Half of democracy is about just showing up—informed people showing up to vote, to rallies, marches, demonstrations, to give testimony, attend action meetings for schools, to partake in community protection, advance civil rights, improve health care, and work for peace. But most people don’t show up, even though it doesn’t take all that much time or money and there is no one to stop them. Politicians pander to us with slogans, flatter us for doing nothing about their behavior. Do we need to lull ourselves with shrugging cynicism or other rationalizations for apathy? Too much can go wrong for our country if we don’t apply some “tough love” and get our friends and neighbors going. So much goodness, well-being, fulfillment, and foresight are ours for the asking if we dedicate our values in those directions.
Democracy does take some work. Democracy does take a no-excuses attitude, a positive refusal to become discouraged. The reverse option is to continue losing more and more control over most everything that matters to us outside or inside the home. Don’t you want to have a voice in the matters that affect the living conditions of you and your family? Injustice hurts and shuts you out. Justice helps and lets you in.
The first step is to decide how much time we’re going to devote to what irks us. Here again is a loss of control—“I just don’t know where the time has gone,” or “I just don’t have the time.” We’re pulled in all directions by the time-takers—waiting on the phone for a simple answer; stuck in bumper-to-bumper commuter traffic; taking things to be repaired; negotiating suburban sprawl; ferrying kids and going to appointments; trying to figure out our bills, which seem to be in code; and above all, having to work longer and longer on the job or jobs to pay those bills. Americans work on average longer than French workers who have a shorter work week, longer paid vacations, childcare, paid sick leave, and health insurance.
The good news is that time can be managed and liberated for what we decide is important. You have probably formed some distinct impressions about Congress, enough perhaps to turn you off in dismay or disgust, though you may like your own Representative. You’ve heard story after story of how many of these politicians—not all—grovel to raise campaign cash, called “legalized bribery” by David Brinkley. How many elected officials wallow in cowardliness when they should be standing tall, how many are always alert to raising their pay and expanding their benefits, and perfecting their charming ways of sweet-talking the public? How many push for one-party redistricts? There are 535 members of Congress (435 Representatives and 100 Senators). Only ten or so put their voting record on the web in a clear retrievable fashion. The rest have declined all such requests by voters and citizen groups.
Now suppose one early summer evening, a person knocked on your door and introduced himself this way: “Hi, I’m your new neighbor. Just wanted you to know that I spend over 20 percent of your income, can raise your taxes while lowering taxes on corporations and the wealthy, can send your children off to war, and can let special commercial interests gouge and harm you and your family. See you later.”
What would you do? Express umbrage at his interruption that is preventing you from watching a rerun of Cheers? Or would you say, “Hey, come back here, you mean something to me, so I better mean something to you!” That person is your member of Congress.
Presently, about 1,500 large corporations control or block most of the votes of most members of Congress on very important matters. It is not beyond the realm of realization to look forward to a time when a few million modestly organized Americans, representing the values of much greater numbers of their fellow Americans, turn the national legislature into a Congress of the people, by the people, and for the people.
The most effective way to begin this process is to cut the reins of commercial campaign contributions that presently restrain members of Congress and direct them toward further concentration of greed and power in ever fewer hands. “Campaign finance reform” has to be one of the most dull and yet most important phrases in our language. It was Thomas Jefferson who said that “of all the mischiefs, none is so afflicting and fatal to every honest hope as the corruption of the legislature.” Two hundred years later, Senator Robert C. Byrd (Dem-WV) said, “It is Money! Money! Money! Not ideas, not principles, but money that reigns supreme in American politics!” All along, a hefty majority of the people have wanted some kind of campaign finance reform and many nonvoters cite the corruption of dirty money in elections as a reason why they do not vote.
Still, the dull phrase is utterly too vague to bring home the intimate and cruel effects on people’s lives. As Will Rogers quipped, “Congress is the best money can buy.” For years, I’ve seen the way cash register politics works against you. Hundreds of drug industry lobbyists prowl the halls of Congress. Their industry PACS contribute tens of millions of dollars to key legislators, and you pay higher prices for medicines and medical devices. Your tax dollars fund new drug development that the National Institutes of Health gives away to drug companies, which charge you staggering prices for new medicines they received free. You pay.
HMOs and large hospital chains send checks to Congress and our country continues to be the only western democracy without universal health insurance. Nothing is done by our government about tens of thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of serious injuries from medical malpractice in hospitals. Little effort is devoted to law enforcement against the looting of Medicare and Medicaid using unscrupulous over-billings and phantom services that total tens of billions of dollars yearly. You pay.
