Cleveland Peace Action is planning a permitted presentation, "Peace in the Park" on Cleveland Public Square on July 20 afternoon. We will sing some anti-militaristic songs and do a few parodies with past presidents and civil rights leaders and artists. I wish to find actors for playing parts as past presidents: Eisenhower, JFK, Reagan , Bush, Obama, and civil rights leaders and artists: Martin Luther King and Maya Angelou. These all would be short parts - reciting quotes and answering questions from "Maya Angelou" or (maybe even "Megan Kelly" (FOX news). If you are interested in acting/ reciting, helping with tryouts and rehearsal, or contacting aspiring actors - please let me know. email.donbryant@gmail.com Please see SAMPLE SCRIPT (below) Thank you, Don Bryant 216.337.6760 SAMPLE SCRIPT: M.C.: Welcome to Peace in the Park sponsored by Cleveland Peace Action. Today we have invited a number of notable voices to address issues of poverty, war, and peace. First, I ask President Dwight D. Eisenhower to open the discussion. President Eisenhower: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, and the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron." M.C.: President Kennedy had a few things to say about war and its casualties on all sides, but especially to the most vulnerable: Pres. Kennedy: "A war today or tomorrow, if it led to nuclear war, would not be like any war in history. A full-scale nuclear exchange, lasting less than 60 minutes, with the weapons now in existence, could wipe out more than 300 million Americans, Europeans, and Russians, as well as untold numbers elsewhere. And the survivors, as Chairman Khrushchev warned the Communist Chinese, "the survivors would envy the dead." For they would inherit a world so devastated by explosions and poison and fire that today we cannot even conceive of its horrors. So let us try to turn the world away from war. Let us make the most of this opportunity, and every opportunity, to reduce tension, to slow down the perilous nuclear arms race, and to check the world's slide toward final annihilation. Continued unrestricted testing by the nuclear powers, joined in time by other nations which may be less adept in limiting pollution, will increasingly contaminate the air that all of us must breathe. ... The loss of even one human life, or the malformation of even one baby -- who may be born long after we are gone -- should be of concern to us all. Our children and grandchildren are not merely statistics toward which we can be indifferent." M.C.: Let’s not let these words be spoken in vain. Maybe presidents can be seen as disingenuous as they also wage the very wars that they denounce – but civil rights leader and anti-war activist Martin Luther King’s message inspires us to commit to peace with justice. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King: “Violence is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding: it seeks to annihilate rather than convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends up defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.” M.C.: As you can see, the warnings of the Republican president, a Democratic president and a civil rights leader were not heeded. There are always excuses to go to war- from Vietnam to Afghanistan - when the "great communicator" - President Ronald Wilson Reagan explained his way into arming and training the Afghan Mujaheddin that later became the Taliban. Pres. Reagan: "Every country and every people has a stake in the Afghan resistance, for the freedom fighters of Afghanistan are defending principles of independence and freedom that form the basis of global security and stability. "These gentlemen are the moral equivalent of the founding fathers." M.C.: To defeat the Soviet Union, U.S. President Reagan was willing to give advanced military equipment to an extremist group in a foreign land; I guess you could call him the "Father of Modern Day Terrorism." M.C.: "After the attacks on September 11, 2001, U.S. troops were deployed across the Middle East and Southwest Asia for reasons that were as confused then as they remain dubious today, but on some unconscious level the myth of violence was at work, promising that waging war abroad would heal the wounds suffered that day. As George W. Bush said when the US invaded Iraq: President G. W. Bush: “We will pass through this time of peril and carry on the work of peace. We will defend our freedom. We will bring freedom to others. And we will prevail.” (fade into) Maya Angelou from "Amazing Peace.." M.C: We are honored by the presence of the many dignitaries of the civil rights movement - and Cesar Chavez said it right. Cesar Chavez: “It’s amazing how people can get so excited about a rocket to the moon and not give a damn about smog, oil leaks, the devastation of the environment with pesticides, hunger, disease. When the poor share some of the power that the affluent now monopolize, we will give a damn.”