The war on women is everywhere: in the home, locally, nationally and globally.

Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – In 2018, the US National Sexual Violence Resource Center published that 81% of women reported experiencing some form of sexual harassment and/or sexual assault in their lifetime.  Further, the majority of violence against women is perpetrated by male intimate partners and acquaintances.

There are myriad other misogynist wars on women worldwide – including military wars; sex trafficking, prostitution and pornography; the theft of female and lesbian sexual identity by some in the trans movement; child marriage, female genital mutilation, and so on.  But none at this moment is so intensive as Israel’s and the US’ genocidal war on Gaza: 70 percent of those killed are women and their children.   Israel’s bombing of hospitals with maternity wards; the starvation of pregnant and breast-feeding women and the record-acute malnutrition among newborns and young children speak loud and clear — End Palestinian women’s potential to give life and the survival of Palestinian babies and children.

How cruelly ironic that as US weapons murder life in Gaza and elsewhere in the world with impunity, 14 US states have criminalized women’s choice of abortion as murder, not even allowing abortion for the hateful acts of rape or incest, six more states have early gestational limits. There were 65,000 rape-related pregnancies between July 2022 and January 2024 in those US states banning or putting extreme limits on abortion, with the end of Roe v Wade in the 2022 Dobbs’ Supreme Court decision.

Today a majority of US-adults including from every religion, race, ethnicity; moderate and liberal Republicans and a vast majority of Democrats (women and men), agree that abortion should be legal. Thus, the end of Roe v Wade in the 2022 Dobbs’ Supreme Court decision is a both a War on Women and a War on Democracy, given that the will of the majority of US citizens does not prevail nor influence government policy. 

According to the Economist, the United States ranks among “flawed democracies.”   Another recent, comprehensive study of democracies worldwide concluded that “only 15 percent of people globally live in places where women and lower income groups have at least somewhat equal access to power.”  No surprise that the US, cluelessly vaunted as the indispensable nation, is not one of them.

What fuels the control of women’s bodies in our country?  It is misogyny and injustice.  After all, there is no comparable moral or medical control of men’s bodies.

Yet the moralistic urgency to preserve life in the womb evaporates once a poor child is born.  One in six children under five years of age lives in poverty – the highest rate of all industrial countries; four million youth are homeless.  Clearly, controlling a woman’s right to her own body, is not about the unborn’s right to life; otherwise, all kinds of social legislation for maternal and child health, adequate housing, a living wage, and well-funded education would accompany legislation criminalizing women for abortion. 

Regarding women’s loss of economic democracy, women have higher rates of poverty than men.  And why?  For at least three reasons:

1.)   Domestic violence causes women victims to lose altogether an average of 8 million days of paid work per year and is a strong factor in women’s homelessness.

2.)    Women’s reproductive labor – giving birth, breastfeeding and caring for children is not compensated with free childcare and paid parental leave in the United States, unlike all other comparable countries. Thus, women who give birth are cheated of savings, pensions and Social Security.  No surprise then that the greatest risk factor for being poor in old age is having been a mother..

3.)   More women than men struggle to cover everyday expenses due to the gender wage gap, which has remained stagnant for 20 years – at 82% – a significant factor contributing to the substantial disparity in poverty rates between women and men age 75 and older.  Even for college graduates in 2024 the same economic inequality persists: male college graduates have been hired at an average sightly over $30/hour; women, at slightly over $25/hour. This wage inequality of 82% will follow these women college graduates all their working lives and in retirement.

Salary is symbolic: Why are we women worth 82% of men in the workplace?.

Ponderous realities:

More American lives were lost in the 20^th century through violence against women than during all 20^th century wars and civil strife.  Yet, while thousands of monuments throughout the United States honor those who lost their lives for their country in war, only one —the first of its kind—is currently being planned for women who lost their lives giving birth to the country’s children.  The counterpoint reality is that feminist revolutions to gain human rights and equality for women (however incomplete that goal remains) have freed and saved the lives of millions of women and girls—without weapons, without fists, and without a drop of blood spilled.  

Women have more than a lot that men can learn from: men commit 90% of homicides and almost all sexual violence; men are the primary wagers of war.  Were our skills, our social and intellectual intelligence, and our wisdom valued and promoted in all places of social and political decision-making: in every home and all national governments and the UN, the world might get a chance at global peace and restoring our beautiful planet.

*Given as the keynote talk at Bigger than Dobbs:  The War on Women and War on Democracy, a June 23 event sponsored by the Reproductive Justice Task Force of Franklin County Continuing the Political Revolution with multiple co-sponsors.  

