No Time for Silence

 

The President’s newly announced budget this week ramps up an already bloated military budget. This is the popular and easy thing to do in a war-based culture. While the Russians brutally invade Ukraine, the drumbeats to beat ploughshares into swords intensifies in a war culture. To propose a more peaceable approach is to invite calls of emasculation, for the war culture is male dominant; just ask the myriad women in the military abused by their comrades. In a war culture, the heroes are the ones that destroy the enemy, even if the enemy they destroy is generally like them--young men asked to ”defend” their nation.

One doesn’t need to experience war firsthand to understand its horror. Certainly the impacts on those directly involved, whether soldier or civilian, are of another level entirely. Even the dubious winners of war leave with untold moral injuries that disrupt their lives forever and, for many, cause them to abruptly end it. In a war culture the fixation is on more weapons, more power, more soldiers that we are told will surely bring peace. History tells a different story, should we be willing to escape the glorification of war in film, parades, football halftime shows, recruitment videos and other realms of war culture and examine the data, as Erica Chenowith has.

Many in the peace community have counseled that contesting the growth in military spending during the atrocious Russian war against Ukraine is counterproductive.  If former general, and then President, Eisenhower could state the following during the Korean War (1953)

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 fifty miles of concrete pavement. 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.

Why, then, should peace-seeking believers in nonviolence shrink from calling for peace and military spending reductions? We expect ridicule from the pragmatists, realists and war profiteers that we are just so naïve. So be it. It is time to put the brakes on the war machine that is robbing our future in an unending theft of the resources needed to build a just and peaceful world for our children and grandchildren as Eisenhower warned.

Martin Luther King Jr. noted during the height of the Vietnam War, "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." Fittingly, this speech at the Riverside Church in New York City a year to the day before his death was subtitled “A Time to Break Silence.”

Let us stand with those brave members of Congress unafraid of being called “naïve” or worse – Bernie Sanders, Pramilya Jayapal, Barbara Lee and others--to break our own silence.  

For a better overview of the military spending debacle, read the Quincy Institute’s analysis of the new budget request by William Hartung  here. Or a broader look at the complexity through the eyes of energy expert Richard Heinberg today.

What Are the Chances?

 

What are the chances, that someone else on the planet is simultaneously reading David Gessner’s Quiet Desperation, Savage Delight: Sheltering with Thoreauin the Age of Crisis and Kelly Denton-Borhaug’s And Then Your Soul  Is Gone: Moral Injury and U.S. War-Culture? Slim to none I would wager.

The why is unclear, but the how was a trip, pre-heart-attack a couple of weeks ago, past the new book shelf. Gessner’s book had acclimations by others I admire – Scott Russell Sanders and Allison Hawthorn Deming. So let’s try it I thought. Denton-Borhaug’s tome’s title is what stirred my interest, perhaps enhanced by recollection of a book similarly found and read last year by Aussie philosopher Ned Dobos on Ethics, Security, and the War Machine: The True Cost of War. The recent invasion of Ukraine and its expansive media coverage (unlike Yemen war) has us hopefully thinking about the folly and ravages of war in a clearer light. 

 

I’d actually be surprised if more than a few hundred people worldwide are currently reading EITHER of these books. Why me? Why am I not sodden with compelling interest in the NCAA basketball tournaments, or upcoming Academy Awards, or even …? I admit to often feeling like a freak, misplaced in time and space, perhaps from another planet or dimension. What is the magnetic force that pulls me towards these authors, these books, these ideas? And they are each compelling.

 

 

Reading Gessner is simply delightful. One of those books I don’t want to end (300 pages read), 75 pages left as of this morning. It’s as if you are sitting with a friend on his front porch sharing a beer or two and talking about the world you share. No pretentions, just honest frank conversation and thinking out loud together. He weaves his rereading of Thoreau with living through the current pandemic and his own journey with nature, writing and living in our times. I suspected Ellen would relish his writing as well, and sure enough, she picks it up when I set it down. He’s become a voice we both want to hear more of.

 

Denton-Borhaug’s work is a deep dive that I’ve only skimmed the surface of thus far. You’d have to want to submerge yourself not only in questions of ethics, but also of psychology, sociology, and ultimately political issues. She is not a newcomer to wrestling with these issues. And she probes deep into not just the individual impacts but, perhaps most importantly, into the social and cultural violence that nurtures the violence and war obsessions of our culture. She doesn’t pull these thoughts out of thin air. With some 500 references that support the 225 pages of text she has poured herself into the subject. Assuming I complete this in the next few weeks, the real question is what will I do with it. I suspect, it may  nudge me to remain, if not re-energize my efforts, however seemingly futile, to abolish war. To turn away from the questions she raises seems a dereliction of duty.

Two more titles got added to the pile yesterday as once again I skimmed the new books at the MSU Library. Toby Ord’s The Precipe: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity and Lily Baum Pollans’ Resisting Garbage: The Politics of Waste Management in American Cities. Too soon to try and discern much from them. Although, I had seen a positive reference to Ord’s book in something recently read. Interesting that the 250 pages of text have 130 pages of notes, which should make for a literal ‘page-turner’. Pollan's title wrestles with my deep involvement in waste reduction. Hoping I learn something useful from both.