We’ve Taught Our Children Well

TOM BOSWELL, OCTOBER 20, 2024

On the afternoon of September 5, I was one of a handful of pro-Palestinian activists in Southwest Wisconsin who drove out to the little town of Westby for an appearance by President Joe Biden. Some of us carried signs about the ongoing genocide in Gaza. I had a piece of paper with the president’s words from the previous day, after yet another school shooting.

I wasn’t very confident but hoped to get close enough to the main man to recite his words back to him. As it happened, only half a handful of us managed to circumvent all the police and sheriff roadblocks and make it to the little patch of lawn adjacent to a cemetery that was reserved for “protestors”.

It was a 14-year-old high school student with the name Colt who had taken the lives of two other 14-year-old classmates and two teachers the day before, while injuring nine others. (No, he hadn’t used a Colt revolver, from the company with the sales slogan Be Legendary, to commit his heinous act. Rather his weapon of choice was a semi-automatic, assault-style rifle.)

Here is what Biden had said: “Winder, Georgia, has now turned into another horrific reminder of how gun violence continues to tear our communities apart. Students across the country are learning how to duck and cover instead of how to read and write. We cannot continue to accept this as normal.”

Vice President Kamala Harris, not to be outdone, said: “This is just a senseless tragedy on top of so many senseless tragedies, and it’s just outrageous that every day in our country, in the United States of America, that parents have to send their children to school, worried about whether or not their child will come home alive.”

Harris went on to use the world senseless a few more times, so many that I feared she would wear out the word. But it’s NOT senseless. It makes utter, irrefutable sense. When adolescents shoot up their schools, they are just imitating their elders, particularly the elders in our society that hold power. As a nation, we are addicted to violence—both military violence and homegrown violence. We worship violence. We are dependent on violence. It’s our cocaine or fentanyl fix.

After someone made what was the second unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Donald Trump, a little over a week later, Biden said he was “relieved” that the former president was unharmed. “As I have said many times,” he said, “there is no place for political violence or for any violence ever in our country.” How could he possibly say this with a straight face? There is plenty of place for violence, from New York to California and throughout the US empire that stretches around the world and includes about 750 military bases in 80 countries. There is hardly any place (or serious funding) for anything that might be life-affirming or to meet people’s basic needs.

With every new mass shooting, politicians love to insist that this is not what our country is about. But it is precisely what we are about. It probably distinguishes us from every other country on earth; it is what makes America exceptional. Violence is the rule, not the exception. We work hard at it, squandering our common wealth on war and weapons of mass destruction.

While Biden and Harris mouth platitudes about how outrageous the violence in our schools, homes and communities is, what does their foreign policy say? Here’s a few passages from a recent statement by two-time presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich.

* As of May, 2024, the US has committed over $175 (borrowed) billion to escalate the proxy war against Russia. Kucinich then recounted how Volodymyr Zelenskyy made a campaign stop at an ammunition factory in Scranton, Pennsylvania where some of the three million 155mm artillery shells the US has given Ukraine are produced. Standing beside Zelenskyy, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania autographed one of the high-velocity shells that will be aimed at Russia.

* “The fervor of warmongering, fueled by machismo and high bravado, illustrates the failure of leadership and a fatal ignorance of the diplomatic process. We should be exercising the science of human relations, not propelling a hubristic and ego-driven brinkmanship which accelerates the dialectic of war,” Kucinich wrote.

* Then he noted how Vice President Harris bragged that former Vice President Dick Cheney had endorsed her campaign. This is the same Dick Cheney who served with George W. Bush and oversaw the $3 trillion-dollar war on Iraq that caused the death of over one million Iraqis. The same war that “set us on a path where, since 9/11, America has borrowed $8 trillion to keep the war machine in tune as our own nation’s pressing domestic needs for housing, health care, education, child care and retirement security have been set aside.”

* “The US government’s endless quest to instigate, fulminate or otherwise set our nation on a path of either participating in or funding endless war … is now sweeping up nations in its maw and, if left unchecked, will soon draw in American troops and inevitably a world war will come home in ways that no one in the continental United States has ever experienced, far exceeding the horrors of 9/11.”

* “While the people of the US are being played by politicians who are giddy with the notion of stuffing the November ballot box with bombs, rockets, missiles, artillery shells and national debt, our government is also being played by the equally unstable and craven leaders of foreign countries.”