Speeches of the presenters will be available soon at http://www.fccpr.us 

Related Video link added by IC: MSNBC: “How GOP may lose 24: Trump conviction collides with MAGA legal ‘war’ on women, minorities, equality”

LET GAZA LIVE

FREE PALESTINE

CEASEFIRE – NO ARM$ TO ISRAEL

NEVER AGAIN FOR ANYONE

Why? 

Johanna (Jo) Rosen stands on the Common because she is “heartbroken and outraged by the death, destruction and displacement in Gaza.”  As a Jewish American, she believes she has “a particular responsibility to speak out against the US government’s material and diplomatic support for Israel and its military aggression…I am motivated,” she adds, “to build the world we want to live in where everyone has a safe home, healthy food, clean water, and can celebrate their culture in dignity.”

Since last October, Jo, a member of Jewish Voice for Peace, has called Congress almost daily, written letters to newspapers, participated in marches and rallies, donated to aid and advocacy organizations.  She joined hundreds of activists to disrupt the State of the Union address and works to support the students at Smith College, her alma mater, advocating for the college to divest from weapons manufacturers. 

Lianna Hart “feels powerless to stop” the war in Gaza” and simultaneously complicit in it as a taxpayer in the United States and as a Jewish American who was raised believing in Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people.” As Americans, we “cannot pretend…that we are not complicit in these atrocities…The least we can do is show up in our communities and say that we do not agree, that we refuse to watch this happen without speaking up against it.” 

Standing on the Common with others, holding her artist-made Free Palestine, she finds the moments of connection with those driving and walking by who give “just a honk, a wave, a thumbs up” motivating.  For her, “visibility is meaningful, we cannot and should not go about our lives as if this war isn’t happening.”  Like Jo, Lianna has been engaged in many and various actions in western Mass, organized or co-hosted by Jewish Voice for Peace and other organizations.  She, too, donates to many relief and aid organizations working with Gazans suffering from this genocidal war.

Theirs are just two passionate, moral voices of many dozens who have gathered with us each Saturday for months, reinvigorating our years of standing on the Common against war and for peace with justice.

Those of us, whose activism on behalf of peace and justice was sparked by the US war of aggression in Vietnam or the Civil Rights movement, the Women’s Movement, the Environmental Movement (and, for some, all of these movements) are now joined with these younger generations.  They match our generations’ passionate protests; and we are heartened, energized, inspired by their integrity and deeply grateful to them.

Related video: NM PBS: “Jewish Voice for Peace Stands with Students”

Together we express what a majority of Americans polled recently support: that the U.S. call for a permanent ceasefire and stop sustaining Israel’s genocidal war with our government’s military aid and weapons.   Ranging in age from our 80s to early 20s, we also stand together in supporting student encampments on their university and college campuses across the country, calling for their administration to divest from necrophilous weapons industries that are sucking up profits from the deaths of Gazans, 70 percent of whom are women and children.

Despite what mainstream news chooses to carry – mainly photos of violence in student encampments, and President Biden recklessly defending police crackdowns on students causing “chaos,” the evidence gathered reveals the opposite.  A study of 553 campus protests between April 18 and May 3 across the country found that 97% “remained non-violent” and peaceful.   Further, half of the 3% where violence broke out were clashes with militarized police sent by university administrators to remove the otherwise peaceful student encampments. 

As we stand here on the Greenfield Common, teenage Israeli military resisters are there in Israel prisons for refusing to serve in the Israel Defense Force.  Two refusniks, before reporting to jail, wrote a letter to President Biden charging that his “unconditional support for Netanyahu’s policy of destruction has brought our [Israeli] society to the normalization of carnage and the trivialization of human lives…You are responsible for this alongside our leaders…you have the power to stop it.”

It took little more than 100 days of bombing for Israel to destroy most schools in Gaza and all 12 universities, killing students and teachers, and ending education for Gazan children and youth.  Yet only two US schools, Evergreen State College and Union Theological Seminary, and Ireland’s Trinity College have agreed to work toward divestment from “companies that profit from gross human rights violations and/or the occupation of Palestinian territories.”

“My message for the American students,” writes Palestinian Nawar Diab, “is that…their protests and their solidarity with Palestine and Gaza gave us a glimpse of hope. And they didn’t leave us left alone.  They didn’t leave us feeling helpless.”

Her action leading to the 6-day ceasefire recalled two women whose work for peace in the United States culminated in Mother’s Day on the second Sunday in May.  Prior to the Civil War, Ann Reeves Jarvis of West Virginia organized “Mothers’ Day Work Clubs” with classes for women on sanitation in food preparation and drinking water in a time of high infant and child mortality. After the war, she organized “Mothers Friendship Day,” bringing together mothers from both sides of the Civil War to support their reconciliation.

