[HCCN] fw: Kathy Kelly, Decency and Strength

[Judith Robbins]

Decency and Strength

By Kathy Kelly
February 2, 2010

Here in Colorado Springs, student and community organizers recently  
invited me to try and help promote their campaign against a proposed  
“No Camping” ordinance, a law to ban the homeless from sleeping on  
sidewalks or public lands within the city limits. The organizers  
insist it’s wrongful to criminalize the most desperate and endangered  
among us, that it instead seems quite criminal to persecute people  
already in need of far more care and compassion than we’ve been  
willing to offer, especially during these bitterly cold winter  
months. But others in the area are intent on eliminating the tent  
encampments near the Monument Creek and Shooks Run trails,  
complaining that the encampments mar natural beauty, deter tourists,  
create fire hazards, and degrade the environment by strewing heaps of  
trash and debris near the creek and even in it.

It seems important for both sides of the argument to acknowledge  
other local encampments that Colorado Springs is home to: Fort Carson  
Army base, both Peterson and Schriever (formerly Falcon) Air Force  
Bases, Norad and Cheyenne Air Force Stations, and the U.S. Air Force  
Academy. It’s not lost on opponents of the “No Camping” ordinance  
that stop-loss policies prevent many of the young men and women at  
these institutions from returning to their homes, where many of them  
long to be after repeated tours of military duty outside the United  
States. For every soldier intent on strengthening his or her  
country’s military option, how many more are taking a last-ditch  
option, signing up for the famed “poverty draft,” to sustain  
themselves and their families through an economic crisis felt  
throughout the country and the world? Many, though not all, of these  
young people have been driven by poverty into their encampments as  
surely as the Monument Creek campers have been driven into theirs.

And these bases, whatever the intentions of their residents, can  
certainly be scrutinized for creating waste, destruction, fear,  
fires, massive casualties and environmental degradation. Whatever the  
soldiers’ intentions, these bases are here, when called upon, to  
supply “shock and awe” wherever needed around the world. But, it’s  
highly unlikely that a No-Camping ordinance will appear before the  
City Council of Colorado Springs, or any other city in the United  
States, returning these young men and women to viable and secure  
lives back in their home communities.

President Obama, while freezing spending on nonmilitary programs in  
this desperate economic moment, just submitted a new budget asking an  
additional 708 billion dollars for the Department of Defense. Keeping  
one U.S. soldier in Afghanistan, for one year, costs one million  
dollars. All this to prevent Al Qaeda strongholds in the country even  
though mainstream news sources have noted that less than 100  
militants of the Al Qaeda organization even live in Afghanistan. (Fox  
News, December 2nd, 2009). With our additional attacks against our  
supposed ally Pakistan, and our insistence that its government attack  
its own villages along the Afghan border, we have displaced at least  
3 million more people, one million of whom still wait in tent  
encampments and inadequate shelters for their indefinitely postponed  
return to security and normal life, filling massive refugee camps  
that military observers repeatedly warn create ideal recruitment  
conditions for jihadist groups.

“In this new decade,” said President Obama, in his State of the Union  
address, “it’s time the American people get a government that matches  
their decency; that embodies their strength.”

But where, with this addiction to war, this perverse use of resources  
that could house and feed our neighbors to instead destroy homes and  
villages abroad, —where can we find decency? Where can we find real  
strength? The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King famously insisted that “A  
nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military  
defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual  
death.” When asked, U.S. people are overwhelmingly in favor of  
reductions, not increases, of the military budget, and increases of  
aid to the needy, not reductions or freezes. Why does it seem so  
impossible to find a government that matches this decency and this  
strength?

Strength, in the sense of real security, comes from communities  
pulling together in compassion and cooperation. Strength comes from  
decency. We are made insecure by our criminal assaults on  
international security and our criminal neglect of the poor at home.  
Who will educate us to better understand that being seen as a  
menacing, frightful and destructive culture, internationally,  
jeopardizes our security? International law establishes that  
initiating war, as we did in Iraq and indeed in Afghanistan, is a  
crime; and in a fundamental sense, for those who wish to live in  
security, crime does not pay.

Our strength will not come from diversions of desperately needed  
resources into meaningless destruction and division. Individual  
Americans, without waiting for help from above, must act to correct  
these pathologies of American social and political life. We can  
support and learn from decent and kindly organizers, in Colorado  
Springs and other communities, who extend a hand of friendship to  
those all too often viewed, domestically, as expendables. We can  
donate from our own resources to fight poverty at home and thereby  
deny these resources as taxable income that our government can employ  
in causing more despair, poverty, and displacement abroad. And we can  
build bonds of community and shared purpose, organizing in our  
neighborhoods, our cities, our schools, churches, and workplaces, to  
build a world wherein no one is left out in the cold.

Kathy Kelly (kathy at vcnv.org) co-coordinates Voices for Creative  
Nonviolence www.vcnv.org
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