Kathy Kelly - You are the best thing of my life
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- Duration: 4:03
- Published: 2006-12-24
- Uploaded: 2010-12-31
- Author: supertrelemorele
My dear Kathy
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In 1982 she married fellow activist Karl Meyer and began a lifetime of "war tax resistance" (refusal to pay federal taxes on pacifist grounds), asking her employer to reduce her salary beneath the taxable income. A Jesuit professional development grant enabled her to travel to Nicaragua in 1985 and participate in a fast led by Foreign Minister Miguel D'Escoto against U.S.-backed Contra activity. Returning to the U.S., she left St. Ignatius in 1986 in order to focus on activism including two years as a teacher in Uptown's Prologue High School serving marginalized low-income youth .
In August 1988, Kelly participated in the Missouri Peace Planting, trespassing at a nuclear missile silo near Kansas City, Missouri to plant corn on it. For this action she served nine months in a Lexington, KY maximum security prison.
In 1990 she joined the Gulf Peace Team, a delegation assembled to protest the imminent Persian Gulf War and spent the first 14 days of the air war encamped on the Iraq-Saudi border before evacuation to Baghdad and then Amman in Jordan where she helped coordinate relief work.
Kelly helped organize, and herself participated in, several nonviolent direct action teams in war zones outside Iraq: Bosnia in December 1992 and August 1993, and Haiti in the summer of 1994. She and Meyer divorced in 1994 although they have continued as friends.Between 1996 and 2003 Voices organized over seventy delegations to Iraq bringing food and medicine directly to Iraqi citizens in deliberate violation of both UN-imposed economic sanctions and US law. Participants refused to pay fines for these actions but instead solicited matching donations from supporters for supplies to distribute on repeat visits. Members sought to raise awareness at home with demonstrations, media appearances, and personal accounts of their delegation work. Kelly went on 26 of these delegations.
Voices work was chiefly focused on, but not exclusive to, Iraq: In April 2002 Kelly and her fellow activists, walking on foot and engaging in repeated negotiations with Israeli Defense Force officers, became the first internationals to visit the Jenin refugee camp after learning, while on peace team work in the West Bank, of the recent attack there and what she described as its heavy civilian toll after observing it first-hand.
In March 2003, Kelly returned to Baghdad shortly before the start of the Iraq War, witnessing the Shock and Awe bombardment, and remaining for two months. She narrated her experiences of bombardment for Westerners via antiwar and religious witness websites. When the air war gave way to a ground invasion, she and other activists were present to greet arriving U.S. soldiers with dates and water.
In November of that same year Kelly joined 43 other activists crossing illegally into the Fort Benning U.S. Army base as part of the annual School of the Americas Watch vigil, and incurred a three month prison sentence which she carried out in Illinois' Pekin Prison in 2004, to which she was seen off by longtime friend Studs Terkel. Her experiences in prison resulted in many of the essays collected in her book Other Lands Have Dreams, published in 2005.
Voices in the Wilderness was eventually assigned a $20,000 fine by the U.S. government which it refused to pay. In 2005, the group Voices for Creative Nonviolence was formed to continue challenging U.S. military and economic warfare against Iraq and other countries.
In 2007 VCNV initiated the "Occupation Project," in which activists in 25 states occupied the offices of 39 Senators and congressional Representatives whom they regarded as insufficiently committed to defunding the Iraq war. In the campaign's first ten weeks participants incurred 320 arrests. The 2008 presidential campaign season saw a corresponding campaign targeting candidates' offices, and "Witness Against War," a march from Chicago to the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, MN. Kelly helped organize a 19-day "Camp Hope: Countdown to Change" winter vigil two blocks from the Chicago home of then-President-Elect Barack Obama, but Kelly spent much of the length of the vigil in the Gaza Strip, living with a family dangerously near to the area under heaviest bombardment from Israeli forces during the 22-day Operation Cast Lead assaults.
In protest to UAV attacks in Pakistan, in an event sponsored by Nevada Desert Experience, Father Louie Vitale, Kelly, Stephen Kelly, SJ, Eve Tetaz, John Dear, and others were arrested outside Creech Air Force Base on Wednesday April 9, 2009 .
"One way to stop the next war is to continue to tell the truth about this one."
"One of the most important "Spiritual Directors" in my life has been the Internal Revenue Service ... finding ways to live without owning property, relying on savings, or growing attached to a job ... Becoming a war tax refuser was one of the simplest decisions I've ever made."
"I want to be in touch with the people caught in a war at home. The war against the poor."
Category:American anti-war activists Category:American activists Category:American pacifists Category:Catholic Workers Category:Nonviolence advocates Category:Civil disobedience Category:Community organizing Category:American tax resisters Category:American educators Category:1953 births Category:Living people
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