American soil has been without war for a very long time. The last time the devastation of war affected large areas of the US was during the Civil War. Even then large parts of Union territory in the north and west and portions of the south remained untouched by war. Oceans to the east and west isolated the US from much of the violence in the world. The US has long been on friendly terms with its only two neighbors, one to the north and one to the south.

          Twice in the twentieth-century the world has been plunged into war and the American experience of those two world wars was much different from the experiences for most other peoples around the globe. Except for Pearl Harbor, American cities were not destroyed; American women, children, and old people were not collateral damage; terror, devastation, and death did not rain from American skies without warning. When American soldiers returned home, they returned to the homes they left behind and picked up their lives and moved on. They didn't have to wonder which heap of rubble was their house. They didn't have to spend months or years trying to find their family which had fled the carnage of war. They didn't have to rebuild their communities in addition to their lives.

Black Ribbon Campaign

          Because war has been absent from American soil for a very long time, in a very real sense, Americans have forgotten what it means to be at war. The Black Ribbon Campaign aims to bring the experience of war – the suffering, the pain, the death, the destruction, the devastation of war -- back into American consciousness. Perhaps the Black Ribbon Campaign will also help the American people to understand why so many people around the globe are opposed to a US war with Iraq.

          We ask people to place a black ribbon on their website – and to link it to an image that for them best illustrates the horrors of war. Perhaps that image shows a field of dead, dying, and wounded men; a child wandering aimlessly in search of its lost parents; a mother grasping her dead child; a burning village; a hospital ward full of beds of maimed and crippled soldiers, children, old people, or women; a town bombed into rubble; a crazed and dying animal; a devastated field; the land scarred by trenches and chronic bombardment during World War I; or mountains of dead stacked neatly in a row waiting to be buried. The image can be a photograph, a painting, a drawing, or any other way of conveying the horrors of war. The scenes can represent a place and a war anywhere on planet Earth from 3000 BCE China or Egypt to contemporary hot spots around the globe.

          Together the internet community can create an international "photo-album" and "scrap book" that unmasks the horrors of war. The black ribbon both connects those images together to form a coherent whole and demonstrates the opposition to this war by the internet community.

          Please add a clickable black ribbon to your website today.

          Thank you.

    Sunshine