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Three pieces of news have been haunting me:
1. Hennepin County Sheriff's Officer Bill Chandler named Students Against War, Anti-Racist Action, and Arise Bookstore in a presentation entitled "Understanding Terrorism in Minnesota" (Star Tribune, March 5, 2003).
2. Eighty women in the U.S. Air Force are part of a class-action lawsuit against military officers for rape and other forms of sexual abuse and harassment. A young Air Force Academy cadet and rape victim reported in the New York Times that "she believed the majority of women in the Academy are raped or molested and that most choose not to report it [for fear of] retribution if not dismissal" (New York Times, March 16, 2003).
3. At a training for school social workers, Abi Gewertz, a University of Minnesota professor who works with battered women's shelters, estimated that the city's children witness 1,200 acts of domestic abuse a month.
These three pieces of news lead me to conclude that the United States is waging the wrong war on terrorism.
Officer Bill Chandler's actions hearken back to another dark era in U.S. history. Some of you remember the McCarthy era. You recall the days when the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was a household word. I teach about mid-century anti-communism every semester in my college history courses. I tell my students about the labor unions, civil rights, and antiwar organizations that tried to protect themselves from the red label by purging, disassociating, and naming names. As a result they destroyed thousands of individual lives and dozens of organizations.
Today the U.S. government's anti-terrorism campaign labels individuals as terrorists by the books they take out of the library, the antiwar organizations in which they participate, and their ethnic identities. Yet today those of us involved in peace and justice work have the example of the 1950s from which we can learn. We know our safety is not in disassociation, but in coalition building. Our strength is in our numbers.
As the New York Times declared on February 17, 2003, we are part of an international movement, a superpower of humanity, with the numerical strength to confront the U.S. corporate and militarist superpower. But people are all our superpower has. We do not have a military arsenal, money, or political positions. We do have e-mail lists, coalition meetings, a united desire for peace and justice, and all kinds of theories about how to best reach the better world we envision. Those theoretical debates are healthy and should continue. Meanwhile, let us open our hands and arms wide to activist and immigrant groups who are being targeted in an effort to divide and conquer us.
We cannot allow the government to use double-speak to redefine what is "violence" and what is "terror." Because terrorism is indeed a huge problem in our society. Our homeland is insecure. The thousands of children who are witnesses/victims of domestic abuse remind us that there is daily terrorism in our community. The Air Force story illustrates that sexual abuse, and indeed patriarchy, are deeply entrenched in the institutions of our government#especially the military institutions that are currently invading our domestic life. We are in desperate need of a homeland security/anti-terrorism campaign that will tackle the problem of domestic and institutional violence and the invasion of U.S. militarism into our homeland.
We could begin by transferring funds from the government's current antiterrorism campaign to domestic violence prevention programs. We could then work to create an ethos so that all human beings in the United States could live a life without the threat of violence and abuse. People in positions of power, be they parents, teachers, spouses, bosses, clergy, police, or military "superiors" would know they lived in a society where a violation of this ethos would not be tolerated.
Finally, it must be pointed out that an increase in domestic violence is a natural outcome of a society that has decided to put its resources into war instead of human needs. As our leaders glorify military "solutions," anti-violence campaigns aimed at the next generation smell of hypocrisy. When we face unemployment, homelessness, a lack of physical and mental health care, and education cuts such as after-school programs, violence increases.
If connecting domestic, institutional, and international violence seems like a stretch for you, consider this: The small elite who are part of the Bush superpower understand that their domestic "wealth-being" is dependent on their control of the earth's labor and natural resources with bombs and guns. To accomplish this, they must also keep the U.S. public divided and fighting.
If we the people are going to act like the superpower the New York Times says we are, we need to make the connections between violence in our neighborhoods, sexual abuse in our institutions, the violation of our right to dissent, and troops in the Persian Gulf.
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