(Photo: Flickr/ Alisdare Hickson)
Donald Trump bombed a Syrian government airbase just a couple of weeks after releasing his budget plan for next year. The budget—with its call for a massive escalation in Pentagon spending, to be paid for with funds stolen from programs that fulfill urgent human needs—was met with outrage. But Trump’s illegal cruise-missile strike, ostensibly in response to a chemical-weapons attack on a Syrian town in Idlib Province, largely knocked the budget outrage off the agenda.
That’s a huge problem. As the saying goes, budgets are moral documents, and Trump showed us precisely where his morals lay when he unveiled his blueprint for federal spending. We must ask ourselves, what do our morals tell us, and how can we put those values into action?
With that mission in mind, a number of us gathered last month to discuss how we might jointly respond to Trump’s budget.
While the majority of us in the room were veterans of the U.S. antiwar movement, our meeting was designed to break out of the silos that have isolated progressive activists and weakened our movements for far too long. As Daniel May recently noted in The Nation, a modern movement to challenge US militarism must recognize and operate from the understanding that we are all in this together, that opposing war is one component of the multifaceted movement for social justice. Thus we were joined in our discussions by key leaders of many of the social movements now rising—the Movement for Black Lives, mobilizations fighting for women’s and LGBTQ rights, environmental justice, anti-Islamophobia, economic equality, immigrant and refugee rights, and more.
We met only a couple of weeks before we would mark the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s essential 1967 speech, “Beyond Vietnam,” where he laid out his vision for an interconnected movement against the connected “giant triplets” of racism, materialism, and militarism. And so, with his words ringing in our ears, we embarked on a mission to do something different—not simply to denounce one part of the president’s budget, but to challenge together the deep immorality of that entire document.