PACIFIST FIGHT CLUB

We will fight for peace, but we will do no violence.

Saturday, April 26, 2014

In Memory of Glen Stassen

Today, all those who fight for peace, all those who follow the way of Jesus, lost an ally and a mentor.


After a long battle with cancer, Dr. Glen Stassen passed away today in Pasadena, CA. Dr. Stassen was a professor at Fuller Seminary, Christian ethicist, activist, and developer of Just Peacemaking — a proactive third way approach in the volley between pacifism and just war theorists.

His friend — and coauthor of the seminal book, Kingdom Ethics (2003) — David Gushee penned a tribute, writing:
For most of us who grieve today, however, Glen will be remembered as the paradigm of how one serves as a teacher-mentor. Teachers teach, of course. But Glen taught as if everything he said mattered immensely, which it really did.

Read the full Tribute by Dr. Gushee here.

For more information on the Just Peacemaking Initiative visit: http://justpeacemaking.org/

Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Biggest Threats To U.S. Nuclear Missile Corps:Boredom and Drugs

Every day 90 uniformed men and women in their mid-20s ride elevators 40 to 60 feet below remote fields in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, North Dakota, and Nebraska in rote preparation for improbable nuclear Armageddon.

They spend some of their 24-hour alerts seated in front of steel Minuteman III missile launch control panels mounted on shock absorbers, with toggle switches capable of hurling 10 to 50 nuclear warheads—each with 20 times the explosive force of the Hiroshima bomb—to the other side of the globe, at speeds of 15,000 mph.

But their day-to-day enemy, for decades, has not so much been another superpower, but the unremitting boredom of an isolated posting that demands extreme vigilance, while also requiring virtually no activity, according to accounts by missileers and a new internal review of their work.
                         
That understandable boredom, when paired with the military’s sky-high expectations for their workplace performance, has pushed some of them to use drugs, others to break the rules, and still more to look for any way out.
 









The millennials who populate this force can watch television, read, study, or sleep in their cramped, often damp quarters. But their checklist routines are typically unvarying, and their moment-to-moment responsibilities are few, and the temperature underground—like the policy requiring their presence—is unnervingly stuck in the mid-60s.


READ FULL STORY HERE>