Imagine a world where taxpayer dollars spent annually on war – an estimated $8.3 million from Lincoln County alone – went instead to social needs.
That’s what Whitefield artist-activist Natasha Mayers, along with other regional artists, asked the public to do Thursday in the State House as part of the “Bring Our War Dollars Home” campaign.
The “Draw-In” held Feb. 18 in the Hall of Flags didn’t draw in as many people as the group hoped for. Nonetheless, Rob Shetterly, president of the Union of Maine Visual Artists and creator of the portrait series “Americans Who Tell the Truth,” thanked Mayers and co-organizers Kenny Cole and Bruce Gagnon, whose efforts made the topic more visible and more public.
Shetterly invited the dozen or so listeners to consider that “the biggest part of our industrial economy is the arms market.”
He also ticked off a list of Maine towns and the estimated tax dollars people in those towns have spent each year (2001-09) to support wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: “Auburn, $5 million; Augusta, $4 million, Bangor, $6,315,000; Portland, $15 million.” The total, statewide, is $2.5 billion, Shetterly said. In Lincoln County, the cost is an estimated $250 per person.
Waldoboro’s estimated share is $1.2 million, Wiscasset’s $893,000, Jefferson’s $592,000 and Whitefield’s $563,000.
Made up of volunteer groups and individuals, Bring Our War Dollars Home uses war cost data compiled by the National Priorities Project. Portland-based volunteer Gary Higginbottom said afterward details and data sources for the cost numbers can be viewed at www.costofwar.com.
The numbers, he said, are “based on rigorous estimates” which can’t be exact “since unequivocal war expenditure numbers are impossible to get from the U.S. government.” Population and income data, however, supply “pretty close estimates,” Higginbottom said. “We and our kids are paying a lot for warfare, and it’s obviously money that’s not available for other public and private uses.”
He believes Mainers and their political representatives “need to be aware of how significant these tradeoffs are.”
Lisa Savage, Maine local coordinator of CodePink, a women’s peace and social justice movement, told the gathering, “Fifty-eight percent of Maine’s discretionary spending goes to war costs.”
Shetterly emphasized, “One of the things we’re questioning is what the proper function of government is – to care for our people or to take our resources to wage war?”
The participating artists used paper and colored ink markers to picture where the Pentagon’s budget might be better spent. People passing through who paused at the artists’ table were encouraged to vocalize their wishes and visions. The artists then creatively interpreted those visions.
At a day-long “draw-a-thon” a week earlier in Bath, 40 artists worked up a gallery of images, spun from such ideas as family time for working parents, better health care, student-tended gardens at every elementary school, and a “chicken in every pot.” A selection of drawings were stapled into small booklets and later handed out to 187 legislators.
Martin Steingesser, Portland’s first poet laureate, pounded American world-leader munitions supplier General Dynamics and other corporate giants while reciting his “Money Medicine Poem.” He wondered, “How come big bucks stuff so few pockets?” Why is “all our money on the top floor” where CEOs decide “the truths we live.”
Singer/songwriter Hana Maris and her 14-year-old son Tucker, of Kennebunk, sang their first musical collaboration “Bled Dry” to Tucker’s vigorous guitar accompaniment.
Mingling with the participants, a woman who identified herself only as “Rainbow” said she grew up in Holland in the 1940s. She saw first hand the ravages World War II inflicted. She recalled her mother ruefully describing World War I as “‘the war to end all wars.’ And here we are,” the now white-haired daughter said. Instead of staying home and “feeling powerless,” she stands on bridges or outside public buildings with other women dressed in black “to bear witness.”
Mayers said that the Bringing Our War Dollars Home campaign is circulating a resolution among state and national lawmakers “asking that military spending be cut and that those war dollars be directed to the states.” She was told that some legislators have signed the letter.
Mayers also described herself as “disheartened” that First District Congresswoman Chellie Pingree supports defense spending, touting it as a way of “keeping Maine workers employed. My wish is that she would say she is voting in the future only for funding that would bring peaceful, sustainable jobs to Maine for our schools, hospitals, social service needs, farms, repairing our roads, and so forth,” Mayers said.