Domestic Insecurity

One in five children in the U.S. officially live in poverty now. In cities, the figure climbs to as high as two out of five. How shameful this seems to me, in light of the money pouring out of our pockets and into the highly profitable business of war. In Charlottesville, VA, for example, taxpayers will be asked to contribute $63.3 million to the Pentagon budget, which would provide 27,933 low-income kids with health care next year.

The mainstream press is increasingly taking notice of the high costs of endless war, as if it had taken a decade to wake up and smell the red ink. Many who don't believe in social progress are joining the antiwar chorus. They don't want to save money in order to, for instance, give 6,414 university students scholarships for a year -- they just want to save money, period.

But how will young people ever pull themselves up by the proverbial bootstraps if they can't read and write competently? For the two decades I've been a public school teacher, every national assessment of future needs concludes that, to compete successfully for the dwindling number of jobs available, students will need at least a high school diploma plus some kind of post-secondary training. Yet public education, chronically underfunded for decades, is again on the chopping block -- with schools closing, teachers laid off, and class sizes climbing. University tuition is skyrocketing from New York to California. Summer job training programs for youth were also cut in lots of the most economically disadvantaged places. (As had been done also in London, Liverpool and Manchester, with riotous results.)

Food insecurity is already at the doorstep of many who thought they were educated enough, or secure enough -- homeowners with careers that brought the elusive health care benefits, suddenly laid off after decades, unable to find a job in their field. Students with enormous debt from their college degrees, working for minimum wage at jobs with no benefits, barely able to make the rent and their education loan payments. Families who had a member with a disease or injury they could ill afford, in foreclosure. Soup kitchens and food cupboards are swamped like never before. And the federal food stamp program, morphed into something called SNAP, now takes weeks or months to apply for.

The federal government's response? Start practicing for urban warfare, apparently. The Jamaica Plain Gazette reported that the U.S. Special Operations Command landed a military helicopter on the roof of a closed elementary school after dark last week in a poor residential area of Boston. No notice was given to the alarmed neighbors, watching men in combat gear descend onto the roof of the building where their children used to go to school.

“We’re from Special Operations,” (spokeswoman) Tiscione acknowledged, referring to the umbrella organization of all four military branches’ special forces. “I’m kind of being vague on purpose. It’s more of a challenge for us when people know who we are.”

(Hey, aren't they the same Special Ops reported to  be carrying out assassinations and renditions in 70 countries worldwide -- without any Congressional oversight?)

Domestic insecurity*, indeed. What are people to do? Burning down buildings doesn't solve much and leaves a poor neighborhood even poorer. Some young people are getting organized, mobbing sites of police brutality like BART subway stations in San Francisco-- and having their cell phones shut down by authorities (but that's another story).

Then there are vibrant cultural responses to rage. CODEPINK's campaign to Create, Note Hate supports artful expressions of what ten years of "war on terror" has brought, and what alternatives might look, sound and feel like, part of a national effort called 10 Years and Counting. Maybe you could get a few hundred friends together and create a dance expressing your yearning for the opportunities offered by higher education like these college students in Chile:

You could write a book, like Buggy, the young adult novel I co-authored about about the poverty draft, and what really turns kids on. You can read a sample on Amazon.


You could help occupy Freedom Plaza in DC this October 6 and beyond. You could organize a Bring Our War $$ Home Care-a-Van to tour your state, finding out what budget cuts have done to your neighborhoods, and how small those are in comparison to the funds lavished on building weapons.

You could study and teach about nonviolent methods of effecting change. Because children living in poverty need ALL of us to pull together and create a better future for the world.

* Domestic Insecurity is a name I lifted from my creative friends the Three Monkeys Art Collective, from their 2004 installation at Fitchburg Art Museum. Grateful for the artists!

PINK for Peace in Yemen

Gene Sharp would be proud. This is just the sort of strategy he would approve of, based on my reading of his studies of nonviolent methods.

