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King's Legacy: Americans Must Choose Between War And Social Progress |
Current rating: 0 |
by Mark Weisbrot
(No verified email address) |
05 Apr 2003
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In Memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, taken from us too soon, April 4, 1968
The level of domestic greed deemed acceptable during wartime has reached hitherto unheard of proportions. A cartoon by Mike Keefe of the Denver Post summed it up: two American soldiers are staggering through a sandstorm in the Iraqi desert, and one says to the other, "It could be worse -- we could be rich and only getting half the tax cut we expected." |
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Thirty-five years ago Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. Exactly one year before, on April 4, 1967, he had made one of the most fateful speeches of his life, denouncing the Vietnam War and calling on young men to resist the draft.
". . . I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitating its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube," he said.
"So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such."
These words proved to be prophetic. But as true as they were then, they are many times truer today. While George W. Bush was requesting $75 billion from Congress as a first installment for the war in Iraq, state governments were slashing billions from education and health care spending for the poor.
No one knows how much this war and subsequent occupation of Iraq will cost. Estimates of just the budgetary costs run into the hundreds of billions over the next few years. If we take into account the damage to our already fragile economy, it could reach trillions over the next decade.
It is easy to see how any efforts to help poor people -- whether through employment, health care, or even providing children with a decent education -- will be continually thwarted by military and security spending. This is even truer today than in King's time, because the whole center of gravity of budget politics has shifted drastically in the post-Reagan era.
Today Democratic leaders outflank Republicans from the right in calling for balanced budgets and fiscal conservatism. This extremism reached its peak a few years ago, when the federal government was running surpluses, and -- rather than try to solve any of our nation's festering problems -- President Clinton proposed to pay off the entire national debt.
At the same time, the level of domestic greed deemed acceptable during wartime has reached hitherto unheard of proportions. A cartoon by Mike Keefe of the Denver Post summed it up: two American soldiers are staggering through a sandstorm in the Iraqi desert, and one says to the other, "It could be worse -- we could be rich and only getting half the tax cut we expected."
In King's era the federal government enacted Medicare and Medicaid, bringing health care to millions of elderly and poor for the first time. The whole country, including the poor, experienced a rapid rise in living standards from 1946 to1973, despite the trillions of dollars wasted on the Cold War and two hot wars (Korea and Vietnam).
The Bush team aims to substitute an open- ended "war against terrorism," including pre- emptive and preventive wars, for the Cold War and "anti-communist" crusades of the past. But this time -- because of the institutional and political changes of the last two decades -- if their pretext for foreign intervention proves successful, there will be no accompanying social progress on the home front.
The last election also shows how militarism abroad hurts us at home. The Bush team used Iraq to win both houses of Congress for their party. Then they used Congress to continue their regressive domestic agenda. The war will provoke more terrorism, which can be used to justify more military spending and war, and the cycle can continue indefinitely.
It is natural to focus on the issues that one is committed to, and for King, too, it was not an easy choice to risk being diverted from his struggle for civil rights and against poverty. He knew that he would be vilified in the press for speaking out forcefully against the war, and he was.
But King was also a moral leader, and was repulsed by what he called an "evil, unjust war" and an "attempt at re-colonization" of Vietnam. "They must see Americans as strange liberators," he said. "So far we have killed a million of them - - mostly children."
Three and a half decades later, the moral choice we face is -- more than ever before -- also a political and economic choice. Anyone who cares about the one-sixth of our children who grow up in poverty, or the 41 million Americans without health insurance, must also oppose this war. They will have to help force our political leaders to abandon their imperial ambitions, and their wars for "regime change" in selected countries. Or they can forget about making this country a better place to live.
Mark Weisbrot is a former resident of Urbana and is Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington D.C. (www.cepr.net)
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Poverty, Military Service Seem To Go Hand-in-Hand |
by Roy MacGregor
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
05 Apr 2003
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PALESTINE, W. VA. -- This spring, yellow is the color of choice in the Appalachians.
The forsythia is in full bloom in the high hills north of Charleston. There are dandelions lining the ditches and daffodils growing wild along the clear creeks that empty down into the muddy Kanawha River. In the little town of Elizabeth and the even smaller Palestine, there are yellow ribbons around every telephone pole, yellow bows on most of the trailers that speckle the rolling hills and even the odd yellow wreath on the broken-down vehicles that pass for landscaping in this desperately poor country they call hardscrabble.
There is a story here of prayers being answered -- a story they are calling The Miracle in the Hills.
But there is also the harsher story of the reality of hills -- and of sometimes not even having much of a prayer.
Most houses and trailers have some yellow, but only one house -- three kilometers up Mayberry Run Road where the pavement gives way to gravel and visiting cars had better give way to logging trucks -- is surrounded by yellow police tape.
The simple, small, tin-roofed house with the backhoe in the front yard and chickens bobbing along the side belongs to Gregory Lynch and wife, Deadra. It is a house also surrounded this past week by satellite trucks and television cameras in search of any word on America's newest hero, 19-year-old U.S. Army Private Jessica Lynch.
