New Structure for Monterey County Branch

By Joyce Vandevere
Co-chair, Monterey County Branch Steering Committee

Our branch is both strong and weak: plenty of members, but only a sparse handful attend monthly meetings; volunteers always available for events but no one wanting to be chair; plenty of strong older women but not many younger ones. What to do? Our strategy is to give up the monthly meetings, and instead to have a Steering Committee that meets quarterly and shares responsibility for leading our branch. Beverly Bean and I have become co-chairs. The newly formed committee has met once and has great plans.

On Women’s Day, March 8, we will be tabling at the United Nations Association’s showing of the documentary Soufra, an upbeat documentary about a Palestinian woman living in a refugee camp who becomes an entrepreneur with a catering business. WILPF is a co-sponsor of the event along with other community organizations.

Hands Off Venezuela! is a program we are co-sponsoring with the Monterey Peace and Justice Center on March 26. The speaker, Gloria La Riva, will have returned from Venezuela where she is a reporter on the ground, interviewing people and trying to learn about the situation there.

Around tax day, pie chart flyers from War Resisters League—showing how our tax dollars are spent and how much goes to the military—will be passed out in front of post offices and at the farmers market.

In April, in solidarity with the rest of US WILPF, we will be at an Earth Day celebration—ours is in Seaside—tabling and showing our Peace Before Profit banner. 

Monterey County WILPF began the new year by joining in the Women's March and by hosting a program on Palestine/Israel with Gilad Atzmon, author of The Wandering Who? and Being in Time: A Post-Political Manifesto. Atzmon reflects on his own authentic experience, growing up in Israel, in light of his own developing awareness, studies of classical German philosophers and the current political scene, and presents many thought-provoking ideas for his listeners to chew upon. A good program, a full house. I'm still rereading his books, trying to understand about identity politics and more. (No. He is not anti-Semitic as some would have you believe.) Atzmon is a popular, successful jazz musician based in London, and he even played a brief fragment of jazz on his saxophone for us.
    
As always, we look forward to our big public event of the year: The 15th Annual Peace Lantern Ceremony in Pacific Grove on August 3, honoring those who suffered the 1945 atomic bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The event includes brief words from WILPF, the mayor of Pacific Grove and others, lantern-making, Taiko drummers, Japanese flute, and then, just at dusk, the decorated paper bag lanterns lit by candles are launched on rafts into Lovers Point Cove where their light is reflected in the water, a beautiful and moving ceremony, one that reminds us that we must forever work against any further use of nuclear weapons.

For more information, contact me at jvandevere@comcast.net.