Wage Peace -- See the Movie

This post originally appeared in Feb of 2005:


http://www.afsc.org/iraq



Follow this link to the Wage Peace movie

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The Adventures of Stick Man and His Friends
by Patricia deVarennes

Once upon a time, a neighbor everyone disliked named Stick Man said, "Someday I'm gonna get me a big stick and kick some butt".

Sure enough, Stick Man started collecting sticks, and Righteous Man and some other neighbors saw him doing it. Righteous Man did the right thing at first. He asked for the sticks to be taken away, or that Stick-Man should be taken away. An investigation ensued by an impartial body that collected all his sticks and they promised to monitor him to be sure he didn't get any more.

Yet Righteous Man suspected that he was still secretly collecting sticks. One day he went over to Stick Man’s house and shot up the place. Stick Man ran away. All but a few of the neighbors stayed in their houses, watching. Some came out and helped to demolish Stick Man’s house hoping that this would keep Righteous Man away from their own houses.

This enraged Righteous Man. He called in vain for the neighbors to come out. And when they didn’t, he realized that the neighborhood must actually have liked Stick Man. They probably sold him a stick or two themselves.

Of course, we know that you don't destroy all the homes and schools and churches and hospitals in the neighborhood simply because in a neighborhood of fifty houses, two of them hold sympathizers to someone like Stick-Man. That would be crazy, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t you call the police if that happened in your neighborhood?

Righteous Man had his own police, called Guards, and Grunts and other things. Let’s call them the Not So Merry Men. They were all bound by contracts that said if they didn’t do what he said, they would have to go live in cages. The rest of the neighbors who really didn't like Stick-Man in the first place started trying to take Righteous Man out because he had become as big a problem as Stick-Man. Righteous Man had some favors owed him, and he retaliated with those and some who were afraid of Stick Man. They swore that Stick Man had hidden caches of deadly sharpened sticks.

Righteous Man and his cohorts started killing all the neighbors who were giving them trouble because they were Un-Righteous. He had to save them from themselves. If they were Righteous like him and his followers, they would have come out and danced around their ruined neighborhood and thrown flowers at the saviors who destroyed their community. They didn’t appreciate the fact that Righteous Man had rid them of Stick Man. Meanwhile, Righteous Man worked hard to kill all of Stick Man’s supporters who might, if left alone, collect their own sticks and become more Stick Men.

In this process, Righteous Man and his Not So Merry Men had come close to the next neighborhood, and those neighbors got upset as well. They started giving support to Stick-Man's neighbors who were all homeless and jobless. They knew Righteous Man and his Not So Merry Men were coming for them next. Righteous Man didn’t disappoint them. And so it went -- on and on -- until the entire county, state, and everyone else in the region was all doing the same thing. Stick Man was caught, hiding, with no sticks.

You see, Righteous Man used Stick Man’s empty threats as an excuse for violence, and he frightened some others into joining him. Righteous Man caught Stick Man and killed most of his family. But that wasn’t enough. We leave Stick Man for now in the land of make believe…where he believes that the world is full of Stick Men. He’s sort of like a latter day Don Quixote. What’s scary is that in our make believe world, more and more Stick Men are being made as more and more of their families, neighborhoods, churches, hospitals and schools are being destroyed.

It’s nice to know that things like that don’t really happen in our neighborhood. Anyone who did what Righteous Man did to Stick Man's neighbors would go away for a long, long time.