Heeding King's Call to End the Madness

The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy- and la[ity]-concerned committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. -- Rev. Martin Luther King

Forty years ago this April 4, Martin Luther King delivered a speech at New York's Riverside Drive Church that unequivocally connected the imperial war abroad and the civil rights struggle at home. The speech marked, to the day, the beginning of King's last year of life. He would be assassinated exactly one year after he became the most prominent US civil rights leader to come out against the Vietnam War.

He was eerily prophetic on future US interventions and trouble spots that would require protest, but was dead wrong about its taking only one generation -- we are in the second generation already and our own grandchildren will be marching against US interventions in Nigeria, Venezuela, Angola, and other resource-rich countries "…unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy."

Each year the federal budget is our nation's most profound policy statement -- an economic snapshot of the spiritual covenant that our representatives have made with the people. We each invest a portion of our earnings into a collective pot for the common good. Unfortunately, Bush's proposed budget looks neither common nor good as it awards billions to Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Raytheon, Halliburton, Bechtel, and United Technologies to name eight of the top ten government contractors.

The budget is not a guns-or-butter trade off but rather it trades bread for guns. Under Bush's FY08 proposed budget, Katrina-ravaged Louisiana has nearly 24% cut from its community development block grants compared to FY06.

Perhaps we need to translate domestic expenditures into Pentagon dollars that would, like dog years, immediately show the relative worth of other discretionary spending. For example, the $3 billion that Bush is proposing to counter global warming may sound significant, but it is about two days of Pentagon spending, making US military might about 180 times more important than saving the environment.

A $427 million cut to Headstart over the last two years is equivalent to two hours of Pentagon and Iraq War spending. For less than three days of the Iraq War all of the cuts in the FY08 proposed budget to the Child Care and Development Block Grants could be restored.

In Bush's FY08 budget the Centers for Disease Control, including activities countering potential biological, disease, nuclear, radiological, and chemical threats to civilian populations will be cut by $50 million, a mere 40 minutes and 36 seconds of Pentagon and war funding.

We can rightly say that every minute that the war continues robs our children and our nation of health, education, general welfare, and security.

The Iraq War has cost over $400 billion directly through supplemental funding. However, Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard researcher Linda Bilmes have estimated the total cost of the war at $1.2 trillion, and that figure could rise to over $2 trillion. They add to the direct costs, the estimated 30% of the Pentagon budget that goes to the Iraq War, the long-term costs of medical care for returning vets, and the interest on the national debt financed by Iraq-War-induced deficit spending.

Twenty percent of the 50,500 wounded in the "War on Terror" (including those serving in Iraq, Afghanistan, and surrounding battle stations) have brain trauma, spinal injuries, or amputations. Thirty-six percent of the vets returning from Iraq and Afghanistan who have received treatment from the VA have been diagnosed as needing mental health care -- an unprecedented number, according to Linda Bilmes in her recent John F. Kennedy School study. The Veterans Administration is overwhelmed with the burgeoning needs of returning vets, as the unfolding Walter Reed Hospital scandal illustrates. This analysis doesn't even count the costs of treating the Iraqis and Afghanis suffering from war wounds.

As King prophetically said: "Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam [Iraq]. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam [Iraq]."

This is why the peace movement's call for troops out now is so important and why all of the diluted congressional proposals for piecemeal ending of the war only extend the madness. Each day of war robs this nation both materially and spiritually of bread and life. Now is the time to denounce the war at home as much as the war abroad. Now is the time to form that grand alliance between a peace movement and the most vulnerable and marginalized at home, for as King realized we have to defeat the "giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism."