Whatever happened to Dr. King’s anti-war message?

When my husband returned from Vietnam he wanted to sleep with me and his gun. Our marriage ended and so did his life a few years later; one night his heart and brain just turned to mush. Doctors doing the autopsy on this young man never found a cause of death. Of course, they didn’t ask the right questions. His family thinks he was microwaved by his equipment, by just-doing-his-job. His job was to neutralize “the enemy”—one of whom turned out to be a Vietnamese maid who cleaned up his air-conditioned quarters.

War does not bring peace. War is a failure, a breakdown. Freedom is not preserved by fighting.

The U.S. national debt is $7 trillion. The greatest threat to American freedoms is the billion dollars per week going to Iraq. A billion dollars a week is sucked out of our economy and we have 40 kids in a classroom, homelessness, a crisis in health care, more people working more jobs and fewer people earning a living wage.

Our domestic tranquility is being disturbed by the disappearance of the middle class.

Democracy requires a middle class that is economically secure, has enough leisure time to be educated, and has access to accurate news. The truth leaking out of U.S. armed service compounds in Iraq is that suicide is up, troops are refusing to go out on patrol, and soldiers on-leave are deserting rather than returning to the war zone.

When young people join up for a green card, health insurance for the family or because there are no other jobs—that is not free choice. What kind of freedom is available to young men being advised to “bank your sperm” because you may be exposed to depleted uranium which could cause birth defects in your children, or your children’s children. It is impossible for service women to “bank your eggs” against future genetic damage.

It is difficult to get much news from our narrow and propagandized media. The watered-down Martin Luther King message is an example: A dream. Dr. King had a dream and an economic vision to get from here to there. King pointed to the war and the poor, tied to the same economic continuum. He died supporting striking sanitation workers in Memphis and opposing the war in Vietnam. King called for “A radical redistribution of economic and political power ... a revolution of values.”

I did not hear the call for a boycott of war this Martin Luther King birthday weekend. In some speeches the word “Iraq” was not mentioned. In Vietnam 11 percent of U.S. soldiers were black and they suffered 23 percent of the “casualties.” The singer Gil Scott-Heron commented, “Nothing casual about death.”

About 16,000 Iraqis are reported killed in the second Bush-Iraq war, 9,000 American troops have been injured, in addition to more than 500 casualties. Pvt. Jessica Lynch was injured in a traffic accident, she didn’t fire her weapon—it malfunctioned—and she will wear a colostomy bag for the rest of her life. Soldiers carry weapons and are targeted whether they serve food, fix machines or go out on patrol. They all wear the same uniform.

The war always comes home—domestic violence, police violence, economic fallout with its attendant underground economy. In the Twin Cities we have Alliant Techsystems Corporation with their depleted uranium war profits and employees. “The Kosovo War has been very profitable for us,” CEO Paul David Miller announced in 2000. Miller made $16.8-million in 2002. Patrick Nauheimer, a career Marine from St. Louis Park, died in 1995 of virulent leukemia at age 31 after being sent to Kuwait to clean up U.S. war debris. His family believes he was contaminated by highly radioactive war waste.

Two and one-half million jobs have disappeared under Bush II. Huge income disparities at home, trashing the Bill of Rights for corporate security, a fear-&-revenge based national policy—we have soldiers in 150 countries and we’re losing our freedom.

We need nurses and teachers and a living wage so we can pay each other. Instead we have soldiers all over the globe and guns in suburban high schools. If war worked it would have worked by now. I come down on manufacturing depleted uranium bullets and shells, and on soldiering, because it’s bad for the soul of the nation. One Iraqi vet home on leave told his mother his job is to burn Iraqi bodies. You don’t want anybody you love to live with that.