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| David Cline (1947-2007) |
This is the full version of a talk I gave at the David Cline Memorial
Celebration, at Connolly's Pub & Restaurant in New York City, on Saturday,
February 16. I summarized or skipped over most of the middle portion due to time constraints and the wide variety of speakers who addressed numerous issues that Dave was involved in.
By Jan Barry
As you all know, Dave Cline loved to talk about the big
picture, nightmarish clashes of war and peace and, in the next breath, about the
nitty gritty details of grassroots organizing to transform horrendous problems
into progress.
Twelve winters ago, Dave and I found ourselves stuck in a
blizzard that suddenly snarled traffic across New Jersey. We were on our way to a class at
Rutgers in New Brunswick,
where I taught a course in community-level organizing. As we inched through
that storm for hours to get back to Jersey
City, there wasn’t a dull or boring moment—being
engaged in a running conversation with Dave Cline about the state of the world
and what to do about it.
Through good health and bad, Dave knew how to pull out of
his own experiences insights into the human condition—which people have
struggled with since biblical days to transform murderous wrath into righteous
anger that speaks truth to power. He showed us how to reach down into ourselves
for the reasons, the resources and the commitment to work on transformation.
This is what he helped me to get—and keep—a clear focus on. When
I was 21, I made the most crucial decision of my life—whether to return to Vietnam as a
soldier or to resign from a military career. In a life focused on nonviolent
conflict resolution, I’ve met many ex-soldiers who turned from waging war to
waging peace. Such transformation happens when combatants wrestle with a
fundamental question: What is the right thing to do in a war? If soldiers can
make this transformation, why can’t American society?
Having served an eye-opening early tour in Vietnam, I resigned from West
Point rather than help escalate the war there. Instead, I helped
to start an organization, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, that worked to end
the war we fought in. For the past
decade, many other Americans have spoken out against the wars conducted by our
military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
All across America,
there are many veterans of the latest wars working for peace, some in Veterans
For Peace and Iraq Veterans Against the War, and others embedded throughout our
society. But Americans would hardly know this due to our news media’s crusty
culture of worshipping war.
The glaring lack of coverage of peace groups’ actions
spurred a special report nearly two years ago by the Nieman Watchdog website of
the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
“Antiwar activists repeatedly stage dramatic acts of civil disobedience in the United States
but are almost entirely ignored by mainstream print and broadcast news
organizations. During the Vietnam
era, press coverage of the fighting and opposition to it at home helped turn
public opinion against the war. This time around lack of homefront coverage may
be helping keep military involvement continue on and on,” wrote John Hanrahan,
a former Washington Post reporter.
“By ignoring antiwar protests almost totally, editors are treating opposition
to the ongoing war in Afghanistan much as they handled the run-up to the war in
Iraq: They are missing an important story and contributing to the perception
that there is no visible opposition to the U.S. wars and ever-growing military
budgets, even as polls show overwhelming support for early U.S. military
withdrawal,” Hanrahan continued.
Among the examples of non-coverage of significant events
that Hanrahan cited was a December 2010 “demonstration organized by Veterans
for Peace, 500 or more people gathered outside the White House, as snow was
falling, to protest the war and to support Wikileaks and accused leaker PFC
Bradley Manning. … there were 131 arrests – including a sizable number of
veterans of current and past wars – for nonviolent acts of civil disobedience.
… The event was covered by The Huffington Post, the Socialist Worker, OpEd
News, Salem-News.com in Oregon, and the Sydney (Australia)
Morning Herald, but was ignored by The Washington Post, The New York Times and
almost all other mainstream media,” Hanrahan found.
Among the leaders of Veterans For Peace, whose statements
are frequently ignored by the national news media, is Leah Bolger, VFP’s
president until recently and a retired Navy officer, who traveled last fall in
a peace delegation to Pakistan
to areas hit by US
drone missiles. You probably didn’t see Leah on CNN—although what she has to
say about civilian casualties of our not-so-secret drone war in Pakistan is all
over the Internet, plus in many communities where she has spoken.
As Dave would say, keep keeping on—travel to hotspots, speak
in every community forum you can wangle an invite to, and even ones where
you’re not welcome, march, demonstrate, write letters to editors, pamphlets,
poems, songs, books, use the Internet.
