 |
  |
|
 |
||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||||||||||
The
Global Solution: A Cause for Unity and Hope The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people; it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government — lest it come to dominate our lives and interests. — Patrick Henry To address our deadly dilemma, we must understand what drives America and how its people remain disempowered. Money is the fuel for the permanent-war-policy engine, and those at the wheel are investors in warfighting. America was built for a people-based engine with people at the wheel investing in people. The concept of "power to the people" comes from the Constitution — not from the radical minds of the 1960s, but the radical principles that founded America. How did the people lose this country? It was lost through the adoption of NSC68, a secret 1950 policy instituting war as the basis of our economy. How can the people take back America? By diligently spreading word of, and uniting around, this single cause of our problems, and — with continued devotion to the symptoms and a sense of urgency — reclaiming America for the people, in whose name it was created. It is that simple, but it must start now. Why urgency? In Welcome to the Machine, Derrick Jensen offers indispensable advice for contemporary cogs: "What one generation perceives as repression, the next accepts as a necessary part of a complex daily life." DARPA, the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is less than a generation away from robot warriors. Jensen suggests we are already robotized in our thinking — submissive, removed, remote-controlled (remember reachback, the Pentagon's strategy for the future?). According to GradSchools.com, there are 54 graduate programs under the category of Peace Studies at various universities nationwide. Some have interesting titles: Special Ministry at Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Accounting at Golden Gate University in San Francisco, Aerospace Engineering at University of Cincinnati, and Strategic Intelligence at the Joint Military Intelligence College in Washington, D.C. The Pentagon is making strides in the field of peace education, and is being sued by Judicial Watch for dispensing propaganda through a website targeting schoolchildren, known as Empower Peace. The National Defense Education Act, a Cold War program created in 1958, was recently revived by the Association of American Universities (which solicits research funds from DoD) to recruit the next generation of national security workers from our schools. And the U.S. Institute of Peace routinely sends invitations to college students through school e-mail servers. Past and current board members of USIP include such ultraconservatives as Daniel Pipes (now on DoD's Special Task Force for Terrorism and Technology) and Peter Rodman (of the Project for the New American Century; see "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces, and Resources for a New Century"). In our time-pressured lives we rarely grasp the big picture and tend to view things separately — DARPA is an agency, universities are where we send our kids, elections are how we (think we) choose our presidents, and wars simply exist. But those in power see a single advancing policy — a military policy to derive profits from fear — and they have set our course in Pentagon plans that will not change with administrations. What is our plan as the people? We may find inspiration from our revolutionary past. There are no laws against carrying out a change of government. Quite the contrary: We hold these truths to be self evident — that all are created equal, endowed with inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that to secure these rights governments are instituted deriving their powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever government becomes destructive of these ends it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, to throw off such government and provide new guards for their future security.
America was born a people-first country, and that concept spread rapidly throughout the world without military force. The vision of our founders was to advance the notion of people living in peace everywhere, using the freedom that nature provides upon birth. But only by practicing these principles will the American people extinguish the obscenity of a "war to spread freedom" and realize this Founding vision. Today there is no graver sin at work in the world than America's military-based economy, adopted without the people's consent. In honoring our founding principles, we must acknowledge that to exploit fears and prejudices to maintain the flow of profits from conflict — to perpetuate a state of war in the name of peace — is treasonous to our creed. Though militarism in America predates the adoption of NSC68, militarism as our way of life became official on that day in 1950. Only by undoing this can we restore hope for a people-based society. Take back this country by popular demand and we not only right a terrible wrong, we open the door to a world free from enslavement to war profiteers. This option is what Noam Chomsky calls the second superpower of public opinion, a force good people in government are waiting for. Our Constitutional framework is intact, but we need to clean house, repair the root flaw, heal its symptoms, and live by cooperation instead of co-option — and we can only do this with a transdisciplinary, transcendent solution; united by determination to overcome. Addressing the symptoms won't work, bloody revolution won't work — organized nonviolent popular demand will work. Many things are in development or in place for transition to peaceful living, such as people-based economic structures, a bill in Congress for a cabinet-level Department of Peace, a self-financed political party that publicly measures the character of candidates, plans for education and health care reforms, a resource-sharing international vision, and much more. But all of these require an American change of priority. Our survival requires that we continue to bail out the water pouring into the boat. But our prosperity depends on fixing the hole — the policy that tells industry to think profits first, people last. Nearly every problem you can name is caused, exacerbated, or exploited by this policy, which has more than 300 of our universities making weapons for a world on the verge of resource depletion. To begin change, spread word among organizations — then unite and demand the adoption of a people-based national economic policy. Campus communities — parents, students, faculty — farm communities, physicians groups, environmental organizations, interfaith alliances, labor unions, all who seek domestic prosperity, working together, can by popular demand change one policy, and in so doing change a nation and world. Nationwide strikes can produce nonviolent revolutionary change. We the people have a duty to our founding principles to restore the role of America as a peaceful beacon of liberty, hope, and justice. Our reputation as killers will only be redeemed by our duty as caretakers. There will never be a better time to rally to this cause; there will never be clearer examples of rampant corruption in our politics or a time when this government is riper for reinvention. Can you think of a time in U.S. history more deliberately saturated with violence and corruption than the years spanning the birth of the Cold War to the never-end of the War on Terror? Can you think of a better solution to provide for our future security and stave off collapse than that of change by popular demand, handed down to us in writing? What could motivate peace-loving Americans more than the need to abolish a war-dependent system and establish a world free from American tyranny? Every action and reaction in the war on terror fuels the engine by which we live and optimizes the performance of war profiteering. The symptoms of this policy cover the world. The American people have the right to implement a peaceful revolution, the duty to transform an offensive posture into a universal rescue operation, and the opportunity to release the world from the grip of a tragic mistake and inspire the triumph of humankind. I have long admired Martin Luther King Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi, but Chomsky is correct in saying that neither were agents of change by themselves; their views were realized by the actions of large groups of determined people. While it may appear that we lack such leaders now, the truth is, we are the leaders we are waiting for, and we hold the key to free the world. One cause, one voice, one message. One planet, one future, one people.
Because of the encroachment of the permanent war policy on our campuses and in our lives, I along with others, including many professors, are building IntelligentFuture.org This website will serve as a central hub for gathering and dispensing organizational tips and resources, and focus on three simple goals: Portray the well-documented cause of our problems in the simplest terms, how this cause arose without the consent of the American people, and how this obliges the people to respond. Challenge the encroachment of warfighting on our campuses and in our lives. Broaden awareness of Pentagon-sponsored peace education programs. The vision: an amendment — by which laws are measured — that protects the future as the sacred common ground of life. Brian Bogart worked in the defense industry for 15 years and is now in his fourth year as UO's first graduate student in Peace Studies. He is giving free talks on these topics at 4 pm Aug. 12, 19, 26 and Sept. 2, 9 at 128 Chiles Hall across from the UO Bookstore. To help fund and complete his project, IntelligentFuture.org, contact bbogart@uoregon.edu
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
||||
|
|
||||