* “And so, the US forks over endless rivers of US taxpayers’ cash for endless wars, without any thought of how this all ends, or how or who ultimately pays. Red or blue, there are no winners in a war devouring our lives, our blood and our national wealth.”

On September 24, two people spoke before the UN General Assembly in New York. One was President Biden, who boasted about working for peace and de-escalation. Quoting Sharon Zhang of Truthout: “He struck an almost anti-war tone as he bragged about withdrawing troops from Afghanistan and, ironically, opposing South African apartheid in his younger years … But Biden suspended his dovish talk when he spoke about the Middle East and Israel’s massacres—for which the US has undermined humanitarian standards at every turn.”

The other speaker of note that day was UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who warned that the world has entered an “age of impunity”. Quoting from another article by the same Truthout reporter, Guterres said that, as world powers have refused to stop the “non-stop nightmare” in Gaza and Israel’s aggression that has put Lebanon “at the brink” of becoming “another Gaza”, immunity for such abuses is now the norm.

“The level of impunity in the world is politically indefensible and morally intolerable. Today, a growing number of governments and others feel entitled to a ‘get out of jail free’ card,” he said. “They can thumb their nose at humanitarian law. They can invade another country, lay waste to whole societies, or utterly disregard the welfare of their own people. And nothing will happen.”

Guterres called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and condemned the international bodies allowing Isreal to continue its illegal settler projects, ethnic cleansing and aggression. These actions are stripping Palestinians of all rights and dignity, he warned, adding that Israel’s atrocities in Gaza are unlike anything else he has seen in his years as UN chief.

In late September, I received an email from a staff person at an anti-gun violence group in Milwaukee who reported that he and other gun violence prevention advocates had just spent two days at the White House with President Biden and Vice President Harris. They were celebrating “historic drops in gun homicide over the past few years” and working on a “suite of new Executive Orders  … to address the growing threat of machine gun conversion, strengthen background checks, reduce the trauma from school active shooter drills” and other strategies to protect communities from the scourge of gun violence.

I doubt very much that any of the gun violence prevention advocates thought to broach issues of foreign policy with the President.  Community organizers are trained to focus on specific, immediate and winnable issues that a large number of people feel strongly about. It’s usually not good strategy to “muddy the waters” by introducing bigger or broader problems that may not be conducive to immediate solutions.

I spent a couple decades in Milwaukee addressing peace issues as a volunteer but most of my professional time was spent as a neighborhood organizer in the inner city. I’m grateful to hear that Milwaukee’s streets might be somewhat safer today. But I think we are now at a point in the state of our world that is so dire and dangerous that we who care about both domestic peace and world peace are called to see things in a broader context. We need to make the obvious connection between what we do here at home and what we do abroad. I think that getting some guns off the streets in the US can help but I fear it is not even close to being sufficient to address the crisis of violence and impending desolation we face.

The Peter G. Peterson Foundation estimates that this past year the US spent $142 billion buying weapons systems and another $122 billion on research and development of future weaponry and militarized equipment. (Those numbers are only a small fraction of the Pentagon budget.) A recent analysis by the Costs of War Project at Brown University figured that, since 9/11, the US has used an estimated $8 trillion plus just for its post 9/11 wars. Even if you believe there can be such a thing as a “winnable war”, many military experts have pointed out that the US has not won a significant war since WWII. All we have managed to do is sow death, devastation and chaos around the world and made everyone—at home and abroad—less secure.

It is baffling and almost beyond belief that Biden and other politicians are unable to grasp the connection between the carnage and mayhem they wreak in countless countries overseas and the violence at home that they criticize so vehemently. One is obliged to conclude they could not possibly be so clueless, which would imply that it is just blatant hypocrisy on their part.

We need to ask: what makes murder at home a serious crime while murder (and genocide) overseas is a patriotic virtue? Why is it such a heinous act for US teenagers to kill their classmates in our elementary and high schools while we help massacre thousands of infants and children in Palestine and it barely deserves mention by our public officials or most other people?

Israel does not allow journalists or human rights investigators into Gaza outside of a small number of embedded reporters accompanying the Israeli military. (Palestinian journalists are targeted for assassination, with at least 175 having been killed so far.) So it is difficult to gain reliable information on what has happened to the Palestinian children who pose such a threat to the American-Israeli empire. But several intrepid volunteer health workers from the US, working with the Opinion desk at the New York Times, recently conducted a poll of 65 American doctors, nurses and paramedics who had volunteered in Gaza during the current war. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/09/opinion/gaza-doctor-interviews.html

A total of 44 of these health professionals reported that they saw multiple cases of children who had been shot in the head or chest. A doctor from Pittsburgh said that during four hours in the emergency room of a hospital he saw six children between five and twelve years of age with single gunshot wounds to the skull. A doctor from Virginia reported that four or five children, five to eight years old, were presented to the emergency room at the same time, each with a single shot to the head. They all died. An anesthesiologist from Toledo, Ohio, said: “I saw many children. In my experience the gunshot wound was often to the head. Many had non-curable, permanent brain damage. It was almost a daily occurrence to have children arrive at the hospital with gunshot wounds to the head.”