Julia Ward Howe, a passionate anti-war activist and promoter of world peace, inspired the first public “Mother’s Day for Peace” rally held in New York City on June 2, 1872. Her 1870 Mother’s Day Proclamation passionately heralded action to stop future wars:

“…Arise, all women who have hearts …

From the bosom of the devastated earth, a voice goes up with our own. It says, “Disarm, disarm!”’…

This recent Mother’s Day in Palestine, Mazin Qumsiyeh of Bethlehem University wrote “I remember my own mother who fought for peace” in the spirit of “Julia Ward Howe’s call for mothers on Mother’s day to end wars and stop sacrificing people on the altar of men’s racism, greed and egos.”

France 24 English Video: “Some 300,000 Gazans have evacuated east Rafah, Israeli army says • FRANCE 24 English

The current obliteration of Gaza is a record-breaking war on mothers and their children.

• An average of two Gazan mothers die every hour of the war leaving their families devastated and their children with diminished protection.
• After four months of Israel’s carpet bombing, more Gazan children were killed than the number of children killed in the last four years of wars around the world combined. 
• With starvation imposed on Gaza by Israel’s blockades of food aid –“unprecedented in modern history” – mothers and adult women are the ones who eat last and least.

• Many mothers are too malnourished to produce milk for their newborns; but no powdered milk in the markets and next to no clean water with which to mix it are available.
• Each day about 180 women give birth in hellish conditions, with most of Gaza’s 36 hospitals lying in rubble and their existing medical supplies nearing exhaustion. Two American trauma surgeons who have volunteered for surgical missions in crisis situations all over the world, stated recently that they have never seen cruelty like Israel’s massacre in Gaza.
• Some mothers have resorted to washing clothes and bathing their children in the sea, polluted with sewage, risking their lives under Israeli strafing.
• As of late February 2024, The U.N. estimated that some 700,000 women and girls in Gaza experience menstrual cycles but don’t have adequate access to basic hygiene products like pads, toilet paper, running water and toilets because of the war. These conditions put them at risk of reproductive and urinary tract infections.

Shahd Sataria, a human rights defender with the Palestinian Working Women Society for Development in the West Bank, visited Gaza every summer as a child until her family could no longer get a permit in 2004. “In Gaza, you got to visit the sea,” she recalled. “We are big families. We would gather at my grandma’s house, and sleep on old mattresses on the floor… those were great nights.”

She remembers the plants, the deep blue sea, nights full of stories, and a lot of singing. In the morning, the women of the family would gather around her grandmother, chatting.  Sataria couldn’t see her grandmother before she died, denied a permit to visit Gaza.

“Women have lost their chance to have education, to be in decision-making, and to be empowered.” Despite the horror of death, destruction and starvation, Sataria speaks of hope. “I believe that people in Gaza are resilient.  If the war would end today or tomorrow, I believe that they will rise up.”

This Mother’s Day my deepest desire for the surviving women of this genocidal war, is that they live to see their beloved Palestine become a member state of the UN with the resources to re-build, as Jewish women survivors of the Holocaust did with the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. 

No other peoples “have been kept stateless for so many decades” as Palestinians.  But the world must be with them not just in words but in deeds.

“ Half a year of unfathomable suffering.

Half a year of irreparable trauma.

Half a year of irreplaceable loss.

Every positive change in human behavior is always preceded by an expansion of consciousness, and Gaza is expanding western consciousness like nothing ever before.”

I want my taxes to help fund universal health care for everyone in our country.  All but 43 countries offer free healthcare or access to health care for at least 90% of their citizens.  Why cannot we, the world’s wealthiest nation for over 60 years, divorce ourselves from corporate capitalist healthcare?

What of other social and economic issues as we near Tax Day?  Take poverty:  140 million people – 40% of US people – are poor or near poor, defined as one emergency away from economic ruin, according to the Poor People’s Campaign. The “140 million” are people of every race, ethnicity, age, faith, sex and sexual orientation, while poverty is highest among Black, Latino and Indigenous peoples due to systemic racism. More women than men are poor due to systemic sexism.  The pay gap between women and men – 21.8% on average – has persisted for 30 years, an injustice that deteriorates our democracy. 

I want my federal and state taxes to lift people out of poverty and end inequality in income. It can be done. Cities are leading the way in raising minimum wage; and they outpace the best states, while the federal minimum wage languishes at a despicable $7.25 per hour

 These 10 Cities have the Highest Minimum Wage in the U.S.

