Author: jpf_24rvpl

One Saturday in March I went to Lafayette Park in Washington, D.C., across the street from the White House, in order to protest several wars. The squirrels were out doing seasonal things. A tree was balancing big buds on the finger-ends of its curving branches; the brown bud coverings, which looked like gecko skins, were drawing back to reveal inner loaves of meaty magnolial pinkness.

A policeman in sunglasses, with a blue and white helmet, sat on a Clydesdale horse, while two tourists, a father and his daughter, gazed into the horse’s eyes. The pale, squinty, early spring perfection of the day made me smile.

The protest featured various speakers including Ralph Nader, Daniel Ellsberg, Watermelon Slim, and Brian Becker. Protesters discussed opposition to wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the then-new intervention in Libya. Veterans spoke about their experiences and opposition to ongoing conflicts. The protest included displays like a model Reaper drone, and speakers criticized President Obama’s continuation of military interventions.

Ellsberg reminded the crowd how kings once locked their critics away in dungeons until they were forgotten. Bradley Manning was now in an oubliette at Quantico for revealing America’s war crimes, and the Libyan intervention was, like Korea, an illegal war waged without Congressional approval.

More than a thousand protesters stood against the barricade, chanting slogans like ‘This is what democracy looks like!’ and ‘Money for jobs and education, Not for Wars and Occupation!’ One hundred and thirteen protesters were eventually arrested, including Daniel Ellsberg, who flashed a peace sign from his zip-corded hands. The arrests took hours, requiring paddy wagons and two city Metro buses to transport all the detainees.

Not long ago I was hospitalized for ten days. Insurance paid for most of my expenses. The doctors, nurses and facilities were outstanding, as were my posthospitalization follow-ups by visiting RNs.

Now compare my experience with Dr. David Ansell’s. In his book, ‘County: Life, Death and Politics at Chicago’s Public Hospital’ (Academy Chicago Publishers, 2011), he writes about the seventeen years he worked at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital, a safety-net hospital dubbed ‘County’ by the poor and largely uninsured people of color it served.

It had once been praised for establishing the nation’s first blood bank and trauma unit. By 1995, however, when Ansell left, it had become a dumping ground for the poorest of the poor, as he describes it in his gripping, angry and ultimately very sad chronicle.

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This past October, at the dedication of the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial on the Washington Mall, two of King’s children gave shout-outs to Occupy Wall Street, now spreading around the country and the world. His daughter Bernice spoke of it as “a freedom explosion,” and his son Martin eloquently hailed “the young people of the Occupy movement all over this country and throughout the world [who] are seeking justice… for working-class people barely making it, justice for middle-class folk unable to pay their mortgages… justice for the young people who graduate from college and are unemployed and burdened by student loans they cannot repay, justice for everyone who is simply asking the wealthy and corporations to pay their fair share.”

When President Obama gave his speech about Dr. King, he referred to the Occupy movement only once and obliquely. “If [King] were alive today,” he said, “I believe he would remind us that the unemployed worker can rightly challenge the excesses of Wall Street without demonizing all who work there…”

Amid the list of King’s accomplishments, he conspicuously did not mention that his last act before being assassinated was to organize the Poor People’s Campaign, including “Resurrection City,” a shantytown built on that same mall to reveal the existence of the poor to the nation.

Daniel Levine, a twenty-year-old college student manning the Occupy Wall Street information table in New York City’s Zuccotti Park, responded to President Obama’s “demonizing” remark: “He’s trying to make excuses for the rich people who donate to his campaign. The rich demonized themselves the second they decided they were going to make fraudulent derivative swaps, the minute they decided to evict people from homes they didn’t even own.”

While Obama once referred to Wall Street denizens as “fat cats,” The Washington Post reported that his 2012 election campaign raised more money from the financial and banking sector than Mitt Romney or any other Republican presidential candidate. Meanwhile, in New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg tried and failed to evict the occupiers of Zuccotti Park, claiming that “the Constitution doesn’t protect tents, it protects speech and assembly.”

At this juncture, it is not yet possible to know the results of the recent prisoner exchanges in Israel/Palestine. More deals with Hamas? Renewed negotiations with the Palestinian Authority? Strong Israeli crackdowns on rocket fire from Gaza? Massive attempts to capture more Israeli soldiers, followed by reprisals in Gaza?

For now, three aspects of this amazing human drama are worthy of note. First: The idea that any country would release a thousand and twenty-seven prisoners, some of whom had murdered their compatriots, to get back one of its children (Gilad Shalit was nineteen, when he was taken prisoner over five years ago), is an act of love so startling that it should stop us in our tracks.

For me, it recalled these lines from Chris Hedges’ sobering and illuminating book, ‘War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning’: ‘Love may not always triumph, but it keeps us human. It offers the only chance to escape from the contagion of war. Perhaps it is the only antidote. And there are times when remaining human is the only victory possible.’

Noteworthy, too, is the fact that seventy-five percent of Israelis favored this thousand-and-twenty-seven-to-one prisoner exchange and, weeks later, the country was still celebrating Sergeant First Class Gilad Shalit’s return to his family. Shalit’s parents led a mass movement that ultimately forced the government of Benjamin Netanyahu to negotiate for his freedom.

