Luke Sekera-Flanders: Reconsider What It Means To Be A Patriot

 

Luke Sekera-Flanders, photo by Ellen Davidson

Growing up in a rural town and through attending public school, I was often exposed to military propaganda.

From kindergarten through 5th grade, each class would have to put on a patriotic performance for the school, whether singing songs like “Proud To Be An American,” making skits depicting war, or listing reasons why America was the greatest country in the world - mainly its military. At my high school, and at all sorts of community events, myself and other young teenagers were presented an enticing image of what military service could offer us: financial benefits, community, and purpose.

But as I learned through my own research, there is far greater reason to be opposed to militarism and the military-industrial complex. For one, investing in war as deeply as the U.S. has robs us of so many opportunities to pursue a healthier, safer future. Changes in our climate and environmental destruction pose an ever increasing threat to human health and safety, and the U.S. military is a leading contributor to this emerging crisis that is rarely addressed. According to a 2019 study, the military emits more greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere than 140 countries. 

my photo

The Blue Angels and shows like it serve as a recruiting tool and a flex of America’s air power, which has been consistently used to devastate civilians across the world as recently as last weekend, when a drone strike on a supposed ISIS target in Afghanistan killed 10 civilians, including 8 children. And because of the marriage between government and corporations, U.S. foreign policy, including decisions to go to war, are dictated by economic interests - and corporations who profit from war are happy to risk military and civilian lives for profit.

Imagine if we invested so much as a fraction of our swelling “defense” budget toward proactively mitigating the coming effects of climate change, such as water insecurity. As of 2014, there were 39,000 different sites in the U.S., including multiple waterways, that were severely contaminated because of environmental disregard by the military. The military supposedly exists for our security - and yet the threat of a coming water crisis has been practically ignored. Climate scientists warn that as climate change worsens, droughts will become more frequent and more severe, even in regions that had seen abundance of water. Water is the cornerstone of all life on earth, so as water scarcity worsens, it will take the forefront of geopolitical issues as the century progresses. A couple years ago, the World Economic Forum confirmed this, placing the probability of future wars being fought over water sources at 95%.

photo by Nickie Sekera

We need to invest in public water infrastructure now, so that corporations don't have their hand on the tap nor the excuse to drag us into an overseas war over water.

While corporate media and the mainstream of environmentalism insist that the solution to climate change can be achieved with consumer choices and electing milquetoast reformers, the real culprits go without any accountability.

Imperialism is costly in all respects.

It detracts from what could be invested in healthcare, education, environmental protection and social services. It subjugates, traumatizes, exploits, and robs self determination from people across the world, for little more than political utility and economic gain for corporations.

photo by Peter Woodruff

Its drain on resources and massive pollution condemns future generations to a future of resource scarcity.

We need to end the military-industrial complex, and reconsider what it means to be a patriot. 

-- Luke Sekera Flanders, Community Water Justice

All banners by the Artists' Rapid Response Team of the Maine Union of Visual Artists.

More Concerned With The Tone Of Someone’s Message Than You Are With The Message Itself? #MillsVsPenobscots

Chloe Cekada and Iris SanGiovanni of Greater Portland SURJ disrupt Maine Attorney Janet Mills

calling for her to respect Native rights to protect the Penobscot River and its many life forms.

Guest post from Sass Linneken, program coordinator for Resources for Organizing and Social Change, who had just returned from a Maine People's Alliance event on June 29, 2017 (MPA is a "progressive" Democratic Party lobbying organization).

Musings on Maine’s Democratic Party, white feminism, and how white men take up space:

I went to the Resistance Rising summit hosted by MPA tonight and came away with some thoughts I need to roll out before going to sleep.

#1) I get anxious when I’m going into crowds, and anxiety is for the birds.

#2) The Democratic party is in no way leading anything resembling resistance at this point.

#3) The Democrats are having a difficult time realizing that taking a paternalistic/tone-policing attitude toward people they view as disruptive is not helping them to galvanize their base, it’s doing the opposite.

Villainizing disrupters is supremacist, and it completely negates the truths that exist within the disruption, for instance, the very fact that political disruption is a small thing compared to whatever issue is at the root of the disrupters’ cause.

***Case in point: Disrupting Janet Mills might feel egregious to people who support Mills, but that disruption is not going to kill her, or take her self-determination from her. On the flip-side of that coin, her refusal to support the Penobscots instead of lead the charge to steal their water rights and redraw the boundaries of their reservation when they hold less than 1% of the land they once did *will* impact their livelihoods and impact their ability to self-determine their own futures.

Letter found by Community Water Justice organizer Nickie Sekera in her son Luke's
pocket. Luke just graduated from middle school and is already a seasoned water protector.

Refusing to revisit the standards for justification in state-sanctioned police violence when there has been a drastic increase in police shooting fatalities *will* result in avoidable deaths, particularly of those who don’t look or live like Janet Mills. Rudeness in messaging should really be the least of worries in this context.***

Luke Sekera speaking at a previous event where Mills was confronted about her attack on
the rights of the Penobscot people to protect their water against industrial polluters the state of Maine protects.
Luke is being protected by Elizabeth Ann Mitchell, a Penobscot water protector.

#4) A candidate should not get a free pass if she’s a woman because she has it harder than her male counter-parts on the campaign trail or in office, and to suggest that the only reason she’s being held accountable is because she’s a woman is as sexist as the perceived sexism in the allegation to begin with.