• Tukwila, Washington: $20.29.
• Seattle, Washington: $19.97.
• SeaTac, Washington: $19.71.
• West Hollywood, California: $19.08.
• Mountain View, California: $18.75.
• Emeryville, California: $18.67.
• Sunnyvale, California: $18.55.
• Denver, Colorado: $18.29.

Today, the highest minimum wages, by state and Washington, D.C., are in D.C., ($17), Washington ($16.28), California ($16), Connecticut ($15.69) and New Jersey ($15.13).  New York has raised its minimum hourly wage in New York City and its suburbs to $16. 

But we need to do better: A livable wage in Connecticut, that is, an hourly wage that enables a single adult to pay for necessities, including housing, food, utilities, transportation and health care, would be $24.13.  Overall, most single Americans need to earn at least $20/hour to pay their bills, given cost of living where they live.   More than 1/3 fall short. 

I want my federal and state tax money used to raise minimum wage to a livable wage in the name of economic justice for everyone.

PBS NewsHour Video: “Families slip back into poverty after pandemic-era child tax credit expires”

In 2023, the Department of Defense (aka the Department of War) was allocated $816.7 billion dollars in our national budget, while failing to pass its sixth straight audit.  US war spending in 2023 dwarfs that of other countries, totaling more than the next ten highest military budgets combined.  Since October 7, the gunboat-diplomacy Biden administration has approved over 100 weapons sales to the government of Israel, an average of 1 every 36 hours.

I want my tax money to “beat swords into plowshares” by supplanting masculinist militarism with intelligent, committed, unrelenting diplomacy that lifts our country above our abject ranking of 131 least peaceful country out of 163 countries on the Global Peace Index.

Our arduous path back from flawed to healthy democracy will only be through engaged citizens, activist organizations and unions in cities and some states not shackled in the stranglehold of anti-abortion, anti-immigrant, Trumpian, and extreme religious right politics, nor held hostage by their weapons manufacturers.

• “Voters inCalifornia, Vermont and Michigan in November 2023 adopted amendments to enshrine abortion protections into their respective state constitutions.” More states are expected to advance similar measures, because constitutional protections are considered the most ironclad and are very difficult to amend.
• In February 2024 the city of Flint Michigan recently approved a universal cash program for babies, called Rx Kids, that provides new mothers $1,500 and $500 monthly for their child’s first year.
• The same month, Detroit became the largest U.S. city so far to pass a “Move the Money” resolution, following the lead of neighboring city Hamtramck, Michigan. The measure, approved unanimously by the City Council, calls on the U.S. Congress and the president to shift public money away from the military to fund social services.
• In June 2023 the US Conference of Mayors unanimously passed a resolution “Calling for Urgent Action to Avoid Nuclear War, Resolve the Ukraine Conflict, Lower Tensions with China, and Redirect Military Spending to Meet Human Needs.”
• In March 2024 the New York State Appellate Court ruled unanimously to affirm Kingston, New York’s Rent Guidelines Board mandating 15% rent reduction, given the scarcity of rental units and tenant organizing for housing justice.
• More than 100 US cities, including Chicago and Seattle, have passed resolutions on the genocidal Israel-Gaza war with most calling for a permanent ceasefire, exchange of Israeli hostages and Palestinian political prisoners and free flow of aid to the Gazan people.

I want my taxes to be used for our true national security: lifting people out of poverty, hunger and homelessness; providing universal health care; ensuring affordable housing for everyone needing it, assuring a livable wage, ending violence against women, affirming that Black Lives Matter, and fostering peace.

In the spirit of International Women’s Day, let’s look at a brief profile of women’s status today and the consequences for our country and the world.

If I asked my brothers, my many nephews, male friends and colleagues, did they think women are as capable as men, I wager that most, if not all, would say yes. Beyond doubt we women have all the talent, intelligence, and potential for leadership and political responsibility as men. But I have also learned from recent history that, in some cases – such as negotiating an end to conflict; working toward long-standing peace; and prioritizing health, education and social welfare in government – women outperform men.

I would go so far as to say that the fate of nations is tied to the status of women. Studies back this up. A team of researchers has created the largest global database on the status of women called WomanStats. Their findings are profoundly illuminating for global security and world peace. In a sentence: the degree of women’s equality predicts best how peaceful or conflict-ridden their countries are. Consider that feminist revolutions to gain human rights and equality for women and girls have freed and saved the lives of millions of women and girls—without weapons, without fists, without a drop of blood spilled.

