Ask anyone doing social justice work in the US to name the glaring problems of our society and the list will come quickly – income inequality, gentrification, racism, sexism, lack of health care, crumbling schools. . . the list goes on and on. Too often, though, we fail to name the elephant in the room: the colossal military machine that eats up the majority of the federal budget, that carries out wars without end, that has almost 800 bases in over 70 countries, and continues to be, as Martin Luther King charged, the greatest purveyor of violence on the planet.
The truth is that we remain silent about this culture of war and the consequences of war – even while it infects and dominates all other issues. This silence is not simply an oversight. It is the constructed reality, the result of a complicated and many-pronged project by the military establishment.
