From the Editor's Desk

What a din this issue of Peacework raises! Howls of laughter, and howls of grief; soldiers barking orders, and civilians (some in earnest, some in staged re-enactment) begging for mercy; explosions, arguments, songs.

Sometimes the sounds we make are profoundly unintelligible to those with whom we need to communicate. To convey to US Americans something of what Iraqis experience in their encounters with occupying soldiers, former Marine Jeff Key and other veterans in the street theater project Operation First Casualty point imaginary machine guns and yell "I'm screaming at you in a language you don't understand! You speak Arabic, I speak English! For all you know I could be screaming about the weather! All you know is that I have a weapon and I am screaming at you!" And Tito Meza tells us about his three-year-old grandniece, unable to express in words what she feels at being separated from her mother with no explanation; unlike many children victimized by the current wave of anti-immigrant repression, Arlette is safe with family as she yells and cries, and as her mother awaits deportation. How much better it is when we use our words and our music and our laughter to knit people together instead of rending them apart. Native American and Alaskan Native women know how to bring to their communities the help and understanding that are needed to reverse a terrible trend of anti-woman violence -- and it is up to all of us to make sure they get the resources they need to do this work. Scarlet P., a "freeway blogger," offers cheery advice on how to engage eachother as citizens in the place where so many of us often find ourselves -- on the highways.

Good communication and open minds have created connections even across the dangerous divide between law enforcement officials and citizens who challenge the laws (and the prisons that back the laws up.) Jamie Bissonette reports on a carefully planned sweat lodge -- held outside a prison's walls -- in which six Native American prisoners were allowed by prison officials to participate. Anti-nuclear activists in Scotland have succeeded in impeding the operations of the Faslane Naval Base over much of the past year, partly because the police have chosen to treat them (as they have been treated by the protesters) with decency and a concern for their safety.

Such effort goes into trying to get us to shut up that we must spend precious time and energy just fighting to be heard, to keep our words from being stifled and those who speak them "disappeared." The USA PATRIOT Act has been such a hit here at home that other nations want one too -- El Salvador, for example, which has recently used its version to detain several nonviolent community organizers on their way to a protest against water privatization. In Pakistan, the fundamentalist movement to silence infidels and (of course) women was itself the target of a massively violent attack on one of its flagship mosques. Is there irony, or only a dreary lack of it, in the title the government bestowed on its attack -- "Operation Silence"? Here in New England, some citizens who regularly commit civil disobedience to try and close the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant are tired of having the charges against them dropped -- so last time they got hauled into court, they made their case out loud even though the judge ran away rather then hear it!

In between songs, beneath the roar, within our jail cells and whenever we have the solace of gathering with comrades, there is the hum and the tappity-tapping of conversation. George Lakey doesn't take offense at Peter Gelderloos's invective against nonviolence, rather he welcomes the stimulation of dialogue. This summer, at the US Social Forum and the United for Justice with Peace convention, there was so much talking that people are still talking about it. Check out UFPJ's call for a variety of different anti-war actions this fall, near and far, and let's make some noise.