Why Do Americans Hate America?
Today, in addition to being International Women’s Day ( more like International War on Women Day, if you ask me, but I digress), is the last day to register for The Veterans Gulf March. A coalition of ordinary Americans who just can’t take it any more are demanding accountability from the government.
They are utterly scathing in their contempt for the Bush administration and its wilful incompetence:
March 19, 2006 is the 3rd anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Veterans for Peace, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Military Families Speak Out, Gold Star Families for Peace, and hurricane survivors’ organizations (Save Ourselves, the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund, Common Ground Collective, Bayou Liberty Relief, the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance, C3, and others) are organizing a five-day march and caravan along Gulf Coast Highway 90 to demand:
(1) the immediate return of our troops from Iraq, and to call for U.S. tax dollars to be spent on human priorities and
(2) rebuilding of the devastated Gulf Coast, under the democratic direction of the residents of the Gulf Coast, instead of further spending for the illegal occupation of Iraq.
We will begin in Mobile, Alabama on March 14th and end in New Orleans on March 19th, the war’s anniversary.
Hurricane Katrina is in the news again, as thousands of hurricane survivors who were housed at hotels in New Orleans and other Gulf Coast cities are now being summarily evicted. In New Orleans, evictees were not even allowed to collect their belongings. The National Guard, which was sent in at night almost as a surprise attack in conjunction with police, was tasked to collect people’s meager possessions, as these serially-displaced residents were herded aboard buses to be shipped off to overcrowded shelters in other cities, or left to fend for themselves as homeless people. This looks for all the world not like reconstruction, but a military occupation.
Concurrently, those who advise the Bush administration are not only stubbornly adhering to the disastrous course of militarily occupying Iraq, the same clique is now advocating military action against Iran, and publishing enemies lists of antiwar activists even in the midst of a domestic spying scandal.
The colonial treatment being meted out to poor people and people of color on the Gulf Coast is mirrored in the war the same administration is continuing against Arabs and Muslims, and vice versa.
Thousands of over-priced FEMA trailers sit unused, while residents are refused entry into their own homes by police. The US government can guarantee the absentee voting of a few Iraqi expatriates in a highly questionable election in a militarily occupied nation, but make little effort to ensure that displaced hurricane survivors can vote in upcoming elections.
Some of the same contractors who have repeatedly been caught stealling publicly appropriated funds in Iraq were almost immediately offered no-bid crony contracts to rebuild the Gulf Coast, while local firms and contractors were frozen out, unless they had ties o the admnistration. Just as camps were prepared for “detainees” who were never given a chance at trial in Guantanamo Bay, there are now camps being constructed for hurricane surviviors around the country.
Veterans and military families are uniting their call for peace with the hurricane surviviors’ call for justice.
If we can build cities in the desert to wage war, why can’t we rebuild cities on the Gulf Coast to deliver justice?
I applaud the effort, I really do – and that of those who can’t go but are sending care packages, like Kitchen Window Woman. You can’t just sit back and do and say nothing – when it all gets a bit too bloody much to bear, you have to get out and shout and scream about it. And as always, unity is strength.
For those reasons I applaud the march. People need this. But as to how much effect on Washington’s deliberate driving of the world to the brink of nuclear catastrophe while attempting to bring about the Rapture it may have, I’m extremely doubtful. We in the Stop The War Coalition got 2 million out marching on the Houses of Parliament – one gigantic NO! – and they went to war anyway. Is Bush likely to take any more notice of this?
Marches are gesture politics and that’s not what’s needed now. The situation is dire and way beyond that. Perhaps marching on DC with pitchforks a la American revolution might be more apropos. After all, the right to revolt against a tyrannical government is guaranteed by the Constitution.
