Don't bring war home

By Mari Werner

Published in the Los Angeles Daily News February 15, 2002

These can be frightening times, and you can hear it in the frightened voices on the opinion pages and airwaves. Street gangs are labeled as terrorists now and there's talk about bringing the army or the National Guard to our own cities to fight them. There are demands for more police, soldiers and weapons in the airports and on the planes, and there's a cry for 100 percent success in protecting American lives.

It might be nice to think that a bunch of guys with guns can protect everyone and make the world safe. That's what we're doing in Afghanistan, right? Making the world safe. If war is the answer over there, let's use war as the answer here too. You have a problem? Blow it up, kill it, shoot it, bomb it out of existence.

The problem - one of the problems - with using that solution here is the same problem they have in Afghanistan, and the same problem they had in Vietnam. How do you know who is the enemy? This isn't TV, it's life. You don't have music and lighting and makeup to clue you which are the good guys and which are the bad guys.

Remember the term "collateral damage." Recently some 15 to 20 Afghan citizens, supporters of the new regime, were reportedly killed by our troops. Another 27 were taken prisoner, some of them reportedly beaten - a case of mistaken identity. Collateral damage. It happens.

Bring the war solution home and "collateral damage" will take on a whole new meaning. Collateral damage may be your son, daughter, father, mother or spouse. Or you.

We are, each of us individually, our own protectors, and we are each other's protectors. The only 100% protection your government can give you is a solitary confinement cell. The citizen killed by a gang bangers bullet would be no less dead if she or he had been killed by a stray bullet from a shootout with the National Guard.

When you say, somebody else must protect me, somebody else must be responsible for my environment, you're saying somebody else is strong and powerful and I am weak. And that's exactly what you'll end up with. That powerful somebody else will make decisions for you as he sees fit, and weak little you will have no defense and nothing to say about it.

Many people are very frustrated and understandably so. We've had so many false solutions jammed down our throats. Drug programs that just substitute one drug for another. Prison systems that turn out tougher, meaner, more criminally inclined people than those who went in.

But there are approaches that actually do work. Most of them are struggling in small storefronts or churches, working on shoestring budgets trying to bring their help to individual people in spite of systems mired down in unworkable government-funded false solutions.

As one example, a program called Criminon was piloted in a Juvenile detention facility in Greenville, Alabama. The usual mental health counseling and probation there was resulting in 70 percent to 80 percent of the inmates ending up being rearrested after release. Criminon brought that down to 10 percent. Ninety percent stayed clean.

There's a branch of Criminon in the LA area too. Workable solutions exist. They usually aren't the ones the government is selling, but they can be found, and we as a people can make progress toward a saner safer world.

It takes hard work, it takes real people really caring and it takes some genuinely workable approaches to improving conditions and improving peoples lives. What it doesn't take is more violence and destruction. It doesn't take bringing the war solution home to our own streets.
 

© 2002 Mari Werner
 
 

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Email: mariw@earthlink.net