Auto manufacturers and their dealers have locked up with lucre those members of the House and Senate who block improved auto safety, fuel efficiency and pollution standards. You pay. The oil, gas, coal, and nuclear industries spread their dollars around Congress and between the political parties. In return, they deny you solar energy and an energy efficient economy, make you subsidize them with your taxes, get us embroiled in overseas turmoil, and expose you to their continued toxic pollutants. You pay.
The giant military weapons companies work Capitol Hill with a commercial intensity second to none. The result is redundant and immensely wasteful munitions, planes, ships, and missiles, most of which come in way above budget. Your tax dollars subsidize sales of many such weapons to repressive regimes abroad. You can’t get community programs—such as education, clinics, public transit, drinking water upgrades, public libraries—funded because military budgets are rapacious. You pay. Uncle Sam is turned into one giant corporate welfare paymaster for the Molochs of Big Business. And we pay because we are not organized to have a say for our country’s future and a say for our own or our children’s well-being.
So the few decide for the many and, not surprisingly, the few put themselves first. Nothing new here. When the people are not organized to transmit and reflect their demands on a regular basis, the organized few prevail. Mass media exposés of the nexus between money, lobbyists, and members of Congress engaged in wrongdoing may produce temporary squirming, but then it is back to normal. For the very people charged with maintaining political law and order are indebted to this dirty money system, and they’re not likely to self-prosecute or change the system.
The book End Legalized Bribery by retired member of Congress from Hawaii, Cecil Heftel, has on its cover a picture of Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich shaking hands at a “town hall” meeting in New Hampshire on June 11, 1995. At the event, a citizen, Frank MacConnell, asked them if they would form a blue-ribbon panel to produce a plan to reform the nation’s campaign finance system. With the national broadcast media looking on, both men quickly agreed. Heftel burnishes the words THEY LIED under the picture, because nothing came of that handclasp. Heftel then devotes a hundred and thirty-five readable pages to laying the basis for his Clean Money Campaign Reform with free access to television and radio time for those ballot qualified candidates who agree to receive public monies, and avoid all private money except small contributions to demonstrate some popular support and serious intent.
This little book offers a galvanizing narration of the outrages corporate lobbyists inflict on regular Americans, conducting what reporters Jeffery Birnbaum and Alan Murray, writing for the Wall Street Journal, called a nightly sale with the members of Congress as the merchandise. As I read it, I recalled previous sterling denunciations of the dirty money system corroding our democratic processes written in the 1980s and 1990s by Elizabeth Drew, Philip Stern, Brooks Jackson, Donald L. Barlett, and James B. Steele. Nonetheless, the money race continued to worsen, with more politicians dialing for the same business dollars with frenzied diligence. When you ask the members of Congress about the monetized life they lead, most express disgust with the “whole rotten system,” as one put it. Yet, they are the legislators who can do something major to stop what a congressional staffer called “the rat race of rot and roll.”
When corruption is so institutionalized that it becomes a way of life, though sometimes distasteful to its predators (some of whom feel they are being shaken down) and to its practitioners, many voters just shrug their shoulders in resignation and conclude that “the system is rigged.” Well, not quite. Senator William Proxmire (D-Wisc.) was elected again and again without asking for any campaign contributions. He would spend a few hundred dollars just for postage to mail back unsolicited donations that dribbled into his campaign office. Of course, it helped that he would literally walk all over the state of Wisconsin, hold more hearings than almost anyone, listen to the people, watchdog government waste, and vote in a progressive manner.
Proxmire is long retired and his example is not around to set the standard of proper behavior that is possible when you represent the people first. Heftel quotes Thomas Paine who wrote, “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of right.” Certainly, Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) thinks that money is free speech and that not nearly enough is spent on campaigns. According to McConnell, campaigns should go unregulated except for the stipulation that donations be disclosed. He neglects the fact that money can suppress the speech of those who don’t have enough of it even to compete on a level playing field, or to attract more media and respectable poll numbers. These gravitate to those with the most money so that small starts based on character, integrity, and honesty, as Heftel points out, do not have a chance to have a chance. He points out that public financing costing “$6.50 per citizen per year is all it would take to own our democracy.” He also notes that “two or three dollars would do the trick for state elections.” The present seaminess costs citizens hundreds of billions of dollars a year—the cost of neglected health, injuries, fraud, crime, and aggravation.
