MY TURN

Greenfield Recorder, May 22, 2021

By ANNA GYORGY

This decade we must act to prevent the worst in climate catastrophe and slow the dramatic loss of insects, birds and other animals of all kinds, humans included.

Is it human nature to wait to “fix the roof” until water drips on heads or part of the ceiling falls?

Ceilings are falling now in Gaza, where 2 million people exist trapped in an area the size of Philadelphia. The world grapples with COVID 19; Gazans have lived in quarantine for years. Conditions have long been serious. A 2012 UN report on the situation in Gaza anticipated that by 2020 it would not be livable. Since that report there have been, as The Guardian newspaper reports, “Seven years of continuing blockade and two devastating Israeli military onslaughts,” in 2012 and 2014. And now this.

More than ceilings are falling. Whole families are decimated, yet another generation of children is traumatized by blasts, destruction and death.

Palestinian lives matter. And it should matter to us that the bombs being dropped are financed by U.S. taxpayers and made by American corporations. Right now a major U.S. arms sale to Israel is pending.

Meanwhile, any United States claim of ‘protector of human rights’ has long been recognized worldwide as bogus, deceitful. There have been too many victims in too many places.

That is why the U.S.’s singular action in blocking three UN Security Council attempts to stop the war comes as no surprise, even to so-called allies, who feel quite differently.

This level of violence against a people made refugees in their own land calls for action. Action to stop the carnage and beyond that to recognize that the era of racist wars and occupation has to end.

A start is to stop arms sales and demand conversion of our military might, to provide true security and meet human and planetary needs. Example: Why are plenty of armed drones produced during a critical shortage of bicycles?

On Aug. 28, 1963, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I have a Dream” speech to some 250,000 people, and many more watching on television. Fifty-eight years later, on Aug. 28, 2021, a demonstration at the same site in Washington, D.C. plans to bring together the black-brown-green justice and democracy movements. A leading demand will be statehood for the District of Columbia.

My parents lived in D.C. in the 1970s, and I remember the round bumper sticker on the family car: “D.C. – last Colony.” The struggle for political rights for the 70,000 inhabitants of the federal district, half of them of African American heritage, has gone on for decades. Far too long.

Enfranchising the majority of this political colony will bring new voices, votes and senators to the Capitol in its midst. “No taxation without representation,” is one cry from this “occupied territory” wishing to free itself from undemocratic rule.

Many are convinced that King was killed for stepping outside the bounds of “his movement” and issue, as he condemned the U.S. war on Vietnam, saying in his famous speech — made one year to the day before his assassination — that “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.” Were he alive today, he would surely be calling for justice for Palestine, as well as for political rights for residents of the nation’s capital.

We may not know what form justice will take in Israel-Palestine, but we do know that more destruction and trauma is no solution.

A first step for us, as U.S.Americans, is to halt all military aid and sales to Israel. Let’s urge Jim McGovern to oppose the current arms deal, for a start.

Much has been learned in the year since George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis.

We need all resources now — human, natural and financial — for the urgent redirection at all levels, at home and abroad, away from racist violence and repression and towards meeting the needs of communities and our children for true security and a healthy and livable future.

Anna Gyorgy, of Wendell, is the communications coordinator for the Traprock Center for Peace & Justice.

Copyright © 2021 Greenfield Recorder 5/22/2021