By Chuck Kaufman, National Co-Coordinator (The following piece was written by Kaufman for the New Priorities Network, of which AFGJ is a member.)
In 2009 angry Tea Party activists hijacked the health care debate with loud and confrontational performances at Congressional Town Hall Meetings across the country. The corporate media loved them and amplified their voices and their power far beyond what their numbers alone merited.
Are tea party activists angrier than we are?
Are we sufficiently angry that the wars and bloated Pentagon budget are stealing from our children the opportunity to live a better life than we enjoyed? Are we sufficiently angry to make our own voices heard before it is too late? Will we stand idly by and while our social safety net is shredded? Will we watch public education destroyed? Will we watch our infrastructure crumble? Will we watch our sons and daughters return from endless wars crippled in body and spirit? Are we ready to stand up and shout, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore?”
The New Priorities Network is angry. We think you are too. We agree with what President Dwight D. Eisenhower told the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 16, 1953:
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. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. 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. […] Is there no other way the world may live?
Yes there is another way the world may live. But it is up to us to force that world into being.
That is why the New Priorities Network is calling on all people of good will to take a page from the Tea Party manual and use every public opportunity to make your anger known. Every elected representative and senator holds town hall meetings. They hold meet and greets. As the primary season approaches they participate in candidate forums, visit assisted living centers, make speeches. In short, they make themselves available to us. We have to use these opportunities to let them know how angry we are. We have to let them know that corporate contributions alone will not win them success against an aroused and angry electorate.
Tell them you will not support them if they support:
* spending half the discretionary budget on the military and endless war
* spending 46.5 percent of global military spending
* keeping between 700-1,000 military bases on foreign soil
* cutting education and shredding the social safety net while increasing the Pentagon budget
* allowing corporations and rich Americans to shirk their share of the tax burden while cutting services to the Middle Class and those most vulnerable in our society
It is a hard thing to stand up and speak truth to power; to raise your voice in a crowd where you might be in the minority. But if we stand silent at this moment in history, we will have failed our children and grandchildren. We will have doomed generations to come to short and brutish lives.
So don’t go to Town Hall Meetings and other forums by yourself. Take your family, your friends, your peace group. Elect your most brazen member as spokesperson and then loudly support her when she confronts the Congress member, the Senator, the candidate.
Don’t be afraid; be angry. They are killing our children. They are slaying our dreams. Your mother’s lessons about good behavior in public do not apply to killers. You do not need to be polite. You need to be relentless.
The New Priorities Network has compiled a huge store of resources from which you can draw statistics, arguments, and authoritative lessons to help make your points. Visit our web page and click on Resources. Start a New Priorities Network chapter in your own community or join one that already exists. Write to [email protected] for more information.