There has always been an enviable bond of mutual responsibility between the Israeli people and the sons and daughters they conscript into the armed forces. In March 2002 Robi Damelin’s son, David, was shot by a sniper while serving in the Israeli army. He was 28 years old. Robi now works for The Parents’ Circle, a group of bereaved Israeli and Palestinian families supporting reconciliation and peace.

From the moment that her son was killed in March 2002, Damelin has proclaimed, ‘Do not take revenge in the name of my son,’ who, she claims, was ‘the most humanistic person you could meet.’ David was working with the peace movement at the time of his murder. ‘I now spend my time,’ she concludes, ‘traveling the world, spreading the message of reconciliation, tolerance and peace.’

Once upon a time there was a United States naval officer who invented a region he called the ‘Middle East.’ His name was Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-1914), and he lived during a period when this ‘Middle East’ was subjugated and colonized, when it was turned into a geopolitical ‘region’ that could be defined by the office of a naval strategist whose penchant for US imperialism made him famous. [Rest of content follows with proper formatting and complete paragraphs…]

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Burton Ira Weiss was a lifelong “battler” powerfully committed to the Jewish tradition of peace and equality. He was born in New York City, where his parents owned a hotel, and studied at Cornell University. Following his graduation he returned to the city where he met and became a protégé of Paul Goodman, the Jewish nonviolent gay anarchist intellectual of the 1960s.

In turn, Burton also became close to Percival, Paul’s brother, and his wife Naomi Goodman, one of the leaders of the Jewish Peace Fellowship. Around 1970, and with JPF backing, Burton was instrumental in founding the Merton-Buber House, a storefront on the Lower East Side, designed to provide draft counseling for people of all faiths and backgrounds.

Burton was an emerging intellectual in the peace community and often represented the JPF at various functions. He then attended SUNY-Buffalo for his graduate work and wound up teaching some of the early classes in what later came to be known as gay studies.

For more than ten years he rarely saw him because he had moved to San Francisco. Then, one day at an antinuclear demonstration, I heard a voice calling “Allan.” There, lurking beneath a large raincoat was Burton, now living in the Berkeley hills with his partner, Elliot. He had become a seller of antiquarian and rare books.

We renewed our friendship and Burt and Elliot became regulars at our seders and Hanukkah parties, always contributing to the intellectual quality — and humor — of the evening. Eventually Burt and Elliot achieved a lifelong dream: they married and bought a place in Spain. There they found a castle in the village of Nou de Gaia, south of Barcelona.

Sadly, the dream was shattered in 2010 when Burton was diagnosed with throat and lung cancer. This past summer, when Elliot and Burton returned from Spain, Burton fell in front of their house. Weeks later, just in his early sixties, he was dead. Burton Weiss was a fierce proponent of pacifism and gay rights. His was an honorable and meaningful life.

I was born in Big Spring, Texas, a small city halfway between El Paso and Dallas, in the Depression-era years. Big Spring is cotton, oil and cattle ranch country. My mother was one of eight children born to a Catholic immigrant from the Black Forest region of Germany. She came alone to work for a family in San Antonio.

My mother’s father was from Alsace and sailed to America “to escape the kaiser’s wars,” I was told. My father’s father had immigrated from Bavaria and his Scotch/Irish mother was from Pennsylvania. His parents moved to Big Spring, where Papa worked as an engineer on the Texas and Pacific Railroad. They were devout Methodists.

My brother and I were thus brought up in a Catholic/Methodist household. We went to Methodist Sunday school, but we joined all the relatives to go to midnight Mass on Christmas Eve with my mother. In those days Texas was solidly Democratic and my father was a great admirer of FDR and the New Deal.

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In April 2000, nearly 20,000 Vietnamese citizens gathered in Ho Chi Minh City — once known as Saigon — to celebrate the 25th anniversary of their victory over the American invaders and the creation of their relatively stable country. Since the end of the war American and Vietnamese officials have resumed normal relations, and exchanged visits to promote business ventures and tourism.

‘Business with an Asian Flair: New Service to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’ read a full-page New Yorker advertisement by Delta Airlines in 2009. Looking back at the still highly politicized Vietnam War debate, 16 historians, eminent scholars of the war at home and abroad, have drawn on recent scholarship for their conclusions about that calamitous conflict.

The result is The Columbia History of the Vietnam War, a brilliant collective exposition of what happened and why. Editor David L. Anderson, professor of history at California State University, Monterey, and former president of the Society for Historians American Foreign Relations, explains: ‘The assumption behind this work is that many of the historical themes in the study of the Vietnam War have contemporary relevance.’

We need only consider our nation’s historical and unceasing addiction to war and military intervention and the abysmal failure to hold powerful decision makers accountable. When the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC, was dedicated and thus became a sacred shrine to the dead in a war that should never have been fought, no one in authority who had dreamed up the bloodletting had ever been held accountable.

In Andrew Bacevich’s important new book, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War, he explains his opposition to our perpetual wars. Bacevich, whose son was killed while serving in the Iraq war, served in the army during the Vietnam War, retired with the rank of colonel, and is now professor of international relations at Boston University.

‘In the simplest terms,’ he writes, ‘the [American] credo summons the United States — and the United States alone — to lead, save, liberate, and ultimately transform the world,’ a doctrine which requires the U.S. to spend billions if not trillions of dollars and maintain a permanent military presence in some 700 overseas bases.

The invaluable Columbia History of the Vietnam War offers cautionary lessons even as our nation fights three wars and continues planning for and spending enormous amounts for our inevitable future wars.

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