A Mile in Their Shoes

James Minton’s fine film record of the Veterans and Survivors March for Peace and Justice (March 2006) from Mobile to New Orleans.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...42395322&hl=en


Well, members of Veterans’ for Peace, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Iraq Veterans Against the War, and Military Families Speak Out, at the call of the Mobile, Alabama Veterans for Peace Chapter, will conduct a 135-mile march between Mobile AL and New Orleans LA from March 14 to March 19, 2005.

The call will go out on MLK day, and paraphrase Dr. King’s observation that “every bomb dropped over Vietnam explodes in Harlem.”

“Every bomb dropped over Iraq explodes from Mobile to New Orleans.”

We are going to do exactly what a lot of politicians don’t want us to do: highlight the connections between the illegal and racist war of the United States government against Iraq and the criminal neglect and militarized racist occupation mentality of the same government in the preparation for and response to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

We talked about the goals of the march, and of course you have to have those. In activist-speak, everyone has become corproate, so we have to have a “goals statement.” We talked about – using the lexicon of the day – building political solidarity in the form of personal relationships between antiwar veterans and military families, and the surviving members of communities affected by the Katrina-Rita disaster.

We talked about demonstrating through our actions the solidarity of this critical working class, multi-national section of the antiwar movement (veterans and military families) with the survivors of Katrina-Rita not simply as the acute victims of a “natural” disaster, but as predominantly African Americans who continue to suffer structural injustice in the United States.

We talked about spotlighting the similarities between the emphasis on population control instead of reconstruction in both the Gulf States and Iraq, and the white supremacist assumptions built into much public discourse about both. From Angola Penitentiary to Abu Ghraib, as it were.

We talked about spotlighting the cynical and anti-working-class social spending priorities that ignore the input and needs of survivors of the Katrina-Rita disaster in the development of plans for its aftermath, and the use of poor and working class youth to prosecute the wars of the rich abroad.

We talked about conducting a strategic national-regional action that does not immerse the voices of these two stakeholder constituencies (veterans/military families and mostly African American hurricane survivors) in the cacophony of larger national actions. The connections drawn by veterans and survivors – all veterans in a real sense – must be associated with these “veterans” and not with any national grouping within which they are only a fraction.

We talked about involving larger numbers of African Americans in the effort to halt the war in Iraq by connecting that struggle with the urgent concerns of African America and exercising reciprocity from this key section of the antiwar movement with African American communities in this region where the socially structured oppression and inequality was a crisis for African Americans before the hurricanes – and only brought marginally into public view by the dramatic scenes from the hurricanes.

They bulldoze homes n Palestine. Now they do it in New Orleans.

We talked about the importance and difficulty of teaching more white people in the anti-war movement the connections between the system that colonizes African America, that colonizes Palestine, and that attempts to colonize Iraq.

We talked about demands, like self-determination for Gulf Coast hurricane survivors and for Iraqis; like immediate, unilateral, and unconditional withdrawal of all US troops from Iraq; like proper care and full benefits for all veterans returning from the war, including Depleted Uranium testing and post-traumatic stress disorder treatment; like proper environmental clean-up of New Orleans and other affected areas without the mass displacement of residents; we talked about much much more.

But its what we are seeing in our mind’s eye that matters even more.

And we don’t see just “goals.” Soldiers have missions. I guess that makes us missionaries.

Walking down the highway shoulder are dozens of young veterans of the Iraq war, fatigue blouses fluttering, carrying their packs, walking most of the 25-miles per day, retracing the steps of many civil rights veterans through what some call the Black homeland from Mobile to New Orleans. They are accompanied by Vietnam Veterans, some walking, some of us aging beyond our long walk years, and along with other Veterans for Peace, rotating on and off of the accompanying VFP Impeachment buses. Prominent among them are the members of the Mobile, Alabama Chapter of VFP, who called for the action.

We envision a feat of arms… a marathon march of 135 miles, treading the breadth of the devastation, throwing their bodies – once put on the line… muscles, lungs, and feet… for imperial wars – into the road and the weather as a physical demonstration of solidarity with hurricane survivors and African Americans generally.

There will be no dilution of the veterans – veterans of the wars abroad (and the families ARE veterans) alongside Gulf Coast veterans of the war at home. No one will be able to say this is a march of “white northern liberals.” This march will have a distinct and authentic working class character; but it will not be a place where a dozen grouplets claiming to be that class’ vanguard compete to hawk their newspapers.

(If you want to do that, go to the rally in New Orleans on the 19th. If we see you on the road with us, we will get mad at you. I will. I get surly when I’m really tired.)

This is a veterans’ thing. Veterans of the wars at home and abroad.

Our identities as veterans – of war and disaster – will not be submerged in a mass of 300,000 people and bombarded by competing agendas.

At night, we stay in the homes of people who are parts of these communities, or we establish camps, reminiscent of the Bonus March camps, but mobile camps that pick up and move at dawn like a Justice Army driving into the heart of the Great Injustice.

By day, we tread down the road in an epic march, and at the end of each day, we rally, conduct press conferences, and build our new and powerful network with each other.

On the final day at mid-day, we arrive at a giant rally in New Orleans, where those voices that were silenced from the affected communities join those voices from military veterans and families to say that there is a twin injustice in the denial of self-determination to Iraqis and African Americans, and that this war and this disaster were only symptoms of the need for a larger struggle to remove the old power, root and branch, and replace them with popular power.

This is not a be-nice event. It is a be-real event.

There is a social explosion waiting to happen in the Big Easy. This march against war and injustice intends to light the fuse!

The fuse burns down Federal Highway 90, out of Mobile to Pascagoula to Ocean Springs to Biloxi to Gulfport to Pass Christian to Slidell to New Orleans.

The fuse burns through the recent Gallup poll showed that the majority of Americans now trust neither the president nor Congress, and this distrust goes across party lines.

The fuse burns through the generalizing sense of disillusion with conventional political practices, lobbying and voting, and places the politics of the war outside the obedient and contained electoral-legislative process.

The fuse burns through the neglect and abuse of the people whose lives were shattered by this storm and the government response is an ongoing, daily reality, especially in New Orleans; and so is the mounting collective anger and the sense that they themselves are the collateral damage of a colonial government, much like the people of Iraq.

The fuse burns through the long-standing mutual dependence between the Democratic Party and a whole layer of opportunistic Black politicians and relatively privileged professionals who perform a management function for the Democratic Party over the Black population as a whole.

(See the article at Black Commentator)

The fuse burns with the audacious heat of the great organizer Ella Baker, who called together radicalized students at Shaw University in Raleigh for a meeting that would found the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which then went on to galvanize the Black masses of the South, and eventually the nation, with their audacious, out-of-the-box strategies during the world-historic struggle to dismantle legal Apartheid in the South – a region that remains, for numerous reasons, strategically pivotal for any social change movement.

That’s why the fuse starts in Mobile and ends in New Orleans.

FIGHT THE POWER.

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