Let’s bring the injustice of female inequality down to the personal level, where millions of women and girls here and throughout the world experience sexual violence, sex trafficking and prostitution; neglect of girls because of son preference; and preventable maternal mortality. Ponder this shocking finding: More lives were lost in the 20th century through male violence against women in all its forms than during 20th century wars and civil strife. Yet, while thousands of monuments in parks and plazas throughout the United States honor those who gave their lives for their country, only one – the first of its kind – is being planned for women who lost their lives giving birth to their country’s children.

World Association for Sustainable Development Video: “International Women’s Day 2024 and Most Influential Women 2024 Sustainability Awards ”

The scourge of men raping women and girls is now compounded in those US states that have denied or greatly diminished the reproductive right to abortion. It is estimated that there were 65,000 rape-related pregnancies between July 2022 and January 2024 in US states banning abortion since the US Supreme Court overturned the 50-year women’s right to make their own reproductive decisions.

Looking into women’s economic status, we find that women have higher rates of poverty than men across most races and ethnicities, with women of color having the highest. Women are hired at a lower level than male counterparts and paid less for the same work, and this wage discrepancy follows them throughout their work life. Domestic violence causes women to lose an average of 8 million days of paid work per year and is a strong factor in women’s homelessness.

Not only do more women than men struggle to cover everyday expenses due to the gender wage gap, which has remained stagnant for 20 years – at about 82% – but the gap compounds over a lifetime, a significant factor contributing to the disparity in poverty rates among women and men age 75 and older.

Women’s birth of and care for children are not compensated with paid parental leave in the United States, unlike all other comparable countries; thus, women who give birth are cheated of savings, pensions and Social Security. No surprise then that the greatest risk factor for being poor in old age is having been a mother.

On a personal note: My fairest employer was my brother Michael: when I delivered papers for him in 7th and 8th grades, he paid me the same rate as himself. Bless you, Mike

• Fairer than the US Environmental Protection Agency New England, which hired me a grade below a comparable male environmental engineer employed at the same time. (When I confronted the director about the inequity, he responded “Doesn’t your husband work?”)

• Fairer than my next employer, which hired me at a significantly lower salary than a comparable male colleague, forcing me to enter into (successful) litigation to win equal pay for equal work and retroactive compensation.

Finally, studies of women and men negotiating post-conflict agreements found that all-male groups take riskier, less empathic and more aggressive positions. They also break down more quickly than negotiations that include women. Interestingly, men are more satisfied with decisions made with women involved than by all-male groups.

So where are the women in negotiations for permanent ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, return of Israeli hostages and Palestinians in Israeli jails, and life-saving aid to Gaza? Where are the women in efforts to bring the war in Ukraine to an end? When will men dare to use the wisdom and skill of women to end their wars and create peace agreements that endure?

International Women’s Day is not only about the arithmetic of equality but also about its consequences – justice for women and girls and a better future for all in our country and the world.

As I began this piece on trees in forests, woods and parks, a friend asked, why in January in New England?  Why didn’t I wait until the deciduous trees were a palette of new spring green crowning the stark brown trunks and branches of winter?  The next day, January 7, nature provided the answer: a 10” snowstorm.  Trees after a winter snowstorm – their upstretched dark deciduous branches shouldered with snow and their downreaching evergreen branches pillowed with snow – are a feast for the eyes.

  “A forest is a sacred place…The medicines available in the forest are the second most valuable gift that nature offers us; the oxygen available there is the first.”  These are the words of Irish born and educated in the ancient Celtic culture of spiritual and physical respect for trees, Diana Beresford Kroeger.  This brilliant botanist went on to receive advanced degrees, culminating in a doctorate in medical biochemistry.  She affirmed that simply walking in a pine forest is a balm for the body and soul, elevating our mood, thanks to their chemical gift of pinenes aerosols released by pine trees and absorbed by our bodies. 

The healing potential of nature even stretches to those hospitalized. Patients recovering from surgery heal more quickly and need fewer pain killers if they have a hospital room with a window that looks out onto nature.  Similarly, studies of students in classrooms with a view of nature have found that they both enjoyed learning and learned more than students without a view of nature.

Suzanne Simard worked for Canada’s minister of forests doing research on the most efficient ways to re-grow forests that had been clearcut by the logging industry.  Loving forests since a child growing up in rural British Columbia, she grasped immediately that clear-cutting whole areas of a forest and applying herbicide to kill any competitor plant or tree before replanting monoculture tree seedlings was a “war on the forest.” In testing her insight, she found that clearcutting and planting single species seedling trees made no difference to speeding up the growth of the desired tree plantation and in some cases, reduced tree survival in the monoculture wood lots. 

