Making Peace in Los Angeles

Mother Earth tells me that peace is a pattern of collective human behavior which contributes to her well-being – specifically, the well-being of her skin, where we live and of which we are an element [For an introduction to Mother Earth and me, please see The Beginning of the First Step]. War, the antagonist of peace, includes much more than our usual concept of war. It encompasses all the substantial assaults upon her skin which we now commonly practice, including forestry, agriculture, fisheries, mining, water management - dams, levees, other artificial channels, and irrigation – mechanized transportation, energy production, manufacturing, and urban settlement. The waste, pollution and global warming which accompany this warring are significant but secondary effects of the damage we do daily. Such war requires a vast array of tools. In a real sense, the great majority of our tools are weapons in this warring, against her and us. However, a particular set of tools are required for the dramatic, single-minded, explosive, indiscriminate, and rapid mass destruction which most of us today think of as war. These are the tools our culture calls weapons. Mother Earth tells me that weapons are not the greatest barriers between our dangerous pretensions and our reality. Weapons are not the essence of our enmity towards wilderness, and ourselves, which may soon provoke our demise as a species. This place belongs to the many walls we have raised against her - in Los Angeles, preeminently, the dams. Contemporary weapons are, though, one of the most important reasons why she can no longer let us continue our peculiar madness. Their use destroys or damages her creation, including what we call life, as well as wild soil, water, and stone, and on an ever increasing scale as the power of these weapons is extended. They are also especially onerous because of the swiftness with which they cause destruction, making natural resistance or avoidance extremely difficult. Nuclear weapons are the worst of these devices, as Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and numerous nuclear tests have shown. The thousands of nuclear explosives now in the hands of the U.S. and Russian military, not to mention the lesser quantities held by the armies of other nations, are more than enough when used – and if not disempowered they will be used – to kill much of life in Mother Earth, and irradiate and temporarily deform much of her surface. Until then, other tools of war are practicing their smaller but still quick and terrible ruin in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, the Sudan, the Congo, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Chechnya, Colombia and elsewhere. Some of these are developed and produced in the Los Angeles region. We also harbor those gatherings of weapons and warriors which are called military bases. Mother Earth asks us to take special responsibility for our local communities and their role in the region where we have placed them. This responsibility is greater than any we may have, or suppose, to other regions or to her whole self, although we share in their journey. Our tools may now permit globalization and global integration, but these are not processes which our planet sees as sane human behavior or contributing to the good health of her skin. She is the globe. We are not. Acting globally is natural to her, not us. Our task is to think and act much more humbly, and to become welcome ingredients in her regional, Los Angeles, wilderness. One aspect of the search for peace here which she expects us to pursue is identifying and ending our contribution to the existence and use of contemporary weapons. The Los Angeles contribution, as we will see in this message, is extraordinary. This pursuit, she tells me, is not entirely negative. There are acceptable tools which can serve as weapons, though because they have so little apparent power they are now largely ignored. These are multi-purpose tools such as bows and arrows, spears and flint knives, fashioned from natural materials, one use of which is to defend our persons and our homes against direct attack by invaders clearly seeking our destruction. This is what the Tongva people of Los Angeles used against the Europeans over two hundred years ago. The fact that the Tongva were overwhelmed and almost exterminated does not mean that they were wrong, or weak. Those who are mad and their more potent tools may prevail for a time. The options then as a people are to endure, assimilate, or simply fold back into Mother Earth and by joining other streams in her creation, seem to vanish. Native people in this region have not vanished, and some of them still look to the moment when wilderness and they recover. Cultural if not familial descendants of the invaders, occupiers and destroyers, the rest of us in Los Angeles are confronted by these same peaceful expectations from our mother planet. In this sense, we have become natives. We do not yet, however, behave like sensible natives. Our acceptance and nurturing of powerful weapons and warriors aimed not at our own defense but against humans and wilderness in other, distant regions, expresses instead the sickness of our aggressive ancestors. It’s not as though our embrace of these military industries and bases will keep them here. Mother Earth tells me that their places will soon become quite different. Instead of sites where instruments of death are conceived, fashioned, and marshaled, they will return to the peace of her wildness. The challenge for us is to consciously join her now, and help, without violence and in pursuit of a new local consensus, bring this about. I have identified below Los Angeles’s principal warmaking centers, each of them consciously aimed at maintaining a global empire through the swift and certain engineering of many deaths in every region of her skin. While Mother Earth tells me that their presence is abhorrent, she does not tell me the details of their sites or work. Since their placement and activities in this region are diverse, disguised, changeable and even secret, and I have access only to their public displays, there will be errors and omissions. I have done my best to keep these at a minimum. The broad outlines of their location, organization and labor are clear enough. The worst of these, she tells me, is what may seem to be the least aggressive, the Army Corp of Engineers, with their central regional office in downtown Los Angeles. They are, after all, the military component which controls and operates many of our river-binding, wilderness-barring dams. But there are certainly others.

