Boxing Day at Beale

 As you can see we were out at Beale at dawn this fine Boxing Day. (The day the British Empire 1% would give a boxed gift to their servants, a swell day I bet.) Here in the U.S. it was a quiet day after Christmas at the base. There were five of us and only a few more of the military coming in and out of the gate. We had our usual discussion on free speech rights with the county policeman called by the base guards. (Quoting Toby, more or less, "if you fought for our freedom don't you think you should give us the right to exercise it?")

 I got my artistic Bradley Manning sheet up for a non-viewing and the cows were very impressed by Toby's heartfelt support of Bradley Manning. Toby had a ridiculous jerking, singing, lighting up elf hat (probably made by bemused but disadvantaged Chinese people,) that she activated for the sleepy service personnel--quite an early morning apparition!

 Our little group of five included sign-maker of the fantastic Peace Panel Project, Charles Withuhn, Pat and Toby from the Bay Area and Shirley from Grass Valley. I liked the sign Shirley made. She interspersed names of American war casualties with those of Pakistanis. It was a huge relief to hear there has been a moratorium on drone strikes in Pakistan for the last six weeks-- CNN said something to the effect that the U.S. is trying to figure out who better to target. (Not the right message for we civilians of the world family.) Firedog Lake said some new regs have gone into effect so drone pilots can only (joy stick) fly 3 drones at once instead of 4 (!) I'm not sure that makes me feel even a little bit better either.

We moved our vigil into Marysville after warming up a bit and Charles put his wonderful panels out Burma Shave like down the main Hwy 70 entrance to town (interspersed with a non-English-speaking pizza sign advertizing gentleman.) This afternoon Toby and Pat will be joined by Caroline and Peter out at the base gate with our messages that Drones create Enemies and that the More Drones there are the Less Secure we are. Slowly people are starting to join us. We need to stop this technology in 2012.