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Coordinator Report 18 July 2001 Bruce Gagnon |
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Just back from 3 day trip to New Mexico for a conference and protest at Los
Alamos. At the conference, organized by New Mexico Peace Action, I was on a space panel along with our advisors Loring Wirbel and Alice Slater. Joe Gerson from AFSC was on it as well and I think we did an excellent job together. Been doing quite a few radio interviews around the country in recent days and Karl reports the same activity with radio as well. On Aug 4-10 I do a trip to the northeast and will be speaking in Pittsburgh, Northampton (MA), Providence (RI), Old Greenwich, New Haven, and Hartford (CT). One of my several meetings in Hartford will be at a special dinner meeting being organized for me to present to local religious leaders. Sally Light and I had a chance to talk while on the march at Los Alamos about the May 10-12, 2002 GN international meeting in Berkeley. She is already doing alot of logistics work and we shall fairly soon want to initiate a planning committee. Board member Cheong Wooksik (South Korea) has asked us if we'd like to have an intern from his country for a couple of months at the first of the new year. I told him we would be interested and the person could help us work on the Berkeley event. Will keep you all posted on this. They would pay travel and we would just have to provide housing and food which should not be a problem. On July 6-8 I spoke at the Minnesota Veterans for Peace retreat just north of Minneapolis. Mary Beth went along with me and they committed to taking two busloads of protestors to Huntsville, Alabama on their way to the School of Americas protest in the fall. They will pay for Mary Beth to fly up to Minnesota and ride the bus all the way to Alabama so that she can teach folks about Star Wars along the way. They will do an action in Huntsville and then go on to Columbus, Georgia for the SOA. Mary Beth will also represent the GN as a speaker at the August 4-6 protest at Oak Ridge DoE facility in Tennessee. This is a very large southern regional annual event. We are now up to about 200 endorsing organizations for October 13 and have 16 countries and 67 demo sites as of today. Recalling the last minute surge we had last year I would not hesitate to predict that we will go over 100 actions this year. We are already looking at next years action date and want to get it locked in soon since groups are already planning their events for next year. Regina has suggested that next year we organize an "International Week of Protest to Stop the Militarization of Space". I'd like to suggest we do October 4-11, 2002. Please give feedback. Would that name be ok again? That is about it for now. Selling lots of videos these days and getting a good response from our last "July 4 Appeal" mailing. |
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