Most of the health care workers observed severe malnutrition among children, other patients and Palestinian hospital staff. Most of these health care professionals observed nearly universal psychiatric distress in young children and some who were suicidal or wished they had died. A pediatric critical care doctor reported that “One child who had lost all his family wished he had been killed too, saying: “Everyone I love is in heaven. I don’t want to be here anymore.” “

Unless the message of our government leaders is Do as I say, don’t do as I do, we are not teaching our children that violence is unacceptable. We are teaching that violence, and even killing, is the preferred method to resolve all our problems. Of course, the principal “problem” for US policy-makers, politicians, the military and the weapons-makers is how to preserve our dominance of the world and maintain the empire.

As I write this, the Associated Press has just published a lengthy article detailing how many of the people accused of “ideologically driven extremist crimes from 2117 through 2023” share a military background. The AP collected and analyzed data from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) showing that more than 80 percent of extremists with military backgrounds identified with far-right, anti-government or white supremacist ideologies. A START leader said they found that a military background was “the number one predictor of being classified as a mass casualty offender,” outranking mental health problems, being a loner, having a previous criminal history or substance abuse issues.

But I would look at this data through a slightly different lens. We need to keep in mind that most mainstream media in the US label Palestinians and any other brown-skinned people in the world seeking their liberation as extremists or terrorists. Also, the flip side of this issue: many, if not most of the sources I consult for the best analysis and writing about issues of war, militarism and US foreign policy are former officers in the US military.

Now we are about half a month away from a presidential election in which, as usual, we are offered no real choice. Both major candidates, as blogger Caitlin Schneider recently wrote, “are unflinchingly committed to upholding the military-industrial complex that defines this country.” https://www.discourseblog.com/p/the-american-killing-machine-and Kamala Harris has vowed to “ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.”  (She will make an inspirational model for all our young girls as they grow up. Weren’t Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton lethal enough?)

“We compartmentalize until we can’t,” Caitlin Schneider continued, “until the killing machine becomes too overwhelming, and we can’t see that, in one way or another, that machine is also coming for us. Every day, each of us has to navigate the immense violence that powers our world. We all have to figure out how to handle the weight of all that violence without losing our minds. We all choose, in one way or another, to look away from something terrible. The endless nature of combat and ambient violence in everyday life in the United States is part of what keeps us desensitized and inured. Violence begets violence. It’s an insatiable beast. It’s all most of us know.”

“U.S. support for Israel has totally insulated Israeli political elites from any consequences for their actions,” Sunjeev Bery wrote in The Intercept On October 10. “ https://theintercept.com/2024/10/10/israel-war-us-foreign-policy/ “As a result, Israeli society has now become a horrifying case study in the politics of genocide. Today, Zionist Israeli officials even call Palestinian infants “terrorists,” while Israeli snipers put bullets in Palestinian children’s hearts and heads … At every step along the way, Biden and Harris have rewarded these political developments with more weapons and supportive pro-Israel propaganda.

“The simple reality is that U.S. foreign policy remains just as bloody and horrific as it has always been,” he added. “In earlier decades, “acceptable” losses included the one to two million civilians killed in Vietnam, another million dead in Indonesia, the carnage of U.S.-backed dictators across Latin America, and the hundreds of thousands killed during the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.  Today’s U.S. military and diplomatic interventions in the Middle East are no different … as has been true in other regions of the world, U.S. foreign policy is the fundamental obstacle to justice, democracy and peace in the Middle East.”

It is certainly laudable that there are grass-roots groups here in the US working to reduce the use of firearms on our streets and in our schools. But what we also need to do is connect the issues between the violence at home and the violence we cause abroad. What is needed beyond these earnest efforts is a movement to take the guns out of the hands of our nation’s leaders, put the arms merchants out of business, and teach our politicians how to resolve disputes, (as they should have learned back in kindergarten), through diplomacy and negotiation. In other words, to study war no more.