From Draft NOtices, January-March 2019
At our meeting in December, the COMD board met to reflect on our work over the year, plan our upcoming activities, and discuss how to branch out with other community partners. We recognize that counter-recruitment work can feel isolating, but upon further discussion we realized that many issues intersect with militarism.
Militarism impacts virtually every aspect of our world: education, livable wages and public health as money is diverted to fund wars instead of basic humxn needs. Womxn and LGBTQ-identified persons continue to face harassment, exclusion, and retaliation in the military. Oil/chemical spills, abandoned military sites, and nuclear weapons tests gravely affect our environment, making the U.S. military the biggest polluter in the world. Forced migration, as we have seen recently in the case of the asylum-seekers from Central America, is directly related to past U.S. military and political interventions abroad. In the last decade, police departments have shown a heavier militarized force especially in predominantly impoverished communities of color, leading to endless and senseless killings. Given this context, we are obliged to develop an intersectional framework in working together to demilitarize our schools and communities and instead invest in peace work for youth. How does militarism impact your life?
This article is from Draft NOtices, the newsletter of the Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (http://www.comdsd.org/).
