Note: This is an email from Toby Blome regarding the peace vigil that was held last week at Beale AFB and the efficacy of holding peace vigils at military bases. There is another peace vigil at Creech AFB this week that she has helped organize. Contact her if you'd like to be involved in the future: [email protected]

Dear wonderful peacemakers.

Thanks again for sharing the day at Beale AFB last Tuesday. It was so great to witness our numbers grow and to experience unity together.
At our midday gathering there was discussion about whether our presence has significant worth to justify
continuing the effort. Some may still be in the undecided stage. I had a phone conversation with Bruce Gagnon
who is the coordinator of Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space. He does amazing work:
check his website here: https://www.space4peace.org/

Bruce grew up in an air force family and joined the air force during the Vietnam war. He was stationed at Travis AFB in '71,
and reported to me that at the time there were regular peace vigils at the entrance to Travis. There weren't many.....maybe 7-10 at a time. He reports that those few people, with messages of peace had a strong influence on him actually becoming a peace activist.
I will send his writing to you in the near future, but I wanted to have you all contemplate about the idea that we can never fully know the potential of what our presence has when we stand outside a military base with our peace messages, but
I believe that there are rippling effects that are innumerable, and very powerful.

Bob Gorringe, who himself served in Vietnam, and who joined us at Beale last month wanted me to share the narrative below that he sent me. I hope that you all can consider the potential that we have to empower ourselves to make peace...........by commiting only to one day a month at a military base near you! Together we can end war! Hope you can help this movement grow!

Please share this with others who came, whom I don't have their e-mail. Also, if you have e-mail addresses of others that you think would like to be on my "Ground the Drones" list for future actions.....pass it on to me. (I hope I have included everyone).

Off to Creech we go (tomorrow)......love and peace, toby

Here's Bob's comments (in response to report back):

Toby, Good job on this presentation and a thorough update on what transpired. A few comments: It's great to see the confluence of different organizations coming together, all basically of one mind towards Peace. I think it serves the cause far better to have all of us uniting our individual affiliations and sharing our support for each other's events. It's very easy to lose hope standing alone. Together we are building coalitions and morale and a visible presence that negates the attempts by some to marginalize the voices out here among us who are not on board with what our country is doing to the lives of innocent people with our deathly instruments of military dominance.

The issue of the civil authorities arbitrarily changing the lines of demarcation for peaceful protest of what's within the rights of the citizens of this country to do in challenging and questioning our government is clearly something we have to look into. Knowing the confines and the related laws will make our argument stronger in confronting the police, Military and CHP, when they arrive. And we should be aware that the more we show up there to bear witness, the Air Force will probably start getting more and more creative in attempting to disrupt or make our protest more difficult to carry out. We have to be at least one step ahead of them. For instance I could see them blocking off the parking area ahead of time under some false excuse if they know that we are coming.

Let's continue to work and build. Your leadership and energies are contagious, Toby. Thank you and all who showed up to say No to what all of us know is not what we were taught in our earlier lives in our schools to be representative of the principles this country stood for, the values of Justice and respect for the Liberties of All the People and the People throughout this earth (our world family).

If you could, Toby, can you forward this email onto the other groups who participated with you at Beale. Let's welcome them into our ongoing struggles. Thanks again for your efforts. I wish I could have been there, but being a slave to this sluggish economy, I couldn't...THIS TIME.
- Bob