{"id":313759,"date":"2017-06-21T03:55:45","date_gmt":"2017-06-21T02:55:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/would-you-like-a-drink-of-water-please-ask-a-yemeni-child\/"},"modified":"2017-06-21T03:55:45","modified_gmt":"2017-06-21T02:55:45","slug":"would-you-like-a-drink-of-water-please-ask-a-yemeni-child","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/would-you-like-a-drink-of-water-please-ask-a-yemeni-child\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Would You Like a Drink of Water?\u2019 Please Ask a Yemeni Child"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This week, in New York City, representatives from more than 100 countries will begin collaborating on an international treaty, first proposed in 2016, to ban nuclear weapons forever. It makes sense for every country in the world to seek a legally binding ban on nuclear weapons. It would make even more sense to immediately deactivate all nuclear weapons. But, by boycotting and disparaging the process now underway, the U.S. and other nuclear armed nations have sent a chilling signal. They have no intention of giving up the power to explode, burn and annihilate planetary life. “The United States is spending $1 trillion USD over the next thirty years to modernize its nuclear weapon arsenals<\/a> and triple the killing power of these weapons,” says Ray Acheson, program director at Women\u2019s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). Acheson also notes that the excessive spending for nuclear weapons contrasts with US cuts to vital anti-poverty programs. On June 19th<\/sup>, more than a dozen people blocked the US Mission to the UN entrance to protest<\/a> Washington\u2019s boycott of the negotiations. They were arrested for disorderly conduct, but I believe it\u2019s incomparably more disorderly to plan for nuclear war. <\/p>\n

During the past weekend, to support the negotiations for a treaty banning nuclear weapons, WILPF called for “Women\u2019s March to Ban the Bomb” actions in cities across the US and around the world. Jane Addams, who helped found the League in 1919, was a Chicago woman who understood the crucial need to put an end to war, all war, and instead care for the neediest people. She dedicated herself to assuring that many new immigrants in her city were treated with respect, given assistance to meet basic needs and encouraged to live and work together, peaceably. Addams worked passionately to prevent nations from sleepwalking into the horrors of World War I, and she vigorously campaigned to stop the United States\u2019 entry into it.<\/p>\n

Upon return from visiting soldiers who had been maimed while fighting in the trenches of World War I, she spoke of how the young men couldn\u2019t have carried on the war without mind-altering substances -sometimes absinthe, sometimes extra rations of rum. Families were sending laudanum and even heroin<\/a> to the front lines in hampers. The soldiers couldn\u2019t kill, she concluded, if left in their right minds. <\/p>\n

The WILPF gatherings help us ask hard questions about our capacity to prepare for massive obliteration of entire cities, through nuclear weapon buildup, while failing to meet the needs of children, like those in Yemen, whose survival is jeopardized by war and indifference. Can we persist in perfecting our nuclear arsenals, indifferent to millions of children at risk of starving to death or dying because they lack clean water \u2013 and because US supported Saudi airstrikes decimate the infrastructure that might have supplied food and water, \u2013 can we do so and claim to be in our right minds?<\/p>\n

WILPF gathered us in Chicago where…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This week, in New York City, representatives from more than 100 countries will begin collaborating on an international treaty, first proposed in 2016, to ban nuclear weapons forever. It makes sense for every country in the world to seek a legally binding ban on nuclear weapons. It would make even more sense to immediately deactivate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2519,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-313759","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2519"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=313759"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313759\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=313759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=313759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=313759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}