shut down creech

This is the group shot of the vigil we attended on Wednesday morning at Creech Air Force Base, part of the week-long, annual event Shut Down Creech.  It was a vibrant group of people.

The protesters of Shut Down Creech remind me of what I like about activism.  Idealistic people imagine a better way and are willing to do work toward that vision.  I felt comforted, that I can take time off and return to this life, and the brilliance could still be here for me.

But I’m sorry we need to keep doing this work, protesting militarism.  I wish the cultural beliefs would change so killing isn’t normal and considered necessary.  Military harm is seen as a necessary evil, or an effort to be proud of.  Soldiers are idealized as heros, when mostly they’re bored or afraid.  They’re exploited, disposable pawns.

Mostly war is a racket, a way for the rich to get richer.  But racism fuels it, as the US kills people who are brown.  Killing white people wouldn’t be acceptable, as white people are considered valuable, real people.  Brown people are Other and not really people, to the US government.

violence

Thank you for seeing the absurdity of the violence of war, the way commerce fuels it, and racism is the way victims are chosen.  Air force base workers are mostly victims also.  The drone pilots are traumatized by the wrong they do.  They kill by remote control, then go home to their families, like everything’s ok.

Normalizing violence is a way our culture is broken.  If killing brown people in other countries is ok, it’s easy to see how killing brown people here is ok, as well as harming vulnerable people through sexual assault, oppressing children, harming queer and trans people, polluting Mother Earth, and many wrongs.

Thank you for un-normalizing violence.  Life is hard enough, without people trying to intentionally kill you through robots in the sky.  Sounds like a sci-fi future I never would believe, if I didn’t know it’s real.

I heard a quote recently: All borders imply the violence of their maintenance.  It reminds me of another quote I know: My truth is a wall the keeps out other truths.

It’s ok to decide, set boundaries, differentiate.  But it’s not ok to do that with violence.