It has been three days since I returned to Boston and I still can't believe it took a trip to Dallas for me to recognize the severity of the problems our country faces.
Thanks to an invitation from SEIU, I spent the week before the March 4th contests canvassing impoverished and working poor communities. The segregation of blacks and latinos reminded me of the split along California Ave. between the Little Village and Lawndale neighborhoods I worked in before I left Chicago. Ignorance and indifference between the two groups hit hardest by this country's polarized economy, as well as the slight advantages poor whites and Asian-Americans fear losing, are clearly the toughest obstacles to building a coalition that can compete with corporate influence in both major parties.
The preoccupation of most voters with the economy is understandable. Clearly, the only thing recent about the latest economic downturn is that until now, it has mostly spared middle class commuters who use the freeways to bypass the shanty towns of Dallas. The free real estate magazine I picked up listed a 5 bedroom home for $69,000; The rest were trailers and rent-to-own. When I found college-age voters at home doing what college-age wealthy kids do after they get out of class (smoke weed or play Guitar Hero), their parents were most likely at work trying to pick up the slack. On Saturday, most of the young latinos on my list were also at work, some of them in Iraq. Extricating the economy from the war in Iraq is as suspect as the standard practice of pitting our own economic well-being against that of other nations. More often than not, the households struggling the most included veterans, enlisted soldiers or youngsters that were likely to be next in line.
The urgency of ending the war became clearest to me in the Atlanta airport on my way home, as I sat reading Nir Rosen's article in Rolling Stone. A young GI sitting next to me was being recruited by a middle-aged contractor. The other thirty or so people in the lounge tuned out their noisy conversation. As the bulky free agent extolled the high pay, tax advantages and free reign a private operation offers, the young soldier seemed ready to jump at the opportunity to finally "get every last one of them". Well, he may have meant terrorists but he had just been saying that Arabs don't know what's good for them. So I was looking at the third picture in the article*, which is absolutely inappropriate for the faint of heart, when a baby-faced female soldier walked in the crowded room and sat across from me. When the young soldier started glad-handing her, it was all I could do to fold the magazine over and hold the magazine in such a way that she might glimpse the moral peril she was facing.
Please read this article. I share my coincidental encounter in the hopes that others will lose patience with the treacherous use of unaccountable and invisible tactics. May it put to rest the facile argument that the surge is working because the statistics say so. It is dangerously naive to blame our volunteer army and the current administration that sent them for everything bad that has happened in Iraq. It is also too simplistic to blame poverty on the irresponsibility of those born into it when those with privilege won't take responsibility for the atrocities our neglect has enabled. History will hold us all accountable.
*Note: The third picture is of a GI mugging for a camera shot as he towers over what appears to be a dead Iraqi. It is unclear whether the head of the Iraqi is still attached. The grotesque image apparently did not make it onto the Rolling Stone web site. Judge for yourself.