Veterans for Peace Santa Barbara
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San Clemente Island, a short stop

San Clemente Island was a short visit.
I left Alamitos Bay and sailed all day and into the night.
As I approached the island cloud cover blocked the moon and I was unable to see the water, shoreline or kelp beds.   There was supposed to be a light at Pyramid Head but there was none.  I found out later it had burned out and was to be replaced.
I sailed around the island,  just  a dark looming in the distance,  navigating more by my depth finder and gps than by sight and searched for a white light that would put a reflection line on the water and allow me to see what I was sailing into.   Finally I found one and sailed in to forty feet and dropped anchor.  I had been sailing for sixteen hours so went below and to sleep quickly.  In the morning I was awakened by a helicopter above my boat.   It was a military helicopter with a helmeted man pointing to sea at the door.   He was pointing to a destroyer squadron offshore that was waiting to commence fire on the cove I was anchored in.   I was in a small cove that was lined with white targets!  As it continued my anchor was tangled into something and I went to the Pyramid Head bouy while the Navy got my anchor and brought it to me.    Having been a gunnery fire control technician in the navy,  on destroyers,  I considered it a narrow escape from an appropriate end!
Follow the Journey: http://www.vfpsb.org/category/lanesblog/
www.LaneAnderson.org
http://www.smartvoter.org/2009/11/03/ca/sba/vote/anderson_r/
http://www.noozhawk.com/politics/article/100709_santa_barbara_council_qa_lane_anderson/
We Are the Antidote – Every Choice a revolutionary Act
S. Brian Willson, June 5, 2008

There is a deeply uncomfortable but clearly structural explanation for the pattern of historic U.S. war-making that continues to this very moment. US Americans, people like you and me, are addicted to insatiable consumption that makes the American Way Of Life totally dependent upon massive exploitation of others and their resources, and the earth herself.
The political-economic market system we have grown up with and support with our tax dollars and voting patterns is a significant contributor to the problem.
Part of the revolutionary antidote, if it occurs, will be in radically changed choices each of us
makes as to how we travel, what we eat, what we consume or don’t consume, etc. Take travel, for example.
Air and private auto travel not only emit massive amounts of carbon molecules, accumulating as particles of mass destruction
in our biosphere, they also consume inordinate amount of petroleum for each passenger mile traveled.
If we are not committed to taking radical leaps in our own consciousness that manifests in corresponding radical changes in our lifestyles, then we choose complicity in business as usual, i.e., continuing to live as we have been conditioned and to which we are now addicted – comfortable materialism. It is absolutely and totally unsustainable. We now have an evolutionary opportunity for a leap in consciousness to integrate ourselves into a cosmological reality of living in mutual respect with all other life.
But we are the antidote, not the government or the market. As we become conscious, each daily choice we make from eating, traveling, and consuming, or not, is a revolutionary act.

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