“Candlelight Corridor of Peace” on Pennsylvania Avenue

Tuesday, January 28th 2003 7:00 PM to 9 PM
On Pennsylvania Avenue between 4th and 6th Streets NW
Washington, D.C.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: January 25, 2003
CONTACT: Steve Cleghorn 202-543-5298 (W) or 202-488-4027 (W)

WASHINGTON, DC – Alongside the traditional Pennsylvania Avenue route taken by the President as he goes to deliver the State of the Union address, a quiet, prayerful and hopeful group of peace loving people will gather to oppose war with Iraq. Between 4th Street and 6th Street NW they will form a “candlelight corridor of peace” through which the President must pass on his way to Congress. Or – if the President’s fear of opposition so moves him – he must go by a another secret way in order to avoid seeing fellow Americans who object to his call to war.

On a night that many published reports say President Bush will use to “gird” the nation for war, and in a moment when press reports are telling us that the Pentagon plans to drop as many as 800 cruise missiles on the people of Baghdad in the first two days, in what military planners refer to as a strategy of “Shock and Awe,” people who object to the indiscriminate loss of civilian life in Iraq will stand against this madness to say:
“This is not the America we love.”

And we shall hope and pray. We shall hope against all the evidence of war preparations. We shall hope, as faithful people do, and as people mindful of the human spirit and its possibilities for good – indeed we shall put our hope in things unseen. We shall hope in an America intent on the purposes of justice and peace throughout the whole of the Middle East and the world. We shall pray that our God will deliver us from the calamity of our own self-righteousness and fundamentalism. We shall pray that our God will deliver us from the destructiveness and who-knows-what unintended consequences of going to war in Iraq.

Steve Cleghorn, one of the organizers of the “candlelight corridor of peace,” says this about why he and others will be standing, lights in hand, beside Pennsylvania Avenue on the evening of January 28:

“We shall do this because we must, because we cannot do otherwise. Because on that night, with the State of our union in great peril, in that small space of Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., in that small geographic space of our interdependent and fragile world, we cannot do, we dare not do, anything less than to stand in opposition to this proposed war in Iraq.”

Page created January 22, 2003 by Charlie Jenks.