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Ask if these religious leaders are aware of what happened in Germany during the Thirties, when Catholic and Lutheran church leaders could not find their voice, and ended up acting as a force of stability for a fascist regime. See if it's possible to wake anyone up in the religious institutions tied to the Establishment.
Inform other citizens that 58 cents of every dollar in federal "discretionary spending" now go to the Pentagon. It might be worth noting that the Soviet Union -- America's "great enemy" -- imploded 20 years ago. Despite the lack of a threat from a major power, the U.S. military spending equals that of all the other countries of the world put together.
It's also worth recalling President Dwight Eisenhower's famous warning about "the military-industrial complex" and the words of Gen. Douglas MacArthur 10 years earlier. (Neither of these military men was exactly a "dove.")
On May 15, 1951, MacArthur said:
"It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear."
Since the Obama administration and Congress cannot be counted on to pursue traditional American justice (not to mention Biblical Jubilee justice) toward the poor -- and since American religious institutions mostly are riding shotgun for this inequitable system -- we might do well to heed the admonitions of popular theologian Annie Dillard; Cesar Chavez, co-founder of the United Farm Workers; and Mario Savio of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of the 60s:
Dillard: "There is only us; there never has been any other."Chavez: "There are already enough of us. But without action, nothing is going to happen."
Savio: "There comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part; and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop."
Some Americans plan to express their repudiation of the dysfunctional political system with a U.S. version of "Tahrir Square" beginning Oct. 6, the 10th anniversary of the U.S. attack on Afghanistan. (See: http://october2011.org/statement.)
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