Snipped from the Chicago Tribune Magazine (yes the same paper that endorsed Pres. Bush)
For the last 25 years, the 51-year-old Kathy Kelly has been nowhere near the sidelines. She has been willing to go anywhere in the world-Bosnia, Haiti, the West Bank-to do whatever she can to help victims of violence and demonstrate for peace. As long as the activity is non-violent, she has been willing to be arrested again and again. She has been willing to go to jail again and again. She has even been willing to die. Just before the start of the war in Iraq last year, while most foreign diplomats and journalists heeded President Bush's warning to leave Baghdad within 48 hours, Kelly stayed behind in a small hotel near the banks of the Tigris River. "I was determined not to let the bombs have the last word," she says. Her defiance of the sanctions has prompted questions about whose side she is on. She has been criticized, even by some in the peace movement, for not being nearly as tough on former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and his brutal dictatorship as she has been on sanctions and other measures to curb his power.
| Kelly once referred to the sanctions as "Weapons of Mass Destruction." She is a professional twit. |
Kelly's view of the sanctions is that the UN they have been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children. As for Hussein, she despised his murderous regime but not as much as Bush says that being openly critical of him would have meant expulsion from Iraq and the end of her mission. "It was a tightrope to walk," she admits. "If we did a demonstration in Iraq, we'd get booted right out of there."
| "So we held demonstrations against civilized countries and then went to Iraq." |
In the late 1980s, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, scores of nuclear weapons sat in silos beneath the Missouri prairie. For a year, Kelly and dozens of other people across the Midwest-college students and nuns, poets and housewives-made plans for a non-violent invasion of the missile sites. The plan was to plant corn and flowers around the missiles, to "sow seeds of life," and they called their project the Missouri Peace Planting. Kelly, who grew up on the Southwest Side, didn't know a thing about farming; a friend in Ohio had to show her what to do...
I have to ask: what has she actually accomplished? Did she end the cold war? Did she eliminate Saddam and free Iraqis? Seems to me like a lot of empty gestures. |