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Special Report |
LAST UPDATE July 12, 2005
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| June 26, 2003 |
September 11 and Peaceful Tomorrows – Presentation - Ryan Amundson |
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| Ryan Amundson speaking to the Peace Boat about his personal experience of the events of September 11 |
On September 11, 2001, Ryan’s brother, Craig, was about to make a birthday card on his computer for his son, who would turn five a week later. When the hijacked airliner crashed into the Pentagon, Craig was killed. In the following weeks, as the Bush administration and the majority of US people turned their grief into anger and cries for revenge, Ryan, and over 70 other victim’s family members, formed a group called ‘September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows’. The group was created to counter the widely held belief that all victims’ families supported military action to bring about justice and stop terrorism. Believing that violence will only produce more violence, the members feel that the root causes of why this happened need to be addressed in order to end conflict.
The name ‘Peaceful Tomorrows’ was inspired from something that Martin Luther King said in 1967: "Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows." The group has campaigned against a violent reaction to the events of September 11 by holding public speaking and media events throughout the US and the world, including Italy, Japan, Puerto Rico, Turkey and the UK.
After the US attacks on Afghanistan, four members of Peaceful Tomorrows travelled there to highlight the fact of innocent people being killed in the “War on Terror”. An Afghan Victims Fund project was founded, and the group lobbied the White House and State Department to pressure the government to acknowledge and help the Afghan casualties. Peaceful Tomorrows was recently nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and continues to speak out against their families' names being exploited in the call for military action ? “Our grief is not a call for war”.
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Ryan spoke to members of Peace Boat about the “mentality of revenge” which swept across the US after September 11, and how the Bush administration used this national fear and anger to justify the violent retaliation on Afghanistan and Iraq. Ryan told the audience that many US people used to feel safe in their homes, but are now afraid. He agrees that people have a right to defend themselves, but not by bombing innocent women and children in the barren mountains of Afghanistan or dusty streets of Baghdad.
According to Ryan, most of the US public is ignorant to international politics, and few of the population ever travel to other countries. When President Bush said: “They hate us because of our freedom, liberty and way of life” people believed him. The centralized media is politically controlled and aware of how ill-informed its audience is. The government uses this ignorance to shape public opinion to its own means, whether it is a tax cut for the rich people of the US, or missiles fired on third world countries.
Ryan feels that if more US people could see the true horror and reality of war, fewer would be so quick to champion the use of force in the name of justice and peace. Not enough people know that Peaceful Tomorrows exists, and Ryan, along with the now 100 or so members, are working hard to spread their message of non-violent solutions to the problems facing the world today.
For more information on the group can be found at – www.peacefultomorrows.org |
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