From a speech in January, 1991:

My name is Michael OGorman.

I'm a vegetable grower from Salinas, California. I'm a member of the California Farm Bureau, the California Association of Family Farmers, the PTA, and the Monterey Peace Council.

As a farmer, I remember Kuwait and Saudi Arabia for the phony oil shortage of the late 1970s - that drove more American farmers from their land than anything since the Great Depression.

And I remember Reagan's 'information age' that told our children there was more money and more future in buying and selling and reselling and accounting and insuring that which was made elsewhere than in producing here.

But I remember too that our country was founded by farmers and craftsmen who fought the foreign monarchs so we could control our land and our future.

Now the price of our crops and the cost of our fuels and our fertilizers and the availability of seed and land and water is decided in distant boardrooms by people who have never seen the sun rise over what theyve grown, and who may or may not even live here. And now the average American farmer is sixty years old and theres more soldiers than farmers and our children have become the paid mercenaries of foreign monarchs who once again seem in control.

I have been marching against the war in the Mid East since August - with mud on my boots. And I will continue to march because it is wrong what we are doing there and because it is wrong what we are doing to the principles on which this country was formed.

I began farming 22 years ago during another war. I farm because it hurts no one and feeds everyone. Most of the people of the world are farmers. Most of the people of color are farmers. Most of the women of the world are farmers.

I farm organically because of a concern to protect the land and the environment, but mostly to protect the soul of a country whos losing its connection to the greatest soil on earth.

I am proud to be a part of American agriculture because no matter how different the beliefs of another farmer might be, he will always judge me on my ability to produce a crop.

But most importantly, I farm because I stubbornly believe in the Jeffersonian democracy that says that the people who live and work here can control this great country of ours.

I find this horrible war to be a slap in the face of everything I work for and everything I believe in. But nothing is harder to see than the symbols and words of democracy be used in its own destruction.

There is no democracy in Kuwait. There is none in Saudi Arabia. There is none planned for after the war, there or in Iraq. There is none planned for the other occupied lands in the Mid East. And we are arming the kings and emirs and despots of the area with billions of dollars of weapons to be used in 100s of Tianaman Squares for years and years to come.

Bush calls for a new world order. I think of that daily when I sit on the ground for lunch with the proud and hardworking Mexican citizens that now grow our food, while out front on River Road hundreds of young Americans drive by in millions of dollars of military vehicles to prepare to defend and die for a faceless international business community that has more power in Washington than you or I.

And I think of the new world order in the United Nations where poor hungry Ethiopia votes to allow the world to spend trillions of dollars to fight over control of the oil so it can be spared a few crumbs, and not have its famine relief shut off like Chad did, two days after it protested this war. And how Zaire, ravaged and devastated by AIDS of genocidal proportion, voted with our allies in hopes of receiving a few pennies to wipe its tears and bury its dead.

We are building bombs instead of homes. We are killing people instead of feeding them. We are fighting people instead of disease. A generation of youth hungry for discipline and direction and purpose is being misled and misused.

We have witnessed the tyrannies of East Europe fall peacefully to the strength of the human spirit. Wall Street and Madison Avenue want to turn that into a victory for Coca-Cola and Exxon, and Bushs New World Order.

But the new World Order has no ideals or morals other than consumption and profit. It is convinced that it has the military might and the buying power and the control of information so it will never topple like the Berlin Wall.

We have to wave, not the flag, but the words of Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine and Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. and prove them wrong. Nothing weve ever faced as a people will be more difficult. And nothing will be more important.

Michael OGorman Founder of Farms Not Arms

Founder and chairman, PeaceRoots Alliance