I have always been fascinated by the intense interest and time that people invest in their hobbies. As a youngster, I poured hours into collecting stamps and playing chess. Years later, I wondered why the joys of civic activity are not seen by more people as a kind of hobby. One day I opened the New York Times to read that a bird with a Western European habitat had been sighted in a New Jersey marsh. The exciting news spread to birdwatchers all over the mid-Atlantic region and they responded by getting in their cars, boarding trains, buses, and planes to the Garden State for the rare opportunity to catch a glimpse of their intrepid feathered friend. What if, I mused in a moment of fantasy, the bird took off, flew south and alighted on the Capital dome of the Congress, pursued by legions of birdwatchers? They might take time to enjoy a brief stint at “Congress watching.” Certainly, we need that.
Several hundred Congress Watchers in each congressional district—well-linked, marshalling the votes, statements, financing, and other activities of their senators and representatives for astute diffusion among the 500,000 or so residents of each congressional district—would do wonders for responsive politics. Holding vibrant accountability sessions between citizens and their members of Congress, attended by the media, would keep legislators’ feet on the ground and their pockets clean. Easy slogans would go out the windows before the probes and proposals of their informed constituents. Participants in this watchdog club could inform their neighbors what a little public investment of their time can produce, how it can replace the private investment of the corporate lobbyists that have turned Congress into a bustling bazaar of giveaways to those who are paying the pipers. Ending what Heftel called a system of campaign finance laws that promotes “begging, bribery, and extortion” will attract much better and more honest candidates for public office who want to get things done and do not want to get their hands dirty by demanding money that carries a quid pro quo. As the grassroots strength of the Congress Watchers increases, you’d see changes in the legislators’ record and attentiveness to subjects and directions that the big boys of business do not welcome. Watching the muscle of the people turn the Congress in their direction would be a lot of fun, an exercise in the politics of joy and justice.
All the above may still not arouse you because it doesn’t connect with your temperament. Let me try another approach. Once upon a time there were mothers who lost their children in car crashes due to drunk drivers. One day in 1980, Candace Lightner lost her teenage daughter to a drunk driver. She got mad, real mad. Mad enough, she says, to seek justice and revenge. So she started MADD, or Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which took off like a rocket. Nationwide, thousands of other mothers joined her to pass or toughen laws against drunk driving and get them enforced. Mothers who lost their beloved children did not have to be tutored in motivation. They had their unrelenting grief to propel them to action. All over America, relatives of victims swing into action after tragedies stemming from defective products, dozing truck drivers, street crime, contaminated blood, toxics around homes, E-coli contaminated meat.
If you are not driven to action by tragedy, yet another approach is available. Ask yourself what really sparks your indignation among the assortment of injustices you view on television, hear on radio, or read in newspapers and magazines? Let one example make this point. Whether you stood for or against the invasion and occupation of Iraq, compare the way the Bush government treats the men and women on active duty with the way it treats Halliburton and other corporate profiteers from this war. Reservists and National Guard members find that their incomes are lower, some far lower. Lower-rank enlistees need food stamps. Their self-employed businesses are shaky or crumbling in their absence. The National Consumer Law Center reports in its study “In Harm’s Way—at Home” that “scores of consumer-abusing businesses directly target this country’s active-duty military men and women daily.” Some in the National Guard are so hard-pressed that they have lost their homes or had their furniture repossessed. Barbara Ehrenreich writes that charities have started to “help families on U.S military bases, like the church-based Feed the Children, which delivers free food and personal items to families at twelve bases.”
Many of the troops in a volunteer army come from the ranks of the working poor. The poor have always fought the wars, starting with George Washington’s army. While George W. Bush is busy transferring more wealth to the super rich using tax cuts and corporate welfare, the children of military personnel receive less funding for their base schools. Veterans’ disability benefits are subtracted from the military retirement pay of soldiers.
Enraging veterans further, Bush’s 2005 budget asks Congress to increase veterans’ drug co-payments and institute an “enrollment fee” that veterans’ groups believe will drive about 200,000 veterans out of the VA system and discourage many more from enrolling. This is the same shameless chicken hawk, George W. Bush, who frequently takes Air Force One to military bases in the United States to pose with soldiers for one photo opportunity after another to feed to a compliant media. However, the “pause and run” photo opportunist has refused to go to Dover, Delaware to pay his respects to the returning dead, those who gave their young lives to his illegal, fabricated war in the quicksands and alleys of Iraq. No news photographers or camera teams are allowed at the Dover base by this administration. Old and new veterans are beginning to filter out Bush flattery and flag-waving to cut to the core of what Bush is doing to them in the hard reality of programs and budget cuts while far greater government deficits are registered to reduce taxes for big companies and the rich. How’s your dander when you learn about what Bush does in contrast to what he says? Ready to show up?
