By Jay Wenk


















During a warm Spring day in
Czechoslovakia.
The Germans were done.
Safe now, birds returned,
trilling, fluttering around my head,
seeking sustenance for tomorrows.
 
I was homeward bound,
unaware that for my sake,
Eisenhower murdered Eddie Slovik,
unaware the French,
trying to regain a cushy colony,
were destroying a world,
unaware that Korean menus were being
printed by MacArthur and  Co.,
unaware that my youthful interest in
Finland, Ethiopia, China and Spain
made them mine.
Unaware that Truman prepaid Vietnam
to the tune of 4 billion,
secret music the French would waltz with.
As an introduction to that dance,
lies were floated on the high seas.
 
Heroes trekked to Canada, while
Harry’s co-conspirators tangoed over the jungles.
Reverberations of their tunes left
common folks withering
with their trees and food and homes,
birds again taking wing to hidden places.
 
Today, these ancient danse macabres continue in
the Golden Triangle, where peace-proclaiming
leaders’ lies lubricate
the Birthplace of Civilization, compressing it with
greed into civilizations’ tomb.
 
Me, naïve, all those juddering decades ago.
My war never ended, never will.

 By Gene Marx
 March 10, 2017


Fifty years ago next month Martin Luther King, Jr warned us in his first public anti-war speech Beyond Vietnam – A Time to Break Silence that any nation that continues year after year “to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Arguably that led to his assassination exactly one year later.


Since the height of the American War in Vietnam, conditions have worsened exponentially, with military spending escalating unchecked. Since 2001 each new bloated Pentagon appropriation has become the new normal.
 
Barely a week after his inauguration, President Trump’s executive order, as promised, obliterated the limits on Pentagon spending, setting in motion a military buildup to end all military buildups. As if on cue the House of Representatives voted this week to boost funding for more bullets and bombs, as well as some of the most deadly airborne killing machines in the US arsenal. Some weren’t even on the Pentagon’s wish list, 11 and 12 more F-35 and F/A-18 fighters, respectively. The new $578 billion stop-gap bill keeps the U.S. military operating through September and sets the stage for even more increases to the Pentagon black hole of expenditures, as if budget caps were merely inconvenient workarounds.
 
Predictably, the House of Representatives minority saw fit to ignore Dr King’s “fierce urgency of now” plea delivered from the pulpit of New York’s Riverside Church in April 1967, lining up instead with Congressional hawks and defense industry contractors. Come this fall there will be even more at stake. If the GOP majority has its way housing, transportation, environmental protection, biomedical research, education and health care would take huge hits to pay for a fiscal 2018 defense measure approaching $640 billion. We will need Capitol Hill representation that exceeds our expectations. Forestalling nay votes in opposition to the unfettered destructive agenda of the Pentagon would only benefit war profiteers and further derail the full potential of domestic achievements for another generation.
 
MLK Jr, never one to pull punches at the expense of peace and social justice, concluded his controversial, certainly prescient speech with this forethought:  “In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time."

Call your Congressional representatives and remind them once more that in 2017, as it was in 1967, time is still at a premium. Insist, moreover demand, that they oppose any increases at all to military spending.


The author of this piece is Veterans For Peace Lifetime Member, Past VFP Board Secretary and Naval Aviation Veteran Gene Marx. He is also an active member of the CPL Jonathan Santos Memorial Veterans For Peace Chapter 111 and has been living in Bellingham, Washington with his wife, Victoria, since 2004.