by Kathy Kelly
for Satya Magazine

How can we best educate the U.S. public about the futility of pouring U.S. resources down the rathole of military spending?

During the recent SOAW trial in Columbus, GA, as co-defendants told what motivated them to risk imprisonment and heavy fines, we heard stories of military atrocities that explain why increasing numbers of people in other parts of the world feel seething rage and antagonism toward the U.S. In a very real sense, our dangerously over-consumptive lifestyles were on trial, just as much as U.S. readiness to use threat and force, overwhelming military force, to protect the American way of life. The belief that, as President George Bush said at a 1992 energy conference in Rio de Janeiro, “the American way of life is non-negotiable,” leads others to justify violent responses to stop U.S. imperialism.

For most of us, the U.S. government does not want our bodies on the line in combat. It wants our assent and our money. Elected officials often perceive that we put them in power to protect our inordinately comfortable lifestyles, and if they have to use violent means to do so, we will foot the bill. Refusal to pay for war (through war tax resistance) and readiness to radically resist militarism through nonviolent means helps us find what Rev. D”Escoto pointed us toward: “actions commensurate to the crimes being committed.”

Before sentencing me, Judge Faircloth asked me why the campaign I work most closely with is called “Voices in the Wilderness.” I explained that we believe there is a wilderness of compassion here in the U.S. I”m grateful to have been part of the passion that motivated defendants in the courtroom. We haven”t given up on nonviolence. Rather than advocate that others risk torture and slaughter as the only way to resist U.S. warmaking, this group and the many thousands of supporters who are part of the SOAW network are committed to “the further invention of nonviolence.”

By telling a judge that we are willing to go into the prison system, and there give witness on behalf of mothers and fathers separated from their children by a cruel and wrongheaded prison-industrial complex, we can point to a radically countercultural departure from accepting the status quo that now exists in the U.S.