Dear Friends of CCCO,
Welcome to the latest issue of CCCO’s Objector! First, we would like to thank you for your outpouring of support over the last calendar year. As you know, CCCO has been struggling through a financial crisis that has threatened its very existence. Through these challenging times you have been there, not only with your financial support, but also your volunteer hours, thank you letters, and commitment to peace. So, for all you’ve done, we are sending to you a heartfelt thank you.
Secondly, I would also like you to know that CCCO is continuing to reach hundreds of people each month who are refusing to participate in war. There are a record number of GIs not reporting in for duty overseas and turning up AWOL, and our Hotline continues to receive calls from GIs who want to get out. Viet Nam Syndrome has become a reality in the “all volunteer” military. As many of us remember, over 500,000 troops deserted and resisted during the Viet Nam War.
Low morale among GIs with questions regarding the morality of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are leading soldiers to also question their conscience. Service members feel isolated when they begin to question their place in the military, and many are finding that they can no longer support the military’s mission of fighting, and preparing to fight, wars. They are finding their way to our websites and to the GI Hotline. They are finding support and a way out.
During this year-end fund drive, CCCO must raise $75,000 in operating costs over the next 90 days to support decisions of conscience by men and women who have decided to no longer be a part of the killing machine. Due to recent electoral events, CCCO is preparing for another spike in calls to the hotline; requests for counter recruitment training and materials; and a greater number of Peace Honor Roll nominees. In order to meet these challenges, while continuing to maintain our current level of service, we ask for your financial support as 2004 draws to a close.
CCCO is also “re-tooling” its fundraising and development program. For the first time, we now have a three year strategic fundraising plan. In order to pull out of the financial crisis we are experiencing, it is imperative that we expand our individual base of support; increase our earned income capacity (including a CCCO Book Store & Gift Shop); aggressively pursue foundation funding; expand our telefunding and email programs; make our seasonal direct mail appeals timely; organize special events that involve our constituency and supporters in our work; implement a program to provide our supporters with a planned giving vehicle that will ensure that CCCO’s mission will continue to be carried out well into the future.
As many of you are aware, CCCO has also gone back to tried and true grassroots fundraising methods by asking our supporters to host house parties in order to raise funds and awareness about the possibility of an upcoming draft; counter-recruitment methods; how to build a CO file; and education and updates about the programs of CCCO. If you would be interested in hosting a house party for CCCO, please contact me at wendy@objector.org or 510.465.1617. These are just a few of the ways in which CCCO has begun diversifying its fundraising approach in order to guarantee a strong, solid future.
According to Defense Department sources, there has been talk of women playing a larger role in combat support by January 2005. Information from a Washington Times article dated October 22, 2004 quoted an Army spokesman, in response to questions from The Washington Times, “the Army is now in discussions with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s staff to see whether the 10-year-old ban in this one area should be lifted. The ban prohibits the Army from putting women in units that ‘collocate’ with ground combatants.”
American society is glorifying war wherever we turn; the U$ military industry pervades entertainment, media, advertising, and it distorts education, making it almost impossible for people of conscience to have an equal voice. Americans are being “conditioned” to live in a constant state of war, to accept war as our lifestyle. That conditioning has also severely damaged the humanity of some American soldiers. The graphic images from Baghdad, Abu Ghraib and Fallujah; the wanton mass destruction of the Iraqi people and their culture, senseless violence against Arab and Israeli peoples; and the continuing political executions in Haiti, show us how war and militarization robs the soul of those young men and women who fight and die in them, whether solider or civilian.
Resistance to this annihilation of life and human dignity is growing by leaps and bounds. Instead of becoming demoralized into inaction by these events, and another questionable election here at home, people are beginning to mobilize in ever greater numbers. Students are gathering on college campuses challenging the Pentagon’s military recruitment; others are organizing boycotts, some are divesting their tax dollars from war usage. More and more people are making the connections between the appetite of the war machine and their lack of civil liberties, housing, healthcare, food, jobs and education; the connections between racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, violence against women, poverty and incarceration, with militarization. Your support of our work helps to turn the tide.
CCCO has long been in the forefront of developing resources for the public that establishes linkages between war and militarization with other structural issues such as racism, sexism, and homophobia, treatment of youth, the criminal justice system, and educational inequality. We are committed to expanding our efforts in these areas, while strengthening our existing programs. CCCO has exciting and ambitious plans over the next calendar year that will continue to unite us with a growing community of conscientious objectors, pacifist, workers and social justice activists, veterans, youth and women’s organizations, on both a local and national level, uniting and working together for peace and justice.
Please help us reach our goal of $75,000 over the next 90 days. We urge your continued support so that CCCO can continue its work for the GIs who dare to say no, for youth who are saying that there can never be peace without justice, for those of us who choose not to make violence and war a way of life. Thank you for carrying the voices of conscience and peace, please give to CCCO today as generously as you can.
Yours in peace and justice,
Wendy Carson, Development Program Coordinator
CCCO