“Healing Forest,” Digital, Dream / Mystical, 2024.

In pursuing a doctorate and subsequent years of research, Simard documented that biodiverse forests are the healthiest of forests, with trees communicating with other trees of their own species and other species by an underground fungal network linking their roots with each other. Through this network, known as the wood wide web, trees provide chemical food and medicine to keep each other as healthy as possible.  Her work has shown that “the fungal networks between roots of diverse trees carry the same chemicals as neurotransmitters in our brain,” strongly suggesting, she says, that trees have intelligence.  She has learned from Aboriginal people that “they view trees as their people, just as they view the wolves and the bears and the salmon as their relations.”  We need that back, she asserts. 

Trees teach us lessons of community and cooperation through all the seasons, writes German forester Peter Wohlleben in The Hidden Life of Trees.  He deems forests as “superorganisms,” sharing food with their own species and even nourishing their competitors.  Together they create an ecosystem that enables them to live much longer as a community than a single living tree alone, a life lesson for us humans.  Moreover, “sick trees are supported by healthy ones nearby…until they recover; and even a dead trunk is indispensable for the cycle of lifesaving as a cradle for its young.”

Trees are essential for life on earth; the older they are, the more essential they are.  They remove carbon dioxide from the air, store carbon in their tissue and soil, give back oxygen into the atmosphere and slow global temperature increases. They offer cooling shade in hardscape urban neighborhoods, buffer cold winter winds, attract birds and wildlife, purify our air, prevent soil erosion during rainstorms and filter rainwater falling through their soil.  

Without trees, we could not survive, whereas they have and could live without us.  Older than we so-called homo sapiens (“wise men”) by a thousand times, they are wiser than many humans: they do not wage war with each other nor destroy their own habitat.  They know not genocide nor ecocide.  They are our ancestral model for cooperative, non-violent and sustainable communities.

I write this to honor and thank the multitude of forest protectors across our country and for those working to restore nature to their towns and cities.

President Joe Biden

Dear Joe,

I would wish you a Happy New Year; but it seems trite and banal, given all the challenges and troubles you and our country face in 2024 – some inherited from previous administrations, others of your own making.

Americans are 10 times more likely to be shot to death than people in other wealthy countries, with homicides, suicides and mass shootings on the increase.  For the past four years, mass murders have skyrocketed into the 600s per year, breaking all past records.  Since 2020 more children and teens are killed by firearms than any other cause. 

Don’t these sound like war statistics?

Yes, you have established the first White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention.  But it is rare to find anyone in your administration making the connection between our country’s record-breaking gun violence at home and our country’s record-breaking military weapons sales across the world, to democracies and autocracies alike, having grown dramatically over the past 5 years.  To re-state, isn’t it possible that the US global culture of weapons and militarism with nearly 100 military bases ringing the world, and our long and persistent history of war (nearly 40 in your and my lifetime), rebounds back to infect our violent culture here at home? 

The US pledged $17.5 million to a loss and damage fund for poor countries vulnerable to extreme climate damage (for which the US is more responsible than any other country) at the 2023 UN climate conference while doling out over $100 billion in weapons and military aid in the same year to feed and fuel wars in Gaza and Ukraine, wars that destroy and contaminate, likely irreparably, the homeland and ecosystems of those peoples who survive these wars and genocide in the case of Gaza.  Crumbs for climate crisis and ruined ecosystems fall from the Master’s table, while feasts of weapons abound. 

Our habit of war “has yielded a host of perverse results here at home,” writes war veteran and noted historian of American military history, Andrew Bacevich.  Neither have our wars brought about “peace [or democracy] by even the loosest definition of the word… the opposite in most case.”  His wise counsel: discard militarism in favor of “prudence and pragmatism.”

You often state proudly that we are the strongest military in the world, as if it is a crown of excellence, when in fact it is a crown of thorns on our country, which hangs on a cross of iron.

As Eisenhower memorably said in 1953: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” What felonious theft our military budget is from the 140 million or 40% of US citizens poor and low-income American people, for whom the crucial Poor People’s Campaign advocates.   Forty-four million Americans “struggled with hunger” in 2022, according to USDA. Diseases of despair are rampant. 

“Missile Theft,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream/ Dreamland v. 3/ IbisPaint, 2023

Our life expectancy – a critical marker of people’s overall health – is lower than all comparable wealthy countries, and many other countries including China and Cuba.  Recall Dr. Martin Luther King’s warning: “If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty and make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life, she too will go to hell.” 

