by Tom Howard-Hastings
This is the season when we ought to have that gratitude attitude. We are blessed, each and every one of us, with more food, more drink, more climate control, more mass communication, more and swifter modes of transportation, more stuff, than anyone in human history.
If we are US North Americans, especially. Here, even the poor are chubby.
To what do we owe this munificence? Is God indeed on our side, against the hordes in Africa, Asia and Latin America? As we count our blessings, we count on the US military to acquire them for us and to protect them once we have gotten them. Of all the organizations devoted to threatening and, when "necessary," committing death and mayhem, the US Department of Defense is the largest and the most well-funded. In DoD we trust.
According to the World Health Organization, poverty is the greatest killer on Earth.We must ask, then, what causes poverty?
1.3 billion of the world’s people live on incomes less than $1 per day, according to the World Resources Institute. Meanwhile, in the US alone, we are spending close to half a trillion dollars each and every year on a combination of :
* the Pentagon budget,
* the Veterans’ Department budget,
* the portions of the Department of Energy budget that goes to producing
nuclear weapons and handling military radioactive waste,
* the portion of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration budget
that goes toward launching and maintaining military satellites,
* foreign military aid,
* international peacekeeping,
* and, finally, the The Center for Defense Information says that roughly
$100 billion is the annual share of the interest on the national debt that
has accrued on the borrowing necessary to pay for the giant military purchases
of the past 20 years, primarily of the Reagan Regime.
Does this mean that the world’s poor are just a regrettable necessity in order to protect our lifestyle, our freedoms, our national sovereignty?
We have to ask that question when we make our decisions about who is going to govern us, about what we purchase, about what we drive, about what we are willing to pay for, about what is done in our name. It is not enough to merely be thankful for what we have.
"What we take is hard to do; what we do is hard to take." So said Santee Sioux poet John Trudell, speaking of America's role around the world. While we remember what it is that we are being thankful for, let's remember what we all pay for. What choices do we make that might help others be more thankful rather than in misery?
While we ponder these choices, let us bear in mind the most succinct definition of the term "human rights" I've ever come across, this from India's Upendra Baxi: "Taking suffering seriously." How seriously do we take human suffering when we know about these choices and consequences in these arenas?
* rudimentary education. Almost a billion adults on this poor planet are illiterate while rulers have spent about $8 trillion developing and maintaining the atomic arsenal that daily threatens all of life, according to the Brookings Institute.
* health care funding. World Priorities notes that half the governments of the world spend more on their militaries than on an attack on the direct enemies of good health (e.g., medicine, sanitation, agricultural development).
* children’s preventive care. Please: pause. Take a minute, literally 60 seconds, of silence. During that minute and every minute, around the Earth, on average, 30 children under the age of five die each die around our Earth as a direct result of malnutrition or lack of basic medicine, even as the world misspends $1.4 million on the militaries during that same minute, according to analyst Ruth Leger Sivard.
Understanding relative poverty is also important. The United Nations Human Development Programme notes that, while the average income in Japan, for example, is 36 times the average income in Tanzania, the per capita income of the poorest 20 percent in Japan is 130 times more than that of the poorest 20 percent in Tanzania. Peace researcher Johan Galtung talks about these disparities as setting up natural conflicts between the rich in the poorest countries and that nation’s poor even as that wide gulf tends to strengthen bonds between the ruling classes of the rich and poor nations alike. For whom do these great armies really exist? Who suffers, who pays, who dies, who profits?
The UNHDP also points out that the richest 358 people on Earth have a combined personal income roughly equivalent to the poorest 45 percent of humanity—2.3 billion people. Naturally, this astonishing disparity can only be maintained by force of arms.
And those arms, complete with the training to use them, flow from you and me to the other armies of the world, many of which actively destroy dissent by shooting the peasant leaders dead. The American Federation of Scientists reminds us of who we provide this free training to, above and beyond the infamous School of the Americas, where 4,408 human rights activists offered nonviolent resistance on November 21 in remembrance of the murdered millions of the Americas:
* Columbia, currently killing its indigenous people, got $900,000 in military training last year from our Pentagon.
* Indonesia, whose armed forces proved capable of 25 years of genocide against the indigenous of East Timor, and who proved complicit in the slaughter there in August and September, received $800,000 of free military training from the US in 1998.
* Mexico, which has militarized Chiapas and massacred villagers at Acteal, got a cool million in US military training last year.
* Turkey, famous for killing of Kurds, was the lucky recipient of $1.5 million in such training in 1998.
The list goes on.
Thus, when we recall the simultaneous beginning of the rule of NAFTA and the beginning of the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas, both on January 1, 1994, and when we see thousands of activists gathered in Seattle this week for a mass action in opposition to the World Trade Organization, we can perhaps put their concerns into context. They are speaking against the wastage of wealth on a few people of privilege while the mass of humanity suffers as a direct result. They are speaking out against the capital-intensive military expenditure that keeps the world’s poor from simply taking the necessities they need, much as Jesus advised his hungry disciples to simply take a bit of food from the fields if they were hungry. Those fields are now guarded by US Marines or their counterparts and the poor of the world are raising a small but significant voice of protest.
I wish to join them. I invite you to join them. Let us help those with
the guns pointed at them to find justice, to find peace and to be able
to find a reason for thanksgiving. Let us give thanks for the decent people
who crossed the line at the School of the Assassins in a major demonstration
that the power of the human conscience will stand in opposition to the
bloodletting and theft. Let us give thanks for the brave human rights activists
who live and work in those countries where the violence is occuring. Let
us give thanks for whatever strength we can find in ourselves to join this
struggle as we cross the millennial divide.
