At first I thought they were trying to kill me. I’d come home to find a bullet hole through my front window. Immediately I guessed who it was.
I’d been getting death threats in my mailbox for a month, 4 of them. I hadn’t taken it seriously before, thinking it was a prank by some twisted soul.
But, assuming the bullet was from the same source, they knew where I lived and had visited before. The letters didn’t have stamps on them, so they had to be delivered personally, as was the bullet.
From the gist of the content, the threats came from local shipyard workers. The Newport News shipyard is the only place that US aircraft carriers are made, and they also make strategic nuclear submarines. At the time, they were the biggest employer in the state of Virginia.
I had been editing an anti-nuke publication for Physicians for Social Responsibility, and I assumed that was the cause of the hatred against me. These workers thought I was threatening their jobs.
Shipyard jobs are some of the best jobs in the area, providing above average wages, but just as importantly, spinning off other jobs as the shipyard workers spend their money locally.
We in the anti-nuke movement were effective in the 1980s, with our membership growing at the time. Each month I interviewed nuclear weapons experts—generals and admirals who commanded large nuclear forces, physicists who made the bombs, defense workers who built the launch and delivery systems, and arms control experts from the State Department. These people I interviewed were all opposed to the nuclear arms race.
The population in general had a growing number of anti-nuke people within it, and the badgered government was reducing its arsenal of nuclear warheads. One physicist making the bombs told me that just before he quit he looked at his tote board and saw the number 33,000 to indicate the number of nuclear warheads the US government had, enough to destroy civilizations, were they to exist, on all the planets in the solar system.
Without the warheads one cannot justify the manned bombers, the ICBMs, and the shipyard workers who make the seaborne component of the launch and delivery systems—hence, the bullet through my front window.
Environmentalists encounter the same problems. In order to have clean air and battle climate change, we must abandon coal, which pisses off the coal miners. Coal miners, in large numbers, voted for President Trump because he said he’d bring back coal. Coal miners see environmentalists as their enemy, just as shipyard workers saw me as their enemy.
I live in Hampton, sandwiched between the Newport News shipyard and the Norfolk port facilities that send mountains of coal daily to the far corners of the world—shipping more coal than any other US port. Many local people support the coal industry as well as nuclear weapons, it is how they feed their families.
Coal is one of the dirtiest contributors to climate change, and having large numbers of nuclear weapons increases the likelihood of an accident, while we wonder when a president goes mad and begins global thermonuclear war.
When people work to oppose nuclear weapons or coal, two of the things that are damning to the very existence of our species, they also work to destroy jobs that sustain working class families. This is a dilemma that activists must consider if they are going to achieve success.
The strategy
Usually activists battling various climate change or global nuclear war Armageddons think they have but one enemy, the capitalists who push for profit at any cost to the public interest. These capitalists obviously control the government with their campaign financing, and they obviously control the mainstream media with investment ties to owners, board members and advertisers.
But there is another constituency willing to fight to the death, because they have no alternative—those whose jobs are threatened by this. Where do you find living-wage jobs in an economy hollowed out by “free trade” agreements that have already sent good-paying factory jobs abroad by the millions? A large part of our workforce is desperate for any way to feed their children, now unemployed or under-employed.
And that is why the major part of activist strategy has got to fix this problem before we will find success. We can’t succeed if we have millions of people hating us and voting for the likes of Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton gave the Trumpster millions of votes when she said, “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”
Of course, Hillary Clinton thought she was speaking to environmentalists when she said this—always telling the group in front of her what they want to hear. WikiLeaks let us know she’d told the banksters, in effect, that she was going to do their bidding but had to tell the riffraff what they wanted to hear. The coal companies had no reason to believe that a Clinton would go against them, but the damage was done and Hillary bit the dust (to say it was just coal is an oversimplification, there were lots of Trump voters in the Rust Belt believing that The Donald would bring back their factory jobs).
