Our efforts are having an effect:
"I, Mary Clare Higgins, Mayor of the City of Northampton and Michale R. Bardsley, President of the Northampton City Council, do hereby proclaim Sunday evening, March 20, 2005 as a time to honor the dead, the wounded and the suffering on all sides of this conflict, to reiterate our community's support for the men and women who are serving our country honorably, and to restate our commitment to work together as a community to urge our nation's leaders to work towards promoting peaceful resolutions to conflicts in every case possible." ...

Whereas, in February 2003 the Northampton City Council went on record urging our national leaders to pursue peaceful resolutions to threatened conflicts in Iraq and elsewhere; and

Whereas, since that time, the United States has entered into armed conflict resulting in the loss of more than 1,500 American soldiers' lives. Moreover, tens of thousands of American service men and women have been wounded and more than 100,000 Iraqis have died, and

Whereas, the ongoing conflict is producing widespread suffering on both sides of the conflict, and a deepening humanitarian crisis in Iraq, and

Whereas, Franklin Delano Roosevelt said in 1945, "The structure of world peace cannot be the work of one man, or one party, or one nation. It must be a peace which rests on the cooperative effort of the whole world,"

Now therefore, I, Mary Clare Higgins, Mayor of the City of Northampton and Michale R. Bardsley, President of the Northampton City Council, do hereby proclaim Sunday evening, March 20, 2005 as a time to honor the dead, the wounded and the suffering on all sides of this conflict, to reiterate our community's support for the men and women who are serving our country honorably, and to restate our commitment to work together as a community to urge our nation's leaders to work towards promoting peaceful resolutions to conflicts in every case possible.