The war on terrorism has done some serious collateral damage at
home ““ to our public infrastructure and livelihoods, and to
our civil liberties and democracy.
Making war and keeping the nation on a war footing against real
and imagined terrorism costs money. The Department of Defense
budget is $459 billion for 2003 ““ not including pensions and
interest payments from past wars, plus an additional $79 billion
for the Iraq invasion. Bush administration cronies line up to reap
the spoils of war and, surprise, the rest of us pay the bills. We
pay in the form of cutbacks in health, education, social welfare,
parks, libraries and transportation, as more of the public purse is
shifted to the military and homeland security.
The rub is that we individuals in different sectors of society
encounter the costs in different ways, so that we each need to look
beyond our personal circumstances to connect the dots.
Working-class communities and communities of color pay the most.
Men and women from low-income communities enlist and risk their
lives disproportionately, because the military is their best shot
at an education for a decent career.
But our new veterans may be out of luck, since Bush has slashed
benefits by $6.2 billion. And many of them may join the veterans
from the Gulf War, who are suffering the consequences of the United
States’ use of depleted uranium and struggling to wrest
medical care from the Veterans’ Administration.
Bush’s policies call for the layoffs of thousands of newly
federalized airport screeners. As many as 38 states are facing
budget crises. Over one million people, largely low-waged workers
and the unemployed, have lost health care access. Tuition in public
higher education rises, and affirmative action has been cut,
denying fair opportunities to low-income students.
These concerns helped fuel the biggest anti-war movement this
country has seen in a long time. The city councils of the
nation’s three largest cities (New York, Los Angeles and
Chicago), as well as one of the poorest states (Maine) and some 150
other cities across the nation, passed anti-war resolutions. Many
unions went on record against the war; even the conservative
AFL-CIO spoke out against the war.
Before the war a very interesting conversation began to take
place across big cities and small towns, across racial and ethnic
lines, across income lines, and across religious lines, as people
confronted the hypocrisy of waging war to bring democracy to Iraq
while curtailing it at home. How can anything be accomplished by
attacking a dictator and devastating civilians when corporate
cronies like Haliburton, Bechtel and the oil industry benefit?
Better yet, why is this being paid for with the lives and taxes of
average Americans? Had this conversation continued its trajectory,
who knows what kind of political consensus might have emerged.
But as soon as the bombing of Iraq began, the Bush
administration and the mass media let loose a massive propaganda
assault to nip this conversation in the bud by calling it
unpatriotic.
What made this movement so threatening is that it began to bring
people face to face across all the lines that separate us, so that
we had independent confirmation of what “other”
Americans think ““ confirmation that not everyone else
supports the president’s program.
At forums and in the streets we got a good public education
about our different problems and about how the Bush administration
has harmed so many people. That movement was the first baby step
toward moving outside the mass-mediated, politically-motivated
virtual reality that molds our thoughts.
So, what about UCLA? We’ve got a hiring freeze and student
fees are going up again. It’s not pretty, but it’s not
as bad as the bloodletting in K-12 and the community colleges. And
in my mind, the worst collateral damage to the university is the
chill on free inquiry and speech ““ that we silence ourselves
for fear of being thought unpatriotic, for fear of terrorists, or
because we think it’s someone else’s problem.
The Bush administration plays on fear and ignorance in racist
ways, claiming that the rise in surveillance, search and seizure,
and imprisonment without charges is for our own good ““ that
there are terrorists in our midst (maybe among our Muslim faculty
or students, or immigrants from China or Mexico, or black
citizens).
Fear and suspicion are the enemies of discussion and democracy;
fearful and divided people are easy to rule and repress. If we
don’t talk to one another, especially in a setting that
allows for conversation across all the lines that divide us,
we’ll never be able or motivated to find out whether
Americans want endless war, loss of democracy and pauperization at
home.
Brodkin is a UCLA professor of anthropology and women’s
studies.