Tacoma, WA
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Tacoma, WA |
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Note: Instead of the usual date of first Sunday of the month, our June meeting is on May 31st
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Learn more at www.vfpcorvallis.org Oregon cities on the tour: Portland, McMinnville, Seattle, Fort Lewis, Bay City, Eugene and others!
Benjamin (Benji) Lewis was honorably discharged from the U.S. Marine Corps in spring 2007 after serving four years of active duty, including two tours of duty in Iraq and the first siege of Fallujah. After he was discharged he moved to Corvallis, enrolled at Linn-Benton Community College and got a part-time job at a local restaurant. In October 2008, Benji received notification that he was being involuntarily recalled to active duty. Shortly thereafter, he announced his decision to refuse activation at the Winter Soldier Northwest Hearings held in Portland, OR. "I am a direct witness to the horrors of this war, having experienced its atrocities at their source, and I have decided that I can no longer carry out these illegal and immoral policies," said Lewis on Veterans' Day 2008. Since making his decision, Benji has become a dedicated peace activist and has recently begun a 15-city speaking tour across Oregon, entitled "We Can Say No." He has also done numerous radio interviews and has written several articles. Benji's orders to report to Camp Pendleton on May 18th 2009 were recently cancelled. Now he's working to help other members of the Individual Ready Reserve (IRR) understand their options if they are involuntarily recalled to active duty. Benji is a member of VFP Chapter 132 in Corvallis Oregon, and has been instrumental in forming the Oregon chapter of IVAW. A calendar of his scheduled appearances can be found at www.vfpcorvallis.org.
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As a veteran and a gun owner, I found Jill Labbe’s April 1 column dishonest. President Obama dropped the proposed change in veterans health care she cites sometime ago after discussions with veterans groups. Her unrelated shallow discourse on brass shell casings makes it seem as if we gun owners cannot buy ammo for large caliber rifles; it just ain’t so. These two non-issues she claims are the reason “so many veterans and gun owners don’t trust the new commander in chief.” President Obama is the first president in decades who has significantly increased the budget for veterans benefits and health care. And as a senator, he voted for the biggest increase in veterans education benefits since the Vietnam War. This veteran and gun owner finds our new commander in chief to be doing a fine job and your columnist to be sorely misinformed.
Ed. note: On March 18, after meeting with veterans, Obama dropped the controversial health-care proposal, which would have authorized the VA to bill private insurance companies for the treatment of amputations, post-traumatic stress disorder and other battle wounds. |
Getting a Death Grip on Memory
Norman Solomon, April 9, 2009, CommonDreams.org A headline in the New York Times announced a few days ago: "Brain Researchers Open Door to Editing Memory." This news ran above the fold on the front page. "Suppose scientists could erase certain memories by tinkering with a single substance in the brain," the article began. Readers quickly learned that it's starting to happen: "Researchers in Brooklyn have recently accomplished comparable feats, with a single dose of an experimental drug delivered to areas of the brain critical for holding specific types of memory..." Big deal. American media outlets have been pulling off such feats for a long time. The scientists trying to learn how to wipe out "specific types of memory" are lagging way behind. Don't need to remember the vast quantities of napalm, Agent Orange and cluster bombs that the U.S. military dropped on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the 1960s and 1970s? Or the continuing realities of burn victims, dioxin poisoning and unexploded warheads? Don't want to consider the many thousands of civilians killed by Salvadoran death squads, Guatemalan troops and Nicaraguan contra guerillas during the 1980s, courtesy of U.S. taxpayers? |
Don't care to recall the Pentagon's estimate that the Gulf War in early 1991 killed 100,000 Iraqi people during a six-week period? Forget about it! That's what selective memory is for. Prefer not to recollect how the U.S. government trained and armed President Reagan's beloved "freedom fighters" in Afghanistan -- including the likes of Osama bin Laden and other fundamentalist mujahedeen -- for their insurgency against the Soviet occupiers in the 1980s? Rather not remember how those "freedom fighters" became "terrorists"? Hate that particular gray? Then wash it away! Enough bleach in the spin cycles will do the trick. There's more than one way to be "editing memory." "So far, the research has been done only on animals," the Times reported in its April 6 story. "But scientists say this memory system is likely to work almost identically in people." The Times account managed to balance enthusiasm for the advances of scientific research with some potential downsides: "Millions of people might be tempted to erase a severely painful memory, for instance -- but what if, in the process, they lost other, personally important memories that were somehow related?" Dominant media have blotted out countless painful memories -- national or personal -- if only by treating them as irrelevant or incidental to news and concerns that really count. All in a day's work: part of the mix of organized forgetting. "The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing," Aldous Huxley observed. "Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth." And, of equal relevance to the brave new world of U.S. mass media in 2009: "The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human." With constant media prompts, the widely replicated screens end up screening us, from ourselves and from each other. Now we know the names of the Pentagon's drones -- Predators and Reapers -- but not the names of the people they're killing. Easy enough to approve of bombing people when they've been rendered unreal. Forgetting becomes a simple matter. Is some memory not worth remembering? Of course, we could always let the market decide. Coffee Strong - A Place for Peace 
Coffee Strong is now the official meeting-place of our VFP Chapter. Located near Fort Lewis, Coffee Strong is one of only two pro-peace coffee houses believed to be operating near military bases nationwide. Coffee Strong provides soldiers, their families and recent vets a place away from the base where they can learn about resources available to them, meet with G.I. Rights Counselors, and access alternative information. The shop holds weekly movie nights, concerts and other events. For more information you can visit the GIvoice.org website. |
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