Will Miller Green Mountain Veterans For Peace

On October 7, I arrived at Freedom Plaza, 14th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., to participate in Occupy D.C., one of over a hundred cities where the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement is occurring. The organizers had obtained the necessary permits and had set up a performance stage, an information stand and tents for medical assistance and legal support.

 

As I mingled with the crowd, I met people who had traveled long distances to express their anger about a broken government. Heather had been employed with the Madison, WI, city government but was laid off in January. She carried a sign saying: “TRICKLE DOWN ECONOMICS IS WHEN CORPORATIONS P--- ON THE PEOPLE BELOW.” Troy and his wife were from North Carolina and were both retired. They had lost just about all of their life savings when the stock market crashed. Troy’s sign read: ”WALL STREET GOT BAILED OUT WE GOT SOLD OUT.” Helen, a laid off teacher, had walked 200 miles from her home in West Virginia to Occupy D.C. Without her teaching income, health care benefit and pension, Helen wasn’t sure how she was going to meet her mortgage payment or have enough to live on. Gary was sitting alone in front of the stage wearing a baseball cap with the word “Navy” on it and a row of service ribbons below it; since I had also been in the Navy, I went over to talk with him. He told about his experiences as a Hospital Corpsman at the Navy hospital in Da Nang, South Vietnam in 1969. His graphic descriptions of what he saw and did as a Hospital Corpsman assisting surgeons as they treated the wounds of marines, soldiers, civilians and enemy Viet Cong were horrific. He said that when he got out of the Navy, he went back home, studied medicine, received his license to practice and had opened a family practice in a remote town in northern Minnesota. Gary said that since his retirement he had been volunteering in the ER of the local hospital and when people with burns, especially children, were brought in his PTSD had returned. He was at Freedom Plaza to protest the start of the eleventh year of the war in Afghanistan.

 

Later I joined around 200 other Veterans For Peace in assembling opposite the White House where we demonstrated and shouted to the President to end the war in Afghanistan, get out of Iraq and spend the billions of dollars the wars are costing on education and healthcare. That afternoon, a thousand or more protestors marched to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce building with the intent of closing it down but the entrance was blocked by police. Because the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that corporations have the same political campaign donation rights as people, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce receives millions of dollars from corporations and then funnels the money to lobbyists and campaign coffers of politicians.

 

Following the stand-off we returned to Freedom Plaza where many continue to stay, demonstrate and speak out against the injustices of a financial/political system that has ruined millions of Americans. The Occupy Wall Street movement continues to be the expression of millions of Americans who have been and continue to be systematically victimized by the collusion of financial, corporate and governmental forces that control our economy and our democracy. Just 1% of the population controls 40% of the wealth, takes home 24% of the nation’s wealth, owns over half of the stocks, bonds and mutual funds and owes only 5% of the personal debt. The remaining 99% are “We the people…”

 

Andrew Schoerke

Shaftsbury, VT