalations of war in Asia, Africa and South America, and continued economic class war at home. And it gets worse.

The bastards, literally bastards not by coincidence I’m sure, have gutted the famed peace organization of its activities, of its participants, of its reputation, legacy and potential and now they’re selling off its possessions.

These include the group’s “memorabilia,” as if PPJPC’s aims weren’t still outgoing. Wouldn’t you think the causes still cry out for those materials? All the tools and equipment gathered over the years are now being demobilized. The posters, banners, puppets, flags, props, costumes, made by activists, for the good fight. Are you kidding me?!

And the PPJPC library, an extensive collection of books about social justice and nonviolence are being scattered to the wind of the same garage sale. These books, painstakingly assembled for the cause and donated by so many members so that the PPJPC office would have a permanent reference library are now being sold to defray the costs of moving. And keeping the staff.

For what? Administrating the liquidation? Have PPJPC members been asked to contribute more and more, chiefly so that the organization can be dismantled and slipped into a coma? To keep the staff paid? When the PPJPC membership at large figure out that they’ve been subsidizing their own deliberately paralyzing iv-drip, they are going to invent their own choice words for these soft-spoken traitors.

I’D SUGGEST someone attending the going-out-of-the-peace-making-business-sale if only to rescue the materials we’ll need to keep up the fight. If it didn’t mean giving more money to the usurpers! That’s extortion, taking our money to reclaim what we donated already! What unmitigated passive aggressive violence.

These paid staff manipulated the tendency of all small groups to take the road most traveled. Specifically, to hush up in the perceived interest of self-preservation. This manifests itself among a minority in the PPJPC who follow a cultish spiritual belief that the only way to stop a wayward wagon is to throw yourself under the wheel. Eventually it’s hoped the driver will stop out of pangs of conscience. Other concerned passengers, who might want to gesticulate or address the driver, are scolded for not giving the sacrificial sheep the opportunity to incubate their guilt bomb in peace.

These self-appointed arbiters of “pacifism” take the “peace” in J&P to mean a quiet, undisturbed, reverential, leave-me-in-peace, peace. It’s the “nonviolent” dogma that has been used to defuse slave uprisings for millennia. It’s the traditional disservice which religion deals in its role to make the oppressed accept their mistreatment at the hands of their oppressors. While we might concentrate on religion’s role in starting wars, we overlook their constant undermining of justice.

Do I have something personal at stake in this unraveling development? I most certainly do! Over the past years, I joined a number of energetic activists in raising the visibility of the local peace movement. We gave it a public signature and a heretofore elusive acclaim, which was bringing in much more public participation. What became of the green peace campaign? Jettisoned. Abandoned. Cast off by the staff and select members who didn’t want an expanded interest in their activities. What are we left to conclude about people who espouse a concern to invite community, but shun populist appeal? Hypocrites is the most polite I can muster.

I’m so sorry to have left the organization to such vultures. I owe my fellow members quite an apology.