If you’re poor, you may feel too busy dealing every day with your travails to think about showing up. Well, prepare to be poorer every day. Earlier, I mentioned that your minimum wage buys three dollars less (adjusted for inflation) then the minimum wage did in 1968. Sounds like too many poor Americans are falling behind…every day. Have you heard of ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, www.acorn.org)? It is a citizen action group composed of low-and moderate-income people. In November 2000, they issued a report called “Separate and Unequal” on predatory lending in America—something that was criminal through the 1960s before most of the state usury laws were repealed in the 1970s under pressure from the financial industries.
The world of predatory lending among lower income minorities and poor Whites is little known to the rest of America. Signing on the dotted line of such a fine-print contract is routine for the down and out so that the law itself becomes an instrument of oppression used by the loan sharks. Although the variety of gouging and deception takes different forms depending on the type of case and place involved. ACORN reports about the (often Wall Street-financed) predatory lenders going to work on Mason and Josie, “an elderly African American couple who have excellent credit and whose primary source of income is Mason’s veteran’s benefits. Their mortgage was at a 7 percent interest rate when a broker convinced them to consolidate some credit cards into the mortgage.” The new mortgage for $99,000 carried an interest rate of 8.4 percent and the broker added a second mortgage for $17,000 at an interest rate of 13 percent. The first mortgage built in nearly $6,000 in broker and third-party fees. Both loans included prepayment penalties. Then the broker applied a series of confusing payment schedules so that his customers were not aware that both loans required balloon payments after 15 years. ACORN concludes that “after making monthly payments of nearly $950 over the next fifteen years, Mason and Josie will face a balloon payment for $93,000.”
ACORN and other neighborhood groups become more effective when more of the residents in the areas they are defending become active participants. This leads to a central point in civic action. A large percentage of the causes you may decide to advance are already the mission of existing local, state, national, or international nonprofit advocacy organizations that will welcome you with open arms. Their web sites are easy to locate. There are manuals and books on organizing, advocating, and strategies that work. Why reinvent the wheel when your engagement can make existing ones move faster and better?
Sometimes, there are no precursors. The massacre of September 11, 2001, was without precedent and the grief-stricken families of the fallen had to start from scratch to secure an independent investigation. While President Bush focused on the television airwaves toward Afghanistan, the families began organizing to discover what went on in our government that failed to prevent the attacks on that fateful day. Washington officialdom was initially not interested. The White House was cool to a proposed independent investigative commission. A small number of families, led by four widows, became increasingly persistent and the mass media conveyed their determination. The politicians always have trouble saying NO to the bereaved, which is one reason they do not like to have them testify in Congress. The bereaved speak from their hearts and minds; their only proxies are their conscience and their quest for truth.
For months they knocked on congressional doors, took their case to officials in the executive branch, located outside allies and refused to take NO for an answer. They cited commissions created to investigate previous calamities in American history. Finally, President Bush relented and appointed five Republican and five Democratic members to the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States. The Commission will make its final report at the end of July 2004, after a series of highly publicized public hearings and private sessions in search of the facts and the most effective recommendations. In the audience, carefully monitoring the proceedings, were the families of 9/11, secure in their belief that had they not stood for justice, there would have been no such commission. Our country owes them an immeasurable debt of gratitude.
Now, it is time to hear from the families of other lost sons and daughters, the families of the maimed—those without legs or arms, the blind and seriously ill, who fill the wards of Walter Reed Army Hospital and other military hospitals. Some of these bereaved Americans hold George W. Bush responsible for an illegal, unnecessary war in Iraq based on fabrications and deceptions. Who can forget seeing the weeping father from Baltimore wailing, “President Bush, you took my only son.” A war unlike other wars, launched against the public opposition of retired generals and admirals, former intelligence and diplomatic officials, now free to speak out. A war against the private advice of many inside the CIA, the U.S. Army and the State Department, below the level of Bush’s compliant political appointees.