#5) Saying that a candidate deserves our respect because she’s a champion for women’s rights when she is simultaneously engaging in an agenda that hurts women of color is the epitome of white feminism.

It’s not only hella problematic in its analysis of women’s rights, it’s detrimental to any perceived effort of resistance. To the contrary, it’s the very upholding of the systems and structures liberals/progressives claim to want to smash.

#6) If you’re a cisgender, able-bodied white guy, you’ve had the floor long enough. Shut the hell up.

The fact is, if your platform is not centering and considering the needs of PoC, you’re doing it wrong.

Trump was no accident, and if you think his agenda is egregious, it’s time to look in the mirror and ask yourself how you are complicit in his getting to where he’s at. And I don’t say that sitting on any kind of a pedestal, I’m a white person on a life-long learning curve.

All I’m saying is if you’re more concerned with the tone of someone’s message than you are the message itself, you are more a part of the problem than the solution, and that should matter to you if you want things to change.

Sass

Winona LaDuke On The Art Of Indigenous Resistance: What Kind Of Ancestor Do You Want To Be?

Winona LaDuke, two time VP candidate for the Green Party,
as depicted by Rob Shetterly for his Americans Who Tell The Truth series.
"The essence of the problem is about consumption, recognizing that
a society that consumes 1/3 of the world’s resources is unsustainable.
This level of consumption requires constant intervention
into other people’s lands. That’s what’s going on."

I had the opportunity to hear Winona LaDuke speak at a nearby college this week; someone had gifted my sister two tickets, and she shared one with me. My sister knows that I value the wisdom of indigenous elders and I'm interested in hearing from their matriarchs, enough so to be out late on a school night.

The theme of LaDuke's talk to students was an invitation to think about what kind of an ancestor they want to be. She shared the Anishinaabeg ancestors' prophecy from many generations ago that we are in the time of the 7th fire:

We have a choice between two paths. And one path, they said, was well-worn but scorched. And the other path, they said, was not well-worn, and it was green. 

Fundamentally the question is, how's that going to be determined? Fifty years from now, what's my village going to look like?...And who's in charge of that? Where's our water going to come from? What will we be eating? What will we be thinking? How will we treat each other?

LaDuke considers herself privileged to belong to the land where food grows on water (native wild rice is found in northern Minnesota) and sugar comes from trees. She was no doubt aware when making a strong argument for local living and local thinking that most of the affluent Colby students in her audience are super transient or, as Mainers say, "from away." 

She offered them this counsel: the U.S. frontier mentality of always thinking we can move on to a new place that is greener is over. She challenged them to settle down someplace because, "We're all here, and we've all got to work this out...Where's that place that you know? Where's that place that you care for?" 

The place that LaDuke cares for is threatened by another pipeline, a replacement for the now defunct Keystone XL pipeline project.
The project threatens the Anishinaabeg homeland and the Great Lakes region, wherein lies 1/5 of the planet's fresh water.
(Source of this and the next two visuals: HonorEarth.org)

LaDuke herself grew up in Los Angeles and attended Harvard. She's traveled to Washington DC "riding horse" accompanied by her sister and her teenage sons. Now, for many decades she has lived where her great great great great greats harvested the wild rice, and she watches her grandchildren there playing that they are front line NoDAPL water protectors.

Her first act was asking the audience to wait while she retrieved her metal water bottle, explaining that she could not use the water in plastic bottles that the college had set out for her on the podium.

I started the applause for that wisdom; years ago I heard environmentalist Maude Barlow's counsel that boycotting bottled water was the most powerful thing we could do to protect the planet's aquifers.

LaDuke and family spent a lot of time with the water protectors in North Dakota and reporting on that was presumably a reason she'd been invited by the Environmental Humanities Subcommitee of Colby College. Only two young people in the audience had been to the noDAPL camps; that seemed to surprise LaDuke more than the plastic bottles. (My note: possibly one explains the other?) But, in her generous way, she noted that many people had supported the water protectors materially and spiritually.

There was more applause later when she shared her plans for making America great again. She's actively working to restore the biodiversity that was lost when 8,000 varieities of corn cultivated by indigenous, largely women, farmers were replaced by those "invented by a guy in a white lab coat working for Monsanto."

"When America was great there were 250 species of grass in the northern plains, and 50 milion buffalo. That's when America was great."


I reflect with sadness as I hear the cooing doves of early morning in the Maine woods where I belong. Thousands of miles away the ecological disaster of the many wars for empire unfolds; I woke up this morning remembering that yesterday my government dropped a bomb in eastern Afghanistan larger than the one that flattened Hiroshima. Air strikes on the tunnels of the Hindu Kush mountains betweeen Afghanistan and Pakistan to kill "terrorists" is an old trick that will do nothing to end the war there. Collateral damage includes the ancient irrigation systems devised by the people who belong to that land. The endless "war on terror" is a profit scheme, and not a sustainable one. As a local man in Kabul told me in 1979: "As long as there is one Afghan left alive, the Soviets will never rule our country."

LaDuke showed us data assembled by Honor the Earth, the organization she helped found, demonstrating that it is game over for oil. It's no longer profitable to drill for it, and the most extreme extraction schemes like fracking or processing tar sands increase the cost. But greed drives corporations to continue building pipelines that LaDuke predicts will soon be abandoned.

On Anishinaabeg land, LaDuke joins with people building solar and wind power sustainable energy solutions. She supports public art for their spiritual health. She is active and she is hopeful -- because that's the kind of ancestor she wants to be.