WNPJ member Bonnie Block reports on her experience as a member of a delegation attempting to deliver a letter to Secretary of War Robert Gates:
After much planning, preparation, recommitment to nonviolence, and community building, there were 25 of us who went to the Pentagon risking arrest. Our plan of action was to ask for a meeting with Defense Secretary Gates because he hadn’t replied to the letter we sent him weeks ago. While we didn’t actually expect to see him, we did expect we would be able to publicly witness by reading that letter so people passing though the metal detector to enter the Pentagon and the dozens of people fenced off in the so-called “free speech zone” would hear it.
What happened instead was that as soon as we moved away from the escalator that brought us up from the Metro station we were faced with a police line. The officer in charge quickly repeated “This is your first warning, this is your second warning, this is your third warning” and then they charged us. I saw more police officers coming through the other side of the metal detector. Next, I saw a police officer pushing an activist and running her into a post along a sidewalk leading to the road where police vans were parked.
I must have turned so I could see what was going to happen and then I felt two hands on my back and was pushed hard. I stumbled but managed to regain my footing without falling. I decided to quickly walk over to another one of the posts to stand there with my friend Joyce and another activist. We began to read the letter, but stopped when we heard the people in the “free speech zone” singing songs of support. Almost immediately, a police officer came over and held all three of us against the post even though we had our backs partly turned to him and were offering no resistance.
I found out later that my friend Joy had her arms wrenched up and behind her so that her shoulders were sore for a day. An 80 year old woman in our group (who has white hair and uses a cane) was knocked to the ground. All the while I heard the police yelling “go to the free speech zone, go to the free speech zone.” Not until we were standing by the police vans did a police officer face me or say anything to me. And they didn’t say much in response to my statement to three of them: “Don’t worry, we’re nonviolent activists. You’re doing your job and we're doing our job.” (I forgot to add “as citizens trying to end militarism.”)
Within a few minutes we were all handcuffed, searched, and put into the back door of a police vehicle. We were driven to a nearby warehouse for processing. Inside I counted seventeen “Pentagon Force Protection Agency “ officers – this for twenty five citizens who had publicly pledged themselves to nonviolence and merely asked to hand -deliver a letter! Several members of our group also saw additional officers without name badges who left before we were taken away. So we’re not sure what the total police count actually was.
Those of us who had not been arrested at the Pentagon before were issued a Warning citation for “failure to obey a lawful order. “ The eight who had been arrested previously were charged with “disorderly conduct” and have a court date of June 3rd. That charge is ironic because not one a single one of us resisted the police -- they were the ones yelling, grabbing and shoving us.
It took over two hours to be processed and then we were released to walk in the rain back to Pentagon City where our support people were waiting. We spent some time piecing together the story of what had just taken place. As Max, one of our spokespersons said, “Congratulations, this was the quickest arrest on record.” Apparently in an effort to not clog the courts, the decision has been made to ignore the first arrest but to make it frightening enough to dissuade people from coming back a second time.
I left with a profound sense of the enormity of the problem facing us and the belief that President Eisenhower’s prediction in his April 16, 1953 “Chance for Peace” speech has truly come to pass:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
Eisenhower said that during the Cold War. Today we have the U.S. military occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, bombing Pakistan, Yemen and Libya; in control of 700-800 military bases worldwide; and a military budget that is about as large as rest of the world combined. The awful consequences of these misplaced priorities are clear not only in the climate chaos around us but also in the current budget battles at both the state and national level.
In Wisconsin, the proposals are to cut almost a billion dollars of aid to local school districts, millions from shared revenue for local units of government and to destroy public employee unions. In Washington D.C., the chair of the Appropriations Committee (Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Janesville)seriously proposes Congress gut Medicaid by converting it to a state block grant program that won’t come close to meeting the needs of the poor and privatizing Medicare with vouchers for seniors to buy insurance from for-profit insurance companies—thus giving corporations access to our Social Security funds just as they already make obscene profits from our out-of-control “defense” spending.
Our militarism is destroying us and our planet. The Pentagon action by a small group of activists was just a grain of sand inserted into the well oiled military machine and it spit us out in minutes. Nevertheless I find hope in the words of a folk song we’ve been singing in our Capitol rotunda:
“Step by step, the longest march can be won, can be won
Many stones can form an arch, singly none, singly none
And in union what we will, can be accomplished still
Drops of water turn a mill, singly none, singly none.”
Bonnie Block is a past Chair of Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice.
No comments:
Post a Comment