July 13, 2007

Greenham Anti-Nuclear Demonstration 25th Anniversary Colouring Book

greenham_colouring_book.jpg

It's a travel day; the kid and I are flying back from Gram's house to our house, and so I was packing the crayons in the plane bag, wondering what the kid'd color on. Fortunately, the UK Guardian's website commemorating the anniversary of the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp really puts the "u" in "colouring book."

Beginning in 1981, Welsh and British mothers, grandmothers, and other women staged a prolonged, impassioned, and media-savvy protest against the US military stationing nuclear-tipped Cruise Missiles on an RAF/NATO air base.

The 11-page colouring book includes a lovely peace sign over a mushroom cloud and some bobbies dragging a lead-footed mum away. Classic stuff.

As for taking peacenik pictures on a plane, I figure as long as there's one old dude at the TSA checkpoint at the Salt Lake City airport who remembers the MX Missile protests in Utah around the same time, we'll be fine.

post-flight update: Actually, the hardest part turned out to be explaining why the policemen were dragging that lady away. As for the TSA, they were more interested in confiscating my more-than-half-empty 5-oz. tube of Kiehl's shaving cream because it was over the 3.5-oz. threat limit. Feeling safer yet?

Your Greenham: Children of Greenham [yourgreenham.co.uk via boingboing]

4 Comments

Oh, those were the days. Perhaps I'll dig out my "U.S. Bases Out of England" pin this weekend.

Nice post, but just to point out that "Welsh and British mothers" is tautological as Wales is part of Britain. It's like saying "Texan and American mothers".

[except that Texans think of themselves as distinct from America b/c of that whole 10 minutes of Republic of Texas nonsense, but point taken. I actually just threw Welsh in there to keep'em happy since they were the apparently the first to protest. would "Welsh and English" have been better?-ed.]

Though the Welsh take that sort of slip a little more good-humouredly than the Scots.

[but Scotland's just a region of England, right? The one where people talk all funny, like our Appalachia. Otherwise, I'm pretty sure Mel Gibson would've made a movie about it. -ed.]

When I was in middle school, I once spent a summer at the Greenham Common base. My best friend at the time was living there because his father was the commanding officer of the base. One of our favorite activities while there was to hang out at the gate near the camp to watch the "peace women", who were frequently nude. As a 13 year old, I thought that was the greatest thing... Made a lasting impression.

[and nowadays kids go to the nursing-friendly pizza joint in Park Slope. -ed.]

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