I do wish that that you had read the other Catholic president John F Kennedy’s 1963 peace speech at American University before you met recently in San Francisco with Xi Jinping, President of the People’s Republic of China.  At the height of the Cold War with the Soviet Union and the Cuban Missile crisis, Kennedy and Khrushchev opened a line of communication and held many secret talks, despite monumental political differences, for the sake of moving away from imminent nuclear war. 

In his 1963 address at American University, Kennedy, after stating his abhorrence of Communism, praised Russia’s key role in saving Europe from Nazism while losing 20 million citizens, and he foregrounded the two countries shared humanity.  “If we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”  In many diplomatic private talks and communications, also involving Pope John the XXIII, Kennedy and Khrushchev laid the groundwork for ending above ground nuclear weapons testing with the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons and forging a more peaceful country-to-country relationship.  Within 6 1/2 months President Kennedy was assassinated.

Xi’s remarks to a gathering of business leaders, following your more private meeting with him last November, has some resemblances with JFK’s speech.  He displayed respect for our country’s accomplishments (even if for self-serving reasons) and advocated the two countries accept political diversity in a multi-polar world.  Joe, you did not employ the same tact when you replied at a press conference to a reporter’s provocation, Yes, I think Xi is a dictator –a gratuitous remark that does little to advance your stated goals of working together to avoid war and address the climate crisis and to live in a multipolar, diverse world.  You are generous with weapons; but dismissive of dialogue where it is most needed.

My wish for you in 2024 is to imbibe this wisdom and act on it:  What is hateful to yourself, do not do to your fellow man. That is the core of the Torah, the New Testament, the Koran and other religious traditions.  Make it your own, end the US addiction to war, and save your country’s soul and your own.

Karen Boyden, with the assistance of some family and friends, folded and laid out free shoes and summer clothes and, later, fall sweaters, pants and heavier shoes on a table and blanket on the Commons.  A sign welcomed all passing by to help themselves to “Dippy’s Closet.”  Some who chose clothing and shoes, with the advice of friends, left with smiles; others were discreet, not wanting to draw attention to themselves. 

Dippy’s Closet, I learned from Karen, is a grassroots volunteer driven outreach that provides free clothing for men, women, and children with the specific goal “to attract homeless folks and individual and families who are struggling financially to purchase quality clothing.”  She was first inspired to share her father’s wardrobe when he unexpectedly passed in Sept of 2022; and she began donating his wardrobe to men living in a recovery home in Greenfield.   “It was a great way to rechannel the pain of losing my dad into helping others,” especially seeing “so many people living on the streets of Greenfield.”

 Karen estimates that, in their 9 outreaches on the Commons from June to early November, about 50 people have visited weekly and left with clothing.  She has widened the circle of donors, including co-workers at the Valley Medical Group Easthampton and the Giving Circle Thrift Shop of South Deerfield.

Asked what this act of kindness for other fellow humans means for her, she replied “I want to show the folks who are struggling that we do notice, that we do care and they are valued.  It is my hope that our little clothing mission might inspire others to serve the homeless.  It is not that hard and so incredibly rewarding….”

Karen mentioned being inspired by the Stone Soup Café, seeing their efforts to serve folks in need.  And I noticed that some who stopped by Pippy’s Closet then headed to Stone Soup Café, one long block away, for a gourmet, healthy lunch, offered each Saturday noon to 1:30.  

Image by Linda Lioe from Pixabay

This pay-what-you can community cafe, whose intent is “to build a culture of belonging,” has grown since its opening in 2010 from serving 25 meals to 600 meals each week.  Their Community Free Store, an emergency curbside food pantry, was created at the prompting of their guests during the onset of the pandemic.  It provides between 80-110 households with groceries, produce and personal care items at no charge to them.  In 2022 Stone Soup created a tuition-free 12-week Culinary Institute program career training to people seeking a new career path, especially those who are seeking employment after a period of incarceration or recovery from addiction. Those accepted into the program leave with a Food Handlers License, a ServSafe Certificate in Kitchen Management, job skills, practicum experience, and references for securing work in the food sector of Franklin County.

Explaining her intense commitment, co-director and chef, Kirsten Levitt said; “My life’s passion is to service…humans are hardwired for service.”   Head of Volunteers, Sarah Hilliard, is motivated by “a lot of love. No human being should be without food.”

Nearby in the Second Congregational Church, Gloria Matlock and volunteer tutors work with up to 20 children, to augment their chances to thrive as they grow in the innovative Twice As Smart program founded by Matlock in 2018.    Her lofty four-fold mission is to:

• Provide after school academic instruction to augment children’s confidence in reading, writing and mathematics leading to a love of learning.
• Cultivate social and listening skills.
• Encourage each child to develop their unique “voice” and to find self-expression through art and music.
• Expose children to resources, role models and experiences that expand their educational and career possibilities.

