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Excerpts from Brother David's "Personal Addendum To The Statement Of The Baltimore Group"
What do these things mean, that Americans shoot other Americans in the streets, that our country is the greatest exporter of violence in the world? I am not a pessimist, but I feel American priorities must be re-ordered. Something completely different, something very new is going to have to happen in our country. (What can we say of a nation that lets millions of its children go hungry and suffer from malnutrition while it spends billions developing planes that will fly the ocean in three hours instead of six, racing madly to the moon, arming dictatorships and oligarchies around the world?)….
I for one am through talking about these problems; I think I have done enough reading, writing, and discussing of articles about how “It’s time to wake up, America.” I’ve got to do something more. Perhaps the time has come for action and suffering; perhaps the time has comer to ask voluntarily for suffering….
Many will probably see this action as stupid, vain, anarchic, wasteful; it may be all of those things, but I mean it primarily to say that as long as men choose to hate, kill, and ignore the suffering of their fellow men (sic), then I too want to receive this same indifference and hostility. For it makes as much sense to kill me as it does to kill Vietnamese children with Napalm and to be indifferent to the despair of millions of black Americans. I am of the hope that our “foolish” action will inspire others to their own actions and suffering.
But if anyone were to think that this action and its results mean that I might be leaving the CB’s, or planning not to be at the House of Studies in St. Louis next year, discontinuing my larking, loafing, laughing and inviting my soul – as Walt Whitman put it – why, I’d wager that such a person was plum befuddled.
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