Good Afternoon, my name is Toni Vincent and I am a Unitarian Universalist minister and a member of the Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace.

We are here today to continue the monthly informational meetings and interfaith worship services of the ICUJP. We are fierce advocates of justice and peace, both at home and abroad. The vast resources that our country is spending on weapons of war are preventing us from adequately funding programs that would address the unsolved problems that face us daily in Los Angeles; problems that were with us before September 11th and that have continued.

Here at home, we believe that opportunities for quality education, well-paid jobs, prevention-based health care, affordable housing, safe streets and what the Declaration of Independence calls, "the pursuit of happiness," should be available for all of our citizens. We would like to see equal treatment for all Americans, especially by law enforcement agencies.

We want to use public resources to fund maternity clinics so that all our children are born healthy, to support drug treatment and rehabilitation programs that help cure the disease of despair and poverty called drug addiction. We would like to provide ecologically sound means of development within our communities and get rid of poverty forever. We can imagine a host of programs that would improve the lives and the future of our people.

Our hopes for all these things are dashed when we see our government spending more money than all other countries of the world combined, on guns and bombs and tanks and and other war-making machinery. Most people around the world have the same hopes that we do; for a meaningful, productive life, for a rich future for their children, for love, comfort, family, friends and some time leftover for daydreaming. These are what we destroy with bombs, for our own people and for others. Wars, especially the highly technological wars that the U.S. fights today are the shame our generation. It is mostly women, children, the infirm and the elderly who are victims of war. Those individuals, especially the damaged children who survive the horror, may be the most tragic victims of all.

War is the logical outcome of a mentality that believes that power and force are the ways to settle disputes; whether in the kitchen or among sovereign states. Violence only escalates to more violence, as we see - painfully - in the Middle East. We in ICUJP say, "Let us put an end to reliance on violence everywhere." This is really our core message.

Violence destroys individual lives and it destroys communities, but most of all, it destroys the hope that we have for a future of justice and peace. There are better ways of solving disputes. Let us employ the art of conflict resolution, of mediation, of intervention, of forgiveness and of reconciliation. Let's get rid of violence and bring hope into our lives and the lives of others. This is the message that we feel is important enough to repeat and reinforce and remind ourselves of again and again until we have learned to live by it.

There is information about ICUJP on tables at the back with our Mission Statement and the current version of a paper we are preparing about the Middle East. I invite you to take any of the written materials and encourage you to get to know us and become involved in our work.

Thank You,
Toni Vincent>