Twice As Smart students are Latinx, Black and African American, Native American and White; some are immigrants and many live in public housing.

This model of holistic education is clearing the students’ obstacle-laden path to higher education, jobs and a deep sense of self, a cause to which artist, musician, and former teacher Gloria Matlock has committed her life.

Are these programs using charity to remedy social injustice, as some might claim?  Jane Addams would disagree.  In 1892, this eminent social reformer explained that Hull House, her settlement house in a poor precinct of Chicago, was not a charity.  Its purpose — and, for Addams, a central obligation of being a citizen — was to help America’s less fortunate make the most of themselves.  “To call this effort [charity]…is to underestimate the duties of good citizenship.”

I would add that, with one half of Americans either poor or a medical emergency away from economic ruin, these programs in our midst and the thousands like them across our country are beacons of civilization in a nation that pumps the world full of military weapons, while its soul empties from within.

Pat Hynes, a board member of the Traprock Center for Peace and Justice, is a retired Professor of Environmental Health from Boston University.  She has published and spoken widely on feminism, environmental justice, and militarism and peace.  Her most recent book, Hope, But Demand Justice book, is available in bookstores and online.

First published in Greenfield Recorder Dec. 1, 2023       

All public ideals of peace with all other peoples were discarded on June 1, 1954, when the US government renamed Armistice Day as Veterans Day.  This erasure of Armistice Day tragically matched our country’s history of militarism after World War II: first bombing North Korea nearly out of existence and metastasizing into a pathological military-industrial-government complex that claims the lion’s share of our discretionary federal taxes and steals from our government’s social investments in health, education, housing and welfare.

Former Marine Corps officer Camillo Mac Bica interprets the rebranding of  Armistice day to Veterans Day as enabling militarists and war profiteers  “…to celebrate and promote militarism…misrepresent war members of the military as heroes, and encourage the enlistment of cannon fodder for future war for profit.”  Many thousands of soldiers and veterans of major US wars of the 20^th and 21^st centuries, including Mac Bica, have turned against war and revived the intent of Armistice Day: “friendly relations with all other peoples.”

Veterans For Peace was founded in 1985 by 10 US veterans in response to the global nuclear arms race and U.S. military interventions in Central America.

In their words, it “is an organization of former soldiers and allies who know too well the costs of war – the obvious, visible wounds; the unseen wounds that curse us and our families for generations and the cost to society of maintaining a military larger than the next ten nations combined. Bitter experience taught us that war is insanity and suffering.”

Image by NoName_13 from Pixabay

Imagine (in the spirit of John Lennon) if every school celebrated at least one day of peace-making for all 5^th graders on International Peace Day September 21, as does the Maine Endwell School District with partners Veterans for Peace and the local historical society.  The day is replete with music, with children playing instruments and making posters, a magician and beekeepers – all with themes of peace, and interviews with children regarding what peace means to them.

Veterans for Peace position on the current war in Ukraine, which has killed and wounded some 500,000 people, embodies their lived ideals: “It is time to drop the weapons and embrace diplomacy and peace.  For the people of Ukraine, the people of Russia, the people of Europe, the United States and China. For the children, for the civilians, for the soldiers, for all living things: We demand Diplomacy, Not War. We demand Peace in Ukraine.” 

I am reminded, as I read their words, of Erich Maria Remarque who enlisted at age 19 in the World War I German army.  Some 10 years after the war’s end, he published his first (and what some consider the greatest) anti-war novel, All Quiet on the Western Front. Remarque’s 19-year-old soldier protagonist acutely observes the corrupt dynamics of war: “I see how peoples are set against each other . . . foolishly, innocently, obediently slaying each other … While they [the promoters and boosters] continued to talk and write, we saw the wounded and dying…The wrong people do the fighting.” 

In perhaps the most incisive moment of Remarque’s novel, a young German soldier gazes upon a young French soldier he has killed and ponders their common humanity, with words that undercut the war’s hard-bitten hatred and national chauvinism. “Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony.” 

Undoubtedly, the voices of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers and vets turned war resisters will emerge in time in bitter protest against that war.

We remember soldiers who have died in US wars on Memorial Day and soldiers who have served in the US military, especially those maimed, injured and broken by the moral injury of war, on Veterans Day.

Why not, then, RESTORE Armistice Day with its resolve for friendly relations with all other peoples” for the sake of world peace, if we are to survive.