by Chris NelsonCatherine Hourcade (retired RN from Stockton) and Chris Nelson (Nurse Practitioner from Chico) were arrested on October 9th at Beale Air Force Base in Marysville, California during a one-year anniversary commemoration of the genocide in Gaza. We are involved with Occupy Beale, a coalition of northern California peace activists who have demonstrated against militarism at Beale Air Force Base every month for 14 years.
Because October is “Keep Space for Peace” month, we also included this issue in the letter we addressed to the new base commander. Catherine and I read it to the military staff at the Main Gate of Beale, then gave it to an MP to be delivered to Colonel Keagan L. McLeese.
The letter said in part that we’d been historically attempting to stop the carnage during the failed war on terror and the killing of innocents by U.S. drones. We also wrote that we are aware of Beale AFB’s complicity in planning to fight a nuclear war that would bring about omnicide. We made him aware that the expense of the space tech to attempt military control of space around planet Earth was not making us safer and was draining the country’s wealth at a time of catastrophic climate collapse (partly due to the military’s outside footprint from war prep and bases around the world.)
We invited the base commander to speak with us about how to demilitarize and decarbonize, and how to resist complicity in genocide and participation in nuclear war. The letter was signed by the eight of us who were at this month’s demonstration. We have not received a reply.
Since we crossed the demarcation line onto the base (with walkers because we are both somewhat handicapped and wanted to avoid injury), we were detained by the military staff. We weren’t cited by the military, however, but by a Yuba County sheriff who arrived about a half-hour later, which gave us a lot of conversation time with the young military personnel. Our citations were for “trespass onto private property” although we attempted to explain, to no avail, that this was a federal property paid for by U.S. taxpayers. We have an arraignment pending on November 7th at the courthouse in Marysville, California, and will demonstrate in the town afterwards regarding the issues of genocide, out-of-control militarism and nuclear risk.