The “glory” of war always precedes its reality. And a war intended to be a political distraction from problems at home, a political chilling of the president’s opposition, and a source for oil and gas resources, given to the president’s corporate contributors, is particularly rancid and reckless. Such actions are impeachable. Howard Zinn, who was an honorably discharged bombardier in World War II, began thinking about how little is devoted to preventing war and how much blood and treasure are devoted to fighting it on the backs of the GIs who are only ordered but never asked.
Zinn, a historian who taught for many years at Boston University, has chronicled “the betrayal of the very ones sent to kill and die in wars.” This year he tells the story of twenty-four-year-old Jeremy Feldbusch, a sergeant in the Army Rangers, who was blinded when a shell exploded 100 feet away near a dam along the Euphrates River in Iraq. His hometown of Blairsville, Pennsylvania, an old coal mining town of 3, 600, gave him a parade. His father, sitting by his bed, said: “Maybe God thought you had seen enough killing.” Ruth Aitken lost her son, an Army captain in Iraq a few days after the invasion. Before he disembarked, she called it a war for oil. “He was doing his job,” his mother said, “but it makes me mad that this whole war was sold to the American public and to the soldiers as something it wasn’t.” Cowboy Bush’s “Bring ’em on” bravado in July 2003, from the comforts of the Oval Office, infuriated many of these families. One mother of a soldier in Iraq told a television reporter “Bring ’em on? Expose more of our soldiers? My son may be next.”
With one of the largest rotations of troops to and from Iraq underway, there will be many eyewitness accounts conveyed to millions of Americans in millions of conversations. Many of them will no longer be dazzled by the political abuse of patriotic symbols, nor will they respect exhortations about fighting for freedom, democracy, and security in a faraway tortured land that we now know possessed no imminent threat to the United States or its allies. What they may not appreciate at first is that they possess the most powerful assets to end a quagmire that breeds more terrorists and hatred throughout the impoverished Islamic world. Those assets are their sacrifice and their credibility, having been in the sands and streets and alleys of Iraq. The chicken hawks in and around the White House, who have been proven wrong by their own weapons inspectors, emissaries, and “embedded” reporters, may have the formal power. The soldiers and their families have the moral power. Once aroused, this moral power can overwhelm the political manufacturers of this war and the exploitative corporations that feed avariciously on lucrative wartime contracts.
The soldiers and their families can rescue our nation, its young men and women, and its resources that could be applied here at home. They need only to heed the call of their own authentic patriotism and organize, organize, organize. It could come quickly because they will have no problem securing the media’s rapt attention. It cannot come quickly enough, however, for the rounds of casualties, horror, pain, irreversible anguish for both the American and Iraqi peoples are mounting. It cannot come quickly enough to stop the policy boomerangs or, in the CIA word used by Chalmers Johnson, “blowbacks” against the security and other best interests of our country. Already, in spite of contrary pressures, there are solidarities forming among the parents who lost their children. They are thinking about ways to exercise their freedom to speak their minds and to stand for their country, so grievously betrayed by the arrogance of political rulers in the White House whom a majority of American voters rejected at the polls.
These families, once they take the lead, will be supported by tens of millions of Americans from all backgrounds and counseled by many retired military and diplomatic officials whose dire predictions and warnings before the invasion of Iraq are coming true with appalling consequences. They feared a trap was facing our government in Iraq and a multiple trap of fearsome proportions it has become. Chicken hawks Bush and Cheney sent American soldiers to Iraq, often without key protective equipment and adequate supplies of drinking water. All the while the two bosses were going from one fat-cat multimillion dollar fund raiser to another, selling out our country’s political institutions. In the meantime, our soldiers are stuck in a whirlwind of violence, disease, and deprivation in Iraq, with low morale and no exit strategy. A reporter said to a soldier, “What would you ask of your president?” The soldier replied, “I would ask for his resignation.”
It takes some doing to turn a world that was demonstrating support for America after 9/11 into a world that is aghast and hostile to the messianic unilateral militarism of George W. Bush and his chronically prevaricating vice president, Dick Cheney—a man who repeatedly expounds on television what is not the case. He does this so often that he is becoming an object of ridicule inside the Beltway. As one civil servant said, “He makes even Republican eyes roll.”
The present Bush regime refuses to listen to knowledgeable and experienced people who fought in wars and who believe its current policies are endangering the United States and undermining the struggle against stateless terrorism everywhere. We must ask Mr. Bush, “isn’t it time for you to learn what these patriotic Americans and the families of the fallen think by meeting with them? You’ve dodged them long enough, and since you have been wrong and they have been right, you should adopt some of that humility you promised voters in the campaign of 2000.”