And make use of inspiring moments in American history. On
Armistice Day 1948, General Omar Bradley made this observation: “We have
grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the
Sermon on the Mount. The world has
achieved brilliance without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and
ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more
about killing than we know about living. If we continue to develop our
technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our
executioner.”
General Bradley spoke out in the Truman government against
expanding the war in Korea
into China.
His West Point classmate, Dwight Eisenhower, ran for president and ended the
war in Korea.
That’s a good model for our government to follow today—stop expanding and start
ending our wars in Asia and the Middle East.
It is long past time for the Obama administration and
Congress to hear from veterans and military families of the monstrous,
cancerous consequences of the war on terrorism who have been ignored by the
gatekeepers of the news media, congressional committees and at the White House.
How do we get their attention? I’ll come back to that in a
moment.
Meanwhile, as US military forces roam the world
in search of enemies to fight, folks back home are under assault by suicidal,
mayhem-bent sons and neighbors wielding military assault weapons. America’s relentless
wars have come home in terrifying, terrible ways. Gunmen from our own
communities have turned urban neighborhoods, suburban shopping malls, college
campuses and small town schools into war zones. The National Rife Association’s
proposed solution is to station armed guards in every school. That would take a
lot of armed guards. To protect every American from those few who decide to
play war with real assault weapons would take an army.
The military solution would be to declare martial law, station troops at every
school, shopping center and every other public gathering place, marshal special
operations teams to break down doors at every home and apartment that
military-intelligence found reason to believe may harbor hidden weapons of mass
destruction. That’s been the American way of war for the past decade and more
in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It’s been very popular in American video games, movies, TV shows. And it’s been
a fatal attraction for many young men in American communities whose minds became
unhinged in a society that apparently worships military-style violence.
“We have to change,” our commander-in-chief said in Newtown, Connecticut,
where a 20-year-old local resident killed 20 school children, six teachers and
administrators, his mother and himself in volleys of shots in a war on the
community where he was raised. “We have to change,” the president said, and
repeated in subsequent speeches.
Obama could lead off by ending the war on terrorism in Afghanistan and
elsewhere around the world. Americans are dying across America of the
consequences of waging such violence abroad.
These wars are killing our soldiers and veterans at home.
The suicide rate among active duty troops this past year was roughly one death
per day, with a big jump in July in the Army, according to military reports.
The total number of U.S.
military deaths by suicide since 2001 is more than 2,600—eclipsing the
2,000-plus military fatalities in Afghanistan, Time magazine noted in
a front page special report last summer.
Meanwhile, military veterans have been committing suicide at
a furious clip of about 22 per day for several years, according to the latest Department
of Veterans Affairs report. How to stop an epidemic of suicides has baffled
military and VA leaders. Everyone from former soldiers to President Obama is
now weighing in on a tragedy that for a long time was seldom talked about in
public—or reported in the news media.
As anyone with combat military training knows, wartime
military culture drums into soldiers that the solution to seemingly intractable
problems is to shoot or blow something up and kill somebody. Indeed, the most
frequent form of self-destruction by veterans is shooting themselves, suicide
reports compiled in Nevada and New Jersey show.
We have got to do more to reach out to our fellow Americans
to transform our country’s culture of mindless violence. What would Dave have
done? We already know.
This a poem I wrote that conveys the essence of Dave Cline,
called
Peace March
"Lift Your Head And Hold It High
Veterans Are Passing By
Tell Them What We're Marching For
Freedom, Justice, No More War!"
Here comes an off-beat, on-beat
Band of graying Veterans For Peace,
Calling out marching cadence
That rings through city streets.
New York, Chicago, Washington,
Los Angeles, New
Orleans, Boston…
Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Indianapolis,
San Francisco, St. Louis, Minneapolis...
San Diego, Albuqueque, Denver,
Gainesville, Fayetteville,
Baltimore...
Seattle, Salt
Lake City, Cape Cod,
Atlanta, Binghamton,
Portland...
Marching "column right" out of Dallas
To the GW Bush ranch by Crawford, Texas...
Then "column left" to the White House
To tell Obama to stop wars' senseless losses...
Recycling military cadence calls
For peace, old soldiers are on the march...
Wall Street, Broadway, Battery Park,
Jersey City, Newark,
Teaneck...
"We Are Veterans Against The War
We Know What We're Marching For
One-Two-Three-Four
Stop The Killing, Stop The War!"
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