I'll admit to having mixed feelings about helping to organize the Peace Hub for an upcoming climate event in Portland, Maine on September 8. The event will coincide with events across the U.S. being styled as RISE for Climate, Jobs and Justice. This will be essentially a Democratic Party get out the vote effort as all such "resistance" is these days. It is also unfortunately in direct conflict with the date for the annual Changing Maine conference put on by Resources for Organizing Social Change. The theme of the 24th annual conference this year is "Exploring diversity of tactics in Maine movements" and I'm sure it, like other Changing Maine's I've attended, will be highly educational and worthwhile.
So why am I going to the DNC's climate event instead?
The easy answer would be because I said I would help organize the Peace Hub before I knew the date of Changing Maine. Keeping my commitments has been a star I've navigated by as the always recovering adult child of an alcoholic.
But also, as a peace activist my special area is communications. And a huge audience for the Peace Hub's central message -- that the Pentagon's carbon boot print is the biggest one on the planet -- will be present in Portland on September 8.
Young people care about climate change. They don't usually think or care much about U.S. wars around the globe. After the crash of '08 there was a flurry of interest in bringing our war dollars home but now the Pentagon building a $100 million drone base in Niger is barely a blip on the screen. Much more important to pay attention to the twitter account of the demagogue with bad hair.
So I'm going where the crowds are, holding our pre-march Peace Hub with Maka the dolphin, and VFP members from New York like Tarak Kauff, who is bringing some of the great banners his group has made about militarism and climate. I'm proud to help carry one of those messages.
As a coordinator for the Maine Natural Guard I'll join others helping people connect the militarism and climate change dots. I'm bringing a handout that I hope will reach hundreds or even thousands of people, Is Climate The Worst Casualty of War? by Stacey Bannerman. Her opening paragraph says it all:
How do you clear a room of climate activists? Start talking about war. It’s not just environmentalists that leave; it’s pretty much everyone. Mission accomplished by the Bush Administration, which sent the military and their families to war and the rest of the country to an amusement park. The military-civilian divide has been called an “epidemic of disconnection.” But the biosphere doesn’t see uniforms, and the environmental devastation caused by bombs, burn pits, and depleted uranium cannot be contained to a combat zone. We haven’t counted the massive carbon footprint of America’s endless wars because military emissions abroad have a blanket exemption from both national reporting requirements and the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. There will be no exemptions in the coming climate collapse.
We’ve all got skin in the war game now.
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