George W. Bush ran during the 2000 campaign as the “responsibility” candidate. He said again and again before large audiences that individuals should be held responsible for their public policy actions. His counterterrorism advisor in the White House, Richard Clarke, resigned and later appeared on 60 Minutes in March 2004, stating that the Bush administration repeatedly gave the impression that Saddam Hussein was involved in the attacks of September 11. Clarke, a highly regarded long-time civil servant under four presidents, uttered these words: “The White House carefully manipulated public opinion, never quite lied, but gave the very strong impression that Iraq did it. They know better. We told them. The CIA told them. The FBI told them. They did know better. And the tragedy here is that Americans went to their death in Iraq thinking they were avenging September 11, when Iraq had nothing to do with September 11. I think for a commander-in-chief and a vice president to allow that to happen is unconscionable.” Clarke was speaking for thousands of knowledgeable civil servants and military personnel in the Bush administration who can not speak out.
In his book Against All Enemies, Clarke wrote: “Far from addressing the popular appeal of the enemy that attacked us, Bush handed that enemy precisely what it wanted and needed, proof that America was at war with Islam, that we were the new crusaders come to occupy Muslim land.”
“Nothing America could have done would have provided al Qaeda and its new generation of cloned groups a better recruitment device than our unprovoked invasion of an oil-rich Arab country. Nothing else could have so well negated all our other positive acts and so closed Muslim eyes and ears to our subsequent calls for reform in their region. It was as if Osama bin Laden, hidden in some high mountain redoubt, were engaging in long-range mind control of George Bush, chanting, ‘Invade Iraq, you must invade Iraq.’ ” So wrote Richard Clarke.
Before the National Commission on the September 11 attack, Clarke testified that “By invading Iraq, the president of the United States has greatly undermined the war on terrorism.” Coming from an acknowledged hawk, his words elicited a moment of silence from the panel.
Perhaps it is time for candidate John Kerry to repeat the question that Naval Captain John Kerry put to the Senate Committee in April 1971 when he returned from combat duty in Vietnam: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”
The horrors of wars have prompted some of our most celebrated generals to construct broader frames of reference after retirement. Consider the newly elected President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s famous “cross of iron” address in April 1953 to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. The context for his remarks was the eight years of tension with the nuclear-armed Soviet Union and its policy of dominating its neighbors. Eisenhower was searching for a peaceful world beyond what he called “the worst to be feared and the best to be expected.” He portrayed the confines of the present world situation this way: “The worst is atomic war. The best would be this: a life of perpetual fear and tension; a burden of arms draining the wealth and the labor of all peoples; a wasting of strength that defies the American system or the Soviet system or any system to achieve true abundance and happiness for the peoples of this earth.” Then, he provided a contrast which is rarely drawn by our political leaders today, much less the voracious military weapons corporations for which no military budget is ever large enough. Eisenhower’s understanding of consequences invites careful attention to his prescient statement a half century ago:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This, I repeat is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. Is there no other way the world may live?
It behooves us to listen more to the post-World War II assessments of some of our leading generals, such as George C. Marshall who advanced the uplifting of living standards in Europe to forestall another monstrous dictatorship. Or Douglas MacArthur, who in 1957 warned Americans about the exaggerations of threats by the U.S. government and its defense industries in order to increase military budgets.
Generals, after they have engaged in bloody battles, sometimes acquire a wisdom not within the reach of chicken hawks who let others fight the wars they supported. Remember Vietnam. What would Eisenhower say today about the massive number of world-destroying weapons in our government stockpile, enough to blow up the planet three hundred times and make the rubble bounce? What would he say about the world’s $3 billion a day on military budgets, nearly half by the United States alone, while 50,000 infants and small children die each day in the world from entirely preventable or easily curable diseases?
Unlike revolution, the relentless erosion of peoples’ standards of living and of fairness does not proceed with sirens or clarion calls. The very nature of an eroding democratic culture is its insidiousness, its exclusion from the visible indicators of the governing and oligarchic rulers. It comes like Carl Sandburg’s fog “on little cat feet”:
I’d like to remind George W. Bush about Gandhi’s “seven deadly social sins:”
I would add two more:
“We are ready,” Eisenhower concluded, “to dedicate our strength to serving the needs, rather than the fears, of the world.”
It is time to define patriotism as a stand for justice, recalling the ringing final words of the pledge of allegiance: “with liberty and justice for all.”