OCCUPY PEACE IS BORN
Jeremah Horrrigan
For months, global forecaster Gerald Celente has promised anyone willing to listen that his Occupy Peace rally would be the start of something big and unprecedented.
On Sunday, he made good on that promise.
Celente, founder of the Trends Research Institute, stood at the historic intersection of John and Crown streets in Kingston NY and made a further promise: "This is going to be the most historic peace movement this country has ever seen."
And to those doubters who may have thought a peace movement couldn't be initiated from a small city like Kingston, no less an expert than Ralph Nader, the man who all but single-handedly launched the consumer safety movement, backed him up.
"It's easier than you think to change the government," Ralph Nader told hundreds of people who attended the rally.
Nader's hour-long speech culminated an afternoon in which three other noted opponents of the political, spiritual and medical status quo echoed each other in describing the need for change in those realms.
Robert Thurman, probably the world's best-known expert on Buddhist thought and practice, called on the crowd to reject the "corporatist fascists" who run the country while remembering not to emulate them.
"In your heart and soul, you can't hate them — even the bad guys."
Alternative health advocate and author Gary Null denounced the medical establishment, whose approach to healing has made a "corrupt" healthcare system itself "the number one cause of death in America," responsible for 700,000 deaths a year.
Cindy Sheehan, who described herself as "a vegan anti-war revolutionary," said she wakes up every day with the question "What can I do to collapse the evil empire?"
But it was Nader, the only man in the crowd wearing a suit and tie, who sought to emphasized the importance of "small town" gathering like Occupy Peace.
"Historically, the greatest movements have started in small towns and rural areas," he said.
The Occupy Peace rally in Kingston would serve as a model that could be spread across the country via the Internet.
After paying homage to half a dozen national anti-war and anti-nuke movements that began in small towns and living rooms over the years, movements that did the impossible, he said that it's been proven historically that "you only need one percent of the population to turn things around."
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