At seven PM we gathered around the list of names. It was a mild evening, with just enough of a breeze to keep us from lighting candles.

Eric welcomed everyone and spoke briefly about the implied contract between our leaders and citizens. Then he introduced Thomas Chavez, pastor of Christ the Healer, Universal Church of Christ; a friend and fellow organizer of many anti-war activities.

We mourn to acknowledge pain. We acknowledge our pain because these others (pointing to the boards) have been riped from life. Why should it matter to us that their lives have been taken? Because deep inside we know that, ultimately, we are all the same. We are human. We are children of God. We are one.

The second part of why we are here, as Eric mentioned, is to be in concern about how our universal oneness is ignored and abused by those who call themselves our leaders, but see us as separate. They separate themselves from ordinary Americans, and send ordinary Americans to kill other ordinary people. Or they are people who separate themselves from those who are not of their religion, their persuasion, their understanding of life. And because they see this separation, they imagine it is okay for them to kill. But it is a fundamental mistake for anybody to imagine that we are separate enough to kill anyone and not ourselves be harmed.

By taking the time and the focus and to be willing to mourn for those that we have never met, we are honoring in ourselves that internal knowledge that we are all humans in this life together, and it is terrible that we kill one another, that we hire, that we conscript, that we enable killing to happen in our name. I grew up in an awareness of that love that makes such killing impossible.

It is interesting to me that we are here in a plaza modeling the relationship of the United States and American citizens of Japanese ancestry, and the reconcilliation after the pacific phase of the second world war. My father fought in that war. He was stationed in Manilla harbor on the island of Corregidor, and he was under continuous bombardment. And it was while killing Japanese that he discovered in his heart that the Japanese he was killing were human beings the same as he and he was killing himself. And he suffered. He was captured, marched across Baton, spent all of WWII in prisoner of war camps, and came back weighing 93 pounds.

I was born, his first child, in the Japanese hospital in Los Angeles where he had taken his wife to Japanese-American doctors to attend her and help bring about my birth, as part of his own effort at reconcilliation.

When I was a small child he would take us past empty lots where there had been a fire. Where grass and tires and small animals had been burned and their stench filled the air, and he would say "Do you smell that? That, is what war smells like. Don't be fooled by what the movies show. This is far more real than what the movies show." So I was raised with an awareness of our species recurrent pastime of self murder.

I am deeply energized by the idea of this gathering because it is more than protesting, it is acknowledging. By feeling the loss and death of others, of strangers, we acknowledge the reality of our oneness.

Then the names of 41 Coalition servicemen and women who had died in the last month were read, and the 101 unnamed Iraqi civilians who were killed were acknowledged. By eight PM the park was empty.