CFOW Weekend Update
May 19, 2017
Hello All – I am way behind and apologize in advance for this late/brief Update. Please join us tomorrow for our weekly vigil/protest in Hastings. We meet from noon to 1 p.m. at the VFW Plaza, which is on Warburton Ave. at the corner of Spring St. Our focus tomorrow will be antiwar, and our leaflet will reference last Tuesday's events at the Hastings Board of Trustees meeting, where antiwar opponents protested the Board's proposal that Purple Heart veterans should be honored because of their role in "defending America" and "protecting our freedoms." (More on this below.) And if there are any volunteers, we can pass out the same leaflet at the Farmers Market, beginning anytime after 9:30 a.m. It could be controversial, so please send a return email about when you can come and show up.
Also tomorrow, two teams from CFOW will be at the Westchester Social Forum in New Rochelle. Allegra Dengler and Deb Bobson will be there with info about election integrity and our corrupted elections, and Morri Markowitz and Amlin Gray from the healthcare committee will be there with some single-payer information. The event starts at 10 a.m.; more information in the Calendar section below.
And speaking of Single-Payer healthcare, the NYS Assembly passed the NY state version of single-payer last week by a vote of 92-52. This substantial margin might have some impact on the Senate, where 31 of 63 Senators – i.e., one short of a majority – have signed up as co-sponsors. Here is a useful analysis of the legislative situation from Healthcare-Now. And NB CFOW is cosponsoring with NYCD16 Indivisible a single-payer forum on Tuesday, May 30th, at the Will Library (Yonkers – Central Ave.), starting at 7 p.m. The speaker will be Dr.Oliver Fein, past president of the Physicians for a National Health Program. It should be a good program, please try to make it.
And today is the birthday of Malcolm X. He was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1925, and was only 39 when he was killed. Manning Marable wrote an interesting/controversial biography of Malcolm X. Sadly, Manning died a few days before its publication. Democracy Now! has pieced together excerpts from two programs in which Marable spoke about Malcolm X and (in the 2nd excerpt) his forthcoming book. You can see this program here.
Finally – I suppose I am the last person in North American to see this – but here is a pretty funny clip demonstrating how Trump's commencement speech at Liberty University (Jerry Falwell's place) was plagiarized from the film "Legally Blonde." I couldn't believe it either, but there it is….
The War and the Warrior
It was only last weekend that I learned that the Hastings Board of Trustees planned to approve a resolution making Hastings a "Purple Heart Village." Apparently few other people knew this either, and so there was some thought and effort and some emails discussing what, if anything, should be done. In my view, the problem was not so much with doing a Resolution supporting Purple Heart veterans, but that the resolution spoke in several places about "defending America" or "preserving our freedoms." – And then on Tuesday, I/we learned that the Resolution would lead to placing signs on all the roads coming into Hastings saying that we were a "Purple Heart Village." This seemed to escalate the significance of what the Board intended to do, in a sense "branding" the village as something connected to war.
Both Elisa Z and I sent emails to the Hastings Board asking them not to pass the Resolution. No surprise, our emails stressed different issues. (Both emails, as well as the Board's "Purple Heart Village" resolution, are pasted in below.) Hastings resident Steve Siebert, who has often spoken out about peace issues, was especially active on Tuesday trying to get people to attend the meeting. Among those he contacted were Linda Snider and Susan Rutman, who both attended, and Linda spoke against the resolution (her statement is pasted in below). (You can watch the Board meeting here; click on "Public Comment" for a few statements about the pending Resolution, and then on "Resolutions" to hear the interesting Board discussion, which concludes that there is too much opposition to the Resolution and it is indefinitely postponed.)
To me, the Board's discussion, and our opposition, is an example of a perennial problem for antiwar people. When praise for veterans is coupled with praise for the wars that they fought in, what do we do? Mostly, we ignore this, as trying to discuss the distinction between "the warrior and the war" leads into unknown and hostile territory for many people. One of the veterans who initiated this project, for example, had a discussion later with Elisa. "Why don't you like veterans?" he asked. It was not possible for her to have a conversation with him about war in which he did not feel personally attacked.
I think this is a teaching/learning moment for us and for the whole village, I hope others agree. For a first-draft tryout, I will do up a leaflet for the vigil that incorporates ideas from the emails of Elisa and me, and the statement by Linda. And we can talk about this at the vigil tomorrow. And if we are still on the same page, we can send a letter to the Enterprise about the Board's action and our opposition. (We would have to write this by Sunday.) I think there are many people in the village who will support our views, but of course there will be some who don't. Drama!
