Op-Ed

Honoring vets means nothing at all unless it means honoring the deeply gouged personal truths each experienced during deployment. But the dismissal of such truths is as much a part of war, and its aftermath, as the propaganda and geopolitical whoppers necessary to launch it.

The problem with these individual truths is that they seldom smack of glory. More often, they’re simply mundane and hellish, and slowly eat the vet’s soul. The clinical name for this is post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, and it’s the phrase I heard most frequently and most distinctly this past weekend, during the grim, pained acknowledgement — I can hardly call it celebration — of Veterans Day.

Ray Parrish, a vets’ counselor and Vietnam vet, was adamantly pessimistic as he spoke to 100 or so people gathered on a bitter, gray Sunday morning at the river in downtown Chicago, about the psychic toll our current wars are exacting on the ones who are fighting them.

It sounds silly, but for a long time it just didn't occur to me what the implications would be. Thus spake a college student who agreed to ask Senator Clinton a planted question. And thus, alas, must I speak as well.

Senator Clinton asked me to impersonate a citizen of the United States, and I was tempted to play along. The assignment she had marked "(citizen)" on the script on her clipboard, read:

Could you ever imagine that Veterans Day was originally enacted as a day for world peace? Not by the way veterans who stand for peace are treated in Veterans Day ceremonies!

Yet, according to Veterans Affairs website, Veterans Day, formerly known as Armistice Day, was originally a U.S. legal holiday to honor the end of World War I and to honor the need for world peace. When it passed a concurrent resolution on June 4, 1926 to honor the end of World War I, the US Congress stated:

Whereas the 11th of November 1918, marked the cessation of the most destructive, sanguinary, and far reaching war in human annals and the resumption by the people of the United States of peaceful relations with other nations, which we hope may never again be severed, and

Whereas it is fitting that the recurring anniversary of this date should be commemorated with thanksgiving and prayer and exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations;

In 1938 the US Congress codified its earlier resolution by legislation naming November 11 as Armistice Day and dedicating the day “to the cause of world peace.””

I wonder what would happen if the people and their representatives were to shock the powerful and their funders for a change? What if on November 16th, the Iraq Moratorium day, everybody together took major actions? What if everyone with a job took the day off work? What if everyone wore orange? What if everyone with a tax bill wrote to the IRS to say not to expect another dollar of that portion of taxes that goes to war? What if everyone who gives money to Democrats wrote to them to say not one more dime before impeachment? What if everyone left their homes in the morning and went straight to the nearest district office of their congress member, sat down, and picnicked on the floor, refusing to leave without two written commitments: 1. to vote no on any more money to occupy Iraq, and 2. to cosponsor articles of impeachment against Cheney and Bush? What if everyone brought cell phones and media lists and spent all day phoning the media from their congress member's office?

If I were a member of Congress, I would make this pledge:

I pledge to vote No on any bill, and to vote No on bringing to the floor for a vote any bill, that includes any funding to extend the occupation of Iraq. This pledge does not prevent me from voting for funding for a withdrawal, although such funding is clearly not needed by the Pentagon. It does not prevent me from voting for funding for veterans' services or for the reconstruction of Iraq by Iraqis, or for relief for hurricane victims or for cash for avocado growers, or for anything else. But I will only vote for items I approve of if they are in bills that do not contain a single dollar for the continuation of the occupation of Iraq.

I am only confident a single Congress Member (Dennis Kucinich) takes this position. It's possible that a few or even dozens will act on that position, but they have not said so publicly.

Hidden agendas unfold and a sinister veep whips fear into a froth one more time: “Our country, and the entire international community, cannot stand by as a terror-supporting state fulfills its grandest ambitions. We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”

The words he never adds, though many Americans, I imagine, silently do it for him, are: “It takes one to know one.”

This is the thing. We’re gaga over nukes ourselves. It takes one recklessly driven government with a God-complex to spot another one. “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

This past Friday night and Saturday, Ann Wright and I spoke at four events in the Los Angeles area on the topics of peace and impeachment. I flew home, but Ann intended to keep going at the same pace for another week or more without ever leaving L.A. The people of Santa Barbara and Oxnard and Venice and Santa Monica turned out in large numbers on Friday and Saturday nights and even Saturday morning to talk about what they could do to end the occupation of Iraq and the illegitimate administration of Bush and Cheney. Young people turned out too and are creating their own events with Ann. Los Angeles even has a busy office known as the Los Angeles National Impeachment Center. If only this same energy really were national! At three events I asked rooms full of Californians whether they would risk jail by sitting in their congress members' offices to impeach Bush and Cheney. Every time, 90 percent of the people present raised their hands. And when I asked whether they would submit to waterboarding if it rid our government of these criminals, 80 percent raised their hands. Now, THAT's asking what you can do for your country.

When someone whose opinions I respect as much as John Nichols' joins those who have been saying since 2003 that Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich should announce that he's not REALLY running for president, I feel compelled to reply.

Nichols, like most Americans, supports the same policy positions that I do and that Kucinich does. Nichols would end foreign occupations, cancel NAFTA, create single-payer health coverage, invest in education and green energy, bust media monopolies, and impeach Bush and Cheney. Nichols believes, in fact, that Kucinich is too good a candidate to succeed in our electoral system. But he believes that Kucinich can have a major impact on the other candidates and on Congress if he continues to run while telling everyone that he does not intend to win.

Of the eleven major peace rallies organized around the country by United for Peace and Justice last Saturday the smallest and most unusual took place in Jonesborough, Tennessee.  Jonesborough is a town of about 4,000 people in the northeast corner of Tennessee, within a couple of dozen miles of both Virginia and North Carolina.  The people of Jonesborough can imagine the number of U.S. troops who have died in Iraq by imagining their entire local population dead.

Rallying for peace and justice in Jonesborough is something of an act of reclamation, and it's about time it happened.  Jonesborough is the oldest town in Tennessee and was a center of the abolition movement.  But, as if to offer a perfect illustration of the wisdom of the nation's founding fathers' distaste for political parties, the people of eastern Tennessee have largely stood by the Republican Party as it has mutated into the party of racism and militarism.  Our rally of about 400 peace activists on Saturday was greeted by about 50 pro-war activists revving their Harleys, honking their horns, and screaming their vicious messages of hate with the utmost vein-popping fury.

The Blackwater scandal has gotten plenty of media coverage, and it deserves a lot more. Taxpayer subsidies for private mercenaries are antithetical to democracy, and Blackwater’s actions in Iraq have often been murderous. But the scandal is unfolding in a U.S. media context that routinely turns criticisms of the war into demands for a better war.

     Many politicians are aiding this alchemy. Rhetoric from a House committee early this month audibly yearned for a better war at a highly publicized hearing that featured Erik Prince, the odious CEO of Blackwater USA.

     A congressman from New Hampshire, Paul Hodes, insisted on the importance of knowing “whether failures to hold Blackwater personnel accountable for misconduct undermine our efforts in Iraq.” Another Democrat on the panel, Carolyn Maloney of New York, told Blackwater’s top exec that “your actions may be undermining our mission in Iraq and really hurting the relationship and trust between the Iraqi people and the American military.”