Mike Ferner

March 29, 1995
Bowling Green State University
Remarks by Mike Ferner

My thanks to the organizers of today’s rally for inviting me to speak. Students at BGSU and around the nation today can be proud for organizing the first large-scale response to the madness emanating from Washington. Too many of our leaders, such as local elected officials, sit by silently, uttering not a peep of protest, watching Congressional votes that will cause millions of citizens to demand help from city and state governments. As happens often in times of national crisis, students help lead the way. If the people lead, the leaders eventually will follow. Hopefully some of the students here today will become those leaders. It would be an improvement.

(Signed by over 400 grassroots leaders, sent 11-17-94, never answered)

In July of 1994, the leaders of 15 of the larger environmental groups sent a mass mailing to their joint membership about the sad state of the struggle to save the biosphere.

The following letter is a challenge to those leaders by a group of other environmental leaders. It asks them to change their focus to the real problem — Corporate influence on legal systems world-wide.

173 grassroots leaders initially signed on to the letter and were then joined by about 240 more. Except for a polite reply from the Sierra Club, there has been no other response in word or deed.

January 14, 1991
Promenade Park
by Toledo City Councilman Mike Ferner

(Note: After months of military buildup in the Persian Gulf, President Bush set a deadline of January 15, 1991 to commence an air and ground war against Iraqi forces if they did not withdraw from Kuwait. Several religious and peace organizations sponsored a demonstration in downtown Toledo to protest the Bush policy. About 1,500 people attended.)

It is a distinct privilege to be asked to speak at this important gathering, and I wish to thank the organizers of this demonstration for that invitation and their work culminating here today.

My road to this point began in earnest 21 years ago. I served in the U.S.Navy Hospital Corps during the Viet Nam war, working at the Naval Hospital at Great Lakes, Illinois.

During that time, I frequently went on Medevac runs to the Glenview Naval Air Station. We rode out to Glenview in what were essentially school buses painted battleship gray. The main difference between our bus and a school bus was that instead of seats, ours had rows of hooks onto which we would load stretchers bearing the wounded soldiers coming back from Viet Nam.