That's it for now. Here are some rewards for patient readers. The whole thing about the Hastings BoT and "defending our freedom" got me a little annoyed, and so I dialed up a few antiwar music videos to make me even more annoyed. Here we have Freda Payne with an updated-to-Afghanistan Bring the Boys Home; the Animals with We Got to Get Out of This Place; and the Rolling Stones with Paint it Black. Check them out; it's good to get angry once in a while.
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
478-3848
The 'Purple Heart Village" File
[The text of the resolution is ATTACHED; then come the statements of Elisa, Frank, and Linda.-]
Email to the Board from Elisa Zazzera
Dear Board of Trustees,
I am dismayed at the decision to register Hastings on Hudson as a Purple Heart Village.
The Purple Heart does not recognize the tens (hundreds?) of thousands of veterans and active duty military personnel who suffer from PTSD and traumatic head injuries. This gross overlooking of these injuries should not be supported by adding Hasting on Hudson to the list of Purple Heart villages.
Beyond that - our village has many ways in which we honor those that sacrificed to carry out the orders of the US military - tax breaks, parades and memorial events throughout the year, a VFW and American Legion within our town...
How much more will our village officially support the now overreaching power of the US military? The US has pulled millions of dollars from Hastings tax payers to pay for actions that many of us don't support - yet we must pay for it.
To ask us to again support/honor a military which now seems mostly to fight to spread American imperialism is wrong.
I beg you to not pass this resolution.
Thank you.
elisa
Email to the Board from Frank Brodhead
To the Hasting Board of Trustees
May 15, 2017
Hello All – I regret that I will not be able to attend Tuesday's Board meeting, as I am chained to my task as an election inspector. But if written submissions are useful, I would like to make a comment about the proposed Purple Heart resolution.
The Purple Heart is awarded to those killed or injured in military action. Period. I suggest that the three phrases in the Resolution that characterize the military actions as "defending our country" or "defending our freedoms" be deleted, as they are irrelevant to the purpose of the Resolution (making Hastings a Purple Heart village) and are in themselves problematic or false.
To stick only to those military actions that followed 9/11, none of them involved defending the United States, except possibly the pursuit of Osama Bin Laden, which did not require regime change in Afghanistan and the destruction of that country. The destruction of Iraq (2003 to the present), intervention in Syria's civil war and the destruction of that country (2011 to the present), collaboration with Saudi Arabia in destroying Yemen and subjecting hundreds of thousands of people to the dangers of starvation (2015 to the present), intervention in Libya's civil war and the destruction of that country (2011 to the present), and the drone attacks on Pakistan's northwest frontier provinces, contributing to that country's destabilization (2002 to the present) had nothing to do with defending the United States.
Indeed, as US intelligence agencies predicted in the days leading up to the bombing of Afghanistan in 2001, the US attacks on Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. have greatly increased dangers to the United States: Al Qaeda has spread to more than a dozen countries, and the Iraq war gave us ISIS.
As for "protecting our freedoms," post-9/11 our liberties have decreased, and have not been protected, as a result of military action, which brought us Guantanamo prison, the well-documented use of torture, and the practice of "extraordinary rendition" so that captives can be tortured outside the United States. The military response to 9/11 also gave us the USA Patriot Act and massive surveillance on Americans and their communications. The rise in Islamophobia that accompanied our wars in the Middle East has suffocated the "right to asylum" traditionally given by the United States to those displaced by war and terror. And of course there is much more.
Therefore, I suggest that the Board delete the following phrases from the proposed Resolution.
Paragraph 1 – Delete "while defending the United States of America"
Paragraph 2 – Delete "for the good and protection of all Americans."
Paragraph 4 – Delete the remainder of the sentence following "A Purple Heart Village."
Yours sincerely,
Frank Brodhead
There are many residents of Hastings who would NOT support this type of useless resolution. Unfortunately most were not aware that this was going to be discussed. I myself got an email saying that the Deer situation was on the agenda. I thought that your trustees were supposed to be REPRESENTING the citizens who live in the Village of Hastings on Hudson. If the citizen residents of this village who are anti-war, and Pro Peace and who stand at the VFW every Saturday and often decrying the many wars our country has initiated in the past 16 plus years were given a chance to vote against this resolution, it would be a resounding NO. I'm asking you to provide the residents of Hastings the opportunity of voting on whether or not Hastings should be a Purple Heart Village.