__________________________________________________________

What & Where Identifying The Military-Industrial Complex in Los Angeles The El Segundo Cluster The South Beach Cluster Elsewhere

__________________________________________________________

Making Peace Unlike war, peace, I have learned, is not something we can achieve away from the place where we live. Obviously we can and do go to other places, changing our address at least temporarily, and make war against the people there, aided by weapons made here. Others, living in other regions, can also make war at home or in distant places using weapons which we choose to produce here for them. We could simply war against one another here. Mother Earth tells me that all of these negate peace in our region. For Angelinos to live in peace, our greatest challenge is to end the pursuit of these paths at home, not in Washington, D.C., Iraq, Afghanistan, or other places on our planet. This is the crux of our peace in Mother Earth. The present focus of the peace movement in Los Angeles upon the policies of U.S. federal politicians, bureaucrats, and leaders of the armed services has value, but it essentially misses the point. Those who are making a substantial effort to dissuade youth here from joining the military and becoming warfighters are, knowingly or not, on a path Mother Earth accepts as a potent struggle for peace. More of us should join them. Some of us are also supporting those already in the military who seek, despite official objections, to leave it; this too is meaningful to her. But these paths are far from sufficient. Making a serious, abiding, peace in Los Angeles, as well as our greatest contribution to peace elsewhere, requires that we call for all of our warriors to return home in order to help us defend this place from the attack of others, and when as now this is not needed, to return to peaceful endeavors. Equally important, and strangely neglected, are the tasks of winning, without violence and by a persuaded consensus: 1) the dismantling of the military bases in our region, which are designed not for our defense but for aggressive imperial battles in the places of other peoples; and 2) the cessation here of corporate military weapons production and provision of contracted military services, designed and intended for the support of wars elsewhere. Until these tasks become the central themes of our active search for peace, we will in effect continue to embrace Los Angeles as it is today, a region saturated with the labors if not the extreme destruction of war, a place rampant with efforts of war while covered by a veneer, a Hollywood illusion, of relative quietude and well-being. Let me be clear about this. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and The Aerospace Corporation are not our good neighbors, despite the large number of Angelinos they employ. They are instead our willing offering to the work of quick, violent, multitudinous human deaths and the accompanying destruction of wilderness and wild creation on our planet. The Los Angeles Air Force Base/Space and Missile Systems Center, the Joint Forces Training Base/Los Alamitos Army Airfield, the Naval Weapons Station Seal Beach, the Naval Warfare Assessment Station/Naval Surface Warfare Center Corona, the March Air Reserve Base, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, particularly its dam sites, concrete-channeled rivers and streams, and artificially structured and sustained ports, are not our brave protections from enemies domestic and foreign or from wild water. They are rather our most immediate and awful instruments of hellish havoc threatened and wrought upon those creations, human and otherwise, whom we have chosen to fear and rend asunder. These suffering objects of our misguided frightened and frightful wrath are many. Is it any wonder that Mother Earth is appalled? She looks, hopefully, for our tender protests, our energetic, peaceful engagement of ourselves and our neighbors in a reconsideration of what we are and how we can truly realize peace. Granted, the process to which she calls us may appear far more difficult and less hopeful than campaigns to end specific wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and other targeted regions. But this is a peace which she also seeks, for us and for her diverse others whom she has made here and who live and struggle as victims of our local war against wilderness. She has determined that if we try, we will succeed. We need only begin. If we do not, it may be because we fail to understand the costs all of us will then be called upon to pay. As Martin Luther King Jr. once put it, the choice for we humans is "nonviolence or nonexistence;" and peace is the essence of nonviolence, not simply as a political policy but as a central stream of our culture. My hope is that we will choose rightly. Note: Most of the information about the military-industrial complex contained in the relevant pages of this message is found in the official websites of the companies and bases named – links to which are placed in the text - the maps of appropriate Thomas Guides, and perimeter tours of many of the locations identified. On a few points Wikipedia and other public sources have also been consulted. I have not been inside any of the corporate or DoD facilities, or interviewed anyone working there. Certainly, an active peace movement aimed at the removal of these facilities should include a peaceful educative interaction with military-industrial workers and soldiers, especially about better alternatives for them and the rest of us. Bill Luttrell, one voice of Mother Earth