Content area
Full Text
FOR TWO YEARS we have gathered at the Pentagon because we fear for our lives. We still fear for the life of this planet, our earth, and the life of the children who are our human future.
We are women who come in most part from the northeastern region of our United States. We are city women who know the wreckage and fear of city streets; we are country women who grieve the loss of the small farm and have lived on the poisoned earth. We are young and older, we are married, single, lesbian. We live in different kinds of households, in groups, families, alone; some are single parents.
We work at a variety of jobs. We are students-teachers-factory workers -office workers-lawyers-farmers-doctors-builders-waitresses weavers-poets-engineers-homeworkers-electricians-artistsblacksmiths. We are all daughters and sisters.
We came to mourn and rage and defy the Pentagon because it is the workplace of the imperial power which threatens us all. Every day while we work, study, love, the colonels and generals who are planning our annihilation walk calmly in and out the doors of its five sides. They have accumulated over 30,000 nuclear bombs at the rate of three to six bombs every day.
They are determined to produce the billion-dollar MX missile. They are creating a technology called Stealth-the invisible, unperceivable arsenal. They have revived the cruel old killer, nerve gas. They have proclaimed Directive 59, which asks for "small nuclear wars, prolonged but limited." The Soviet Union works hard to keep up with United States initiatives. We can destroy each other's cities, towns, schools, children many times over. The United States has sent "advisors," money, and arms to El Salvador and Guatemala to enable those juntas to massacre their own people.
The very same men, the same legislative committees that offer trillions of dollars to the Pentagon, have brutally cut day care, children's lunches, batteredwomen's shelters. The same men have concocted the Family Protection Act, which will mandate the strictly patriarchal family and thrust federal authority into the lives we live in our own homes. They are preventing the passage of ERA's simple statement and supporting the Human Life Amendment, which will deprive all women of choice and many women of life itself.
In this environment of contempt and violence,...