During the past six weeks, there has been the unusual occurrence of 28 arrests at the N.H. State House. Hundreds, if not thousands, were arrested during the civil rights struggle of the 1950s and ’60s. There is a direct link between the arrests of the past and those of recent weeks.
Those gathering at the State House on Mondays of recent weeks, with some risking arrest, are attempting to be on the same moral path blazed by those activists of a half-century ago. The civil rights movement struggled against what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called, “The triple evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism.” Those of us following them in 2018 add environmental degradation to the three evils that Dr. King called out.
In writing this, I’m aware that it is extremely difficult for some to connect with our concerns. We are immersed in a culture that doesn’t encourage us to see these issues. Many react strongly against thinking that we could be participating in something evil (if we can still use that word). We think of ourselves as good people doing what is right. We resist hearing Dr. King’s message and certainly don’t want to see ourselves in 2018 as participating in the evils he named. Most of us certainly don’t think of ourselves as racist, or that we are oppressing the most vulnerable and poorest among us. Most of us don’t see ourselves as a militaristic country with an economy based on killing and destruction. Probably more of us are beginning to wake up to a concern that we have developed an economy that is assaulting the planet on which all life depends, but we aren’t really engaged with an urgency of turning that around.
Attempting to reinvigorate the values of the civil rights movement in our present time is an awkward role in which to be. However, those of us who have been at the State House in recent weeks with the Poor People’s Campaign see our country deeply mired in the same problems that cost Dr. King his life.
In order for people to understand, maybe it would be helpful to be aware that every year, the state of New Hampshire sends $420 million to the federal government to finance only two of many weapons programs. Every year $230 million of New Hampshire money goes to finance the F-35 fighter/bomber. This plane has the distinction of being not only the most failed weapons system in U.S. history, but also the most expensive. The idea was to design a fighter plane that would do everything other fighter planes had done and also be a plane for not just one branch of the armed services but for the Air Force, Navy and Marines. It was designed to do everything for everybody, and the result is that it does nothing right.
Year after year there continues to be one problem after another with this plane and the tons of money invested never manages to fix the multiple problems. Every year the system funding this plane swallows another $230 million of New Hampshire taxpayer dollars.
At the same time that we are shoveling $230 million yearly into the F-35, we in New Hampshire are also dumping another $190 million yearly into a complete modernization of our entire nuclear force. The total cost for this is estimated to be $1.2 trillion from 2017 to 2046. To fund these two weapons systems, we in New Hampshire are paying in the vicinity of $420 million annually to the federal government.
While New Hampshire is paying close to half a billion annually for weapons to kill other human beings and to destroy, every day in the news we see a deficit of resources for health care, people with disabilities, public schools, higher education, addiction treatment, mental health, renewable energy, the environment, homelessness and a host of other needs that are going unmet.
We who have been showing up at the State House every Monday for the last six weeks believe that our choice to fund these killing systems as opposed to funding life-giving systems is crazy and needs to be resisted as strongly as possible. When people have been arrested during these actions, we are saying that the path we are on is not only crazy but immoral.
A section of Deuteronomy states, “I put before you life and death, choose life.” We of this campaign are raising our voices with some risking arrest to urge us all to choose and fund life, not death.
(Gray Fitzgerald is a retired United Church of Christ pastor living in Concord.)