Gregory Lynch, a 43-year-old self-employed trucker, wears a faded blue-checked shirt, jeans and work boots, and periodically walks within range of the yellow tape, limping badly on his right leg. The television reporters, hair perfect, suits pressed, hurry to see if he will say anything.
He has nothing to say this day, the story already known, the images everywhere from the front pages to the tree at the end of the lane with a poster of Jessica in full uniform, looking dainty and far less threatening than the light rain that sends the television reporters and their hair racing for the broadcast trucks.
Such signs are everywhere in Wirt County. And dozens of other signs hang from the churches and buildings of this deeply religious county: "Thank You God for Saving Jessica," "Praise the Lord for Answered Prayers."
Down at The What-Not Shop in Palestine, three older men -- one a Second World War combat veteran, one a Vietnam veteran, one a veteran who fought no war -- say they never gave up hope that the teenager would be rescued.
She had been missing in action since March 23, when her unit took a wrong turn near the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah and ran into an ambush. She was dramatically rescued from a Nasiriyah hospital on Tuesday. The fate of her fellow missing soldiers from the 507th Maintenance Company is still unknown.
"We knew she'd be back," says Harry Hemmick, who served in the armed forces in the 1970s. He says he's known Jessica since the day her parents brought her home.
"This is a praying community," says Ron Pettry, the Vietnam veteran, adding he's known her since she first began crawling.
"One hurts, we all hurt" says Clifford Reynolds, the Second World War veteran who admits he doesn't know Jessica, but "I know her daddy, and I knew her grand-daddy, and I even knew her great-grand-daddy."
All three have something else in common with her. They saw the military as a way out of circumstance, an opportunity not to be passed up. It is no surprise to any of them that Jessica Lynch joined up the same day as her 21-year-old brother, Greg, and no surprise that her 18-year-old sister, Brandi, has also signed up and will report for duty in August.
That's just the way it has always gone in Wirt County.
"There's no jobs around here," Pettry says. "There's no employment. Most of them go into the service because they know the government will pay well and they'll come out of it with some training."
"There has never been a lot of work here," adds Reynolds. "People who didn't leave during the Depression are still stuck in the Depression if they stayed."
There has long been a link between poverty and the U.S. military, even between poverty and heroism. The last great American war hero -- winner of the Medal of Honor in the Second World War -- was Texas's Audie Murphy, the sixth of nine children born to sharecroppers so poor the family often lived in abandoned boxcars.
Jessica Lynch is unique in that she is a teenager and a woman, and not even the military can figure out the last time an American PoW was rescued.
But she is also from a poor background, and in that she is not unique at all.
The song from the musical Hair suggested that Vietnam was "white people sending black people to fight yellow people to protect the country they stole from red people," but the lyrics are not entirely accurate.
The popular myth is that blacks died in far greater proportions in Vietnam than whites, but while this was true in the early stages of the ground war, by war's end, blacks had suffered 12.5 per cent of the total deaths in Vietnam, slightly less than their proportion in the overall population.
Today, there are 1.4 million Americans in the military and the Pentagon maintains that the demographics are quite representative of the population as a whole, especially given the increasing number of Hispanics who have joined in recent years.
A strong sense remains, however, that the poor soldiers so vastly outnumber the well-off that New York Democratic Representative Charles Rangel has said: "It's just not fair that the people that we ask to fight our wars are people who join the military because of economic conditions, because they have fewer options."
Oddly enough, Jessica's sudden fame has brought some trappings of wealth -- offers of new cars, college scholarships -- but the experience has been rather overwhelming to the Lynches.
"They are exhausted," U.S. military spokesman Randy Coleman says, coming to the end of the lane to talk.
There was some hint that the family would be flown to Germany to be with Jessica as she recovers in hospital, but the complications were now more on this side of the ocean than the other: the family, for one, would need passports.
"They're nervous," Coleman says. "If they fly, they're flying for the first time."
No wonder the story of Jessica Lynch has so immediately become the stuff of legend -- soon, surely, the stuff of Hollywood.
Earlier reports this week quoted officials saying Lynch had sustained "multiple gunshot wounds" and had been stabbed as she "fought fiercely and shot several enemy soldiers . . . firing her weapon until she ran out of ammunition."
The Washington Post quoted one official saying, "She was fighting to the death" and had no intention of being taken alive.
The story, unfortunately for the movie, turns out to be untrue. Her father spoke to her by telephone from Germany, where she was airlifted for treatment on an injured spine and broken legs, and he quietly told reporters there had been no gunshot wounds or stabbing.
No matter, she was still a hero, and nothing like this had ever before happened to Wirt County.
"We weren't even on the map before this happened," Pettry says.
But they certainly are now, with badly folded road maps on the seat of every reporter's car lined up and down Mayberry Run Road.
All the interest delights Alice Coplin, who pasted Jessica Lynch's picture over the front door of her yellow-ribboned trailer, and who says this rescue was the answer to the prayers of an entire community that doesn't get much but has so much to give.
"And did you see the forsythia as you came along?" she asks.
"I don't think I've ever seen it so lovely as it is this year."
© 2003 Bell Globemedia Interactive Inc
http://www.globeandmail.ca/ |
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