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This came to me today via a friend:

A positive gesture in the face of so much bellicose bluster. It's like the peace marches in the 50s and 70s when people put flowers in the muzzles of soldiers' guns.

I think that rather than shout anti-war slogans we need to make positive and creative and humane gestures like this one, gestures of community, actually.

In order for this protest to be effective, there must be hundreds of thousands of such rice deliveries to the White House.

We can do this if we all forward this message to our friends and family. If every Mennonite and every Church of the Brethren household sent one of these, and the tens of thousands of persons from outside these churches who think war is a mistake also send them...we are hundreds of thousands of people!

There is a positive history of this protest! Read on!

"In the mid 1950s, the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation, learning of famine in the Chinese mainland, launched a "Feed Thine Enemy" campaign.

Members and friends mailed thousands of little bags of rice to the White House with a tag quoting the Bible, "If thine enemy hunger, feed him."

As far as anyone knew for more than ten years, the campaign was an abject failure. The President did not acknowledge receipt of the bags publicly; certainly no rice was ever sent to China.

"What nonviolent activists only learned a decade later was that the campaign played a significant, perhaps even determining role in preventing nuclear war. Twice while the campaign was on, President Eisenhower met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to consider US options in the conflict with China over two islands, Quemoy and Matsu. The generals twice recommended the use of nuclear weapons. President Eisenhower each time turned to his aide and asked how many little bags of rice had come in. When told they numbered in the tens of thousands, Eisenhower told the generals that as long as so many Americans were expressing active interest in having the US feed the Chinese, he certainly wasn't going to consider using nuclear weapons against them." From: "People Power: Applying Nonviolence Theory," by David H. Albert, p. 43, New Society, 19.

Thank you all for being people of hope, people of faith.

Susan Ortman Goering