War At Home

Last weekend thousand gathered at Fort Benning in the annual SOAWatch to close the military training program for Latin America at Fort Benning in Georgia.

Forty or fifty of those had traveled there from the Milwaukee area. Yet when we have a protest to close the military training program for the region at our Catholic University we would be more than blessed to have 50 persons.

Many want to stop military training, teaching a person to kill without conscience, at a military base in Fort Benning, Ga. but few would stop this same military training at our local school, Marquette University. This phenomenon is true on many issues. Churches sent missionaries to poor countries while people go without shelter and food in our cities, like in North Central Milwaukee.

The violence, the poverty and racism on the streets of Milwaukee continues to increase. People call for incarceration and punishment but few ask why. Some help by giving money or food, especially in this season, but few are willing to take a risk that will mean structural change in our institutions that would mean change in how we deal with people in our cities.

Someone asked me the other day what was the difference between Marquette University and other colleges and universities in the area. I thought hard but could only respond saying Marquette University was the only college or university in the five country area to host military training on campus for the Department of Defense.

Many Catholics praise the Holy Father, Pope Francis, for his position on making the main mission of the Church to aid the needy and marginalized. Few say anything when a local Catholic Church, here at home, takes over a million dollars gathered from closing a Church in the poorest and most segregated neighborhood and putting it into an “endowment for future” over using it to provides beds for children to sleep on and refrigerators and stoves for people to store and prepare healthy food.

Why do the Works of War predominate over the Works of Mercy? The answer, my friend, I fear is money. War, violence and killing make money while providing shelter, health care and comfort to poor and marginalized takes money. Waging war comes with major suffering and lost to soldiers and civilians in war zone. To most Americans it is just more violence in a foreign country and without a personal loss has little effect on them. They praise our soldiers yet continue to send them off to “kill or be killed” in endless wars.

In a cartoon many years ago the character of Pogo says: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” The War starts and ends here at Home.

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