PINK to signify ☮ -- what a great idea!

Apparently in order to signal that they are committed to nonviolent protest, the crowds that have now come out in Yemen calling for an end to corrupt government have pink signs and sashes. Who knew my favorite color would turn up in the bread intifada spreading from Tunisia to Algeria to Egypt, and now to Yemen.

Video here on facebook  

Anti-government rallies hit Yemen - Middle East - Al Jazeera English

With the U.S. Department of Homeland Security giving up on its color coded terror threats alerting you to the correct level of fear for each day, Codepink is reaching a new stage of its identity.  It was founded in silly response to the fear mongering. What now? 

David Swanson blogged about it with the title "CP Wins the Future" a phrase from the recent SOTU address. (Didn't Obama used to have better writers? Oh, wait, that was back in the days when they let him write his own speeches.)

Internationally, PINK stands for a commitment to nonviolence!

Stay strong, people of the world.

The Boy(s) Who Cried Emergency

Once upon a time there was a boy whose job was to cry emergency. People believed that the security of a very large flock depended on his doing the job loudly and at the right times.

There was a problem, though. The boy had a hard time pronouncing long words like emergency. If there had been, for instance, a nuclear emergency during the time he had the job, the results might have been comical rather than alarming. So his bosses came up with a code word -- actually, a number -- that was short, easy to pronounce, and easy to remember. They also came up with color codes that could be used to describe the precise shade of emergency on any given day.

Eventually the boy outgrew his job and a new boy was found to sound the alarm. The new boy had no trouble pronouncing long words and was actually quite good at it. He still used the code number and colors from time to time, too, just for variety.

This was all very well, but the real wolves were not one bit scared away by the constant bleating of alarming words. As the flock listened contentedly to the song of emergency, the wolves were circling around, picking off weaker prey and devouring them. At first no one noticed much, because who cared about the weak ones? But over time the pack of wolves grew fatter, stronger and bolder on a steady diet.

Meanwhile bridges were crumbling, schools were closing, jobs were evaporating, and people had no health care. Their ears filled with the cry "emergency," they struggled to find non-existent public transportation to take them to the unemployment office. Their children graduated from college with six figure loans to pay back, but no jobs on the horizon. The grown children wanted to move back home but alas, the homes had been foreclosed on by the banks -- banks which had grown fat while everyone was listening to the emergency song.

Where had all the money gone? $1 trillion had been spent to make everyone safer in the long, long emergency. So in the end, the song of the boys came true. It really was an emergency, and no one needed to be reminded about it anymore. All they had to do was look around.

Hannah Kreitzer & the wolf, from last year's Draw-a-thon. Join in the fun this year at Draw-a-thon II at Space Gallery in Portland on Vet's Day (11/11). Kenny Cole's show on drones "The Hellfire Story" will be on display, and artists will respond with their ideas of what bringing our war dollars home could look like. More info here: http://mainedrawathon.blogspot.com/

What's that overhead?

I saw an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) or drone in the sky over Washington DC last March 20 when I was there, a brief glimpse before it disappeared from sight behind a tall building. I knew what one looked like because I'd checked out some photos in order to draw posters. It caught my eye because its movement was odd; it seemed to float more than an ordinary small airplane.

Drones that fly over Central Asia or Africa (story on CIA using them in Yemen here) dropping bombs and spying on people are far away, invisible to citizens of the U.S. Except when said citizens check their empty pocketbooks. Most people try hard not to think about them.

But now drones have come to the Mexico-U.S. border.

AlJazeera reported on 9/14 "...US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to deploy drones to monitor the entire border since September 1, along with a further deployment of 1,200 troops and other measures, as part of a $600m package for "enhanced security." Full article here .

There could be a drone in your future. Keep your eyes peeled.

Meanwhile, if you're are scared as I am, consider talking to your neighbors about the need to Bring Our War $$ Home.