I read environmental articles saying clean energy is better for jobs, but these articles are only read by environmentalists, they don’t seem to reach coal miners. And the “defense” workers don’t have any reason to believe they will be able to find work if their weapons projects are ended.
So, if we are to move to a better world we must convince the victims of progress that we are with them. The capitalists don’t care, they knowingly make products that kill millions of people annually and will continue until they are forced to stop. Profit is the only thing that interests them, but they will shift their investments if there is enough of a public outcry.
The tobacco industry alone, knowing they are slaughtering their own customers, shamelessly kill from six to eight million people annually around the globe in the name of profit at any cost. There are many other industries that premeditatively murder employees and customers in less obvious ways, year after year as regulatory agencies turn a blind eye on behalf of the campaign financing going to the president who appointed their boss.
Immediately after getting rid of the nuclear weapons and fossil fuels we must have ready a plan to hire millions of citizens to rebuild our infrastructure. We must have jobs to massively replace the fossil fuels supplying power plants, homes, offices and transportation, with millions of solar panels, wind turbines and other renewable energy such as geothermal and tidal.
These projects should be the first things mentioned in election campaigns for those we support. The first thing the masses should hear is that good, living-wage jobs will be available as part of the program, as we dismantle nuclear weapons and shut down the last coal mines, and the people losing their jobs in this transition will be eligible for free training and priority on the jobs list.
Capitalism has failed us and keeps pushing workers to do the same things that have endangered our environment and way of life, and will continue to do that until we come together, uniting Greens, socialists, labor and the sold-out progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which is now anxious to find a new home.
Immediate funds are available by declaring victory and shutting down all the wars, combined with shutting down the 800 or so foreign military bases and bringing the troops home. The troops should be given priority in the new jobs as part of the military/industrial complex dismantlement so necessary for us to move to a better world.
With a platform offering to not only put anybody to work who wants a job, but doing work to actually make a better world, we can have shipyard workers joining us rather than shooting at us. We can have coal miners making solar panels. We can have the world we want.
We are only limited by the size of our dreams, and we live in a time which requires big dreams. I am 72 years old and don’t expect to have time to see the finished project, but I have faith in the young people I see marching in the streets, and I know they can do what I have failed to do.
Jack Balkwill has been published from the little read Rectangle, magazine of the English Honor Society, to the (then) millions of readers USA Today and many progressive publications/web sites such as Z Magazine, In These Times, Counterpunch, This Can’t Be Happening, Intrepid Report, and Dissident Voice. He is author of “An Attack on the National Security State,” about peace activists in prison.
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Let’s call it the democracy movement
Posted on March 27, 2017 by Jack Balkwill
At first I thought they were trying to kill me. I’d come home to find a bullet hole through my front window. Immediately I guessed who it was.
I’d been getting death threats in my mailbox for a month, 4 of them. I hadn’t taken it seriously before, thinking it was a prank by some twisted soul.
But, assuming the bullet was from the same source, they knew where I lived and had visited before. The letters didn’t have stamps on them, so they had to be delivered personally, as was the bullet.
From the gist of the content, the threats came from local shipyard workers. The Newport News shipyard is the only place that US aircraft carriers are made, and they also make strategic nuclear submarines. At the time, they were the biggest employer in the state of Virginia.
I had been editing an anti-nuke publication for Physicians for Social Responsibility, and I assumed that was the cause of the hatred against me. These workers thought I was threatening their jobs.
Shipyard jobs are some of the best jobs in the area, providing above average wages, but just as importantly, spinning off other jobs as the shipyard workers spend their money locally.
We in the anti-nuke movement were effective in the 1980s, with our membership growing at the time. Each month I interviewed nuclear weapons experts—generals and admirals who commanded large nuclear forces, physicists who made the bombs, defense workers who built the launch and delivery systems, and arms control experts from the State Department. These people I interviewed were all opposed to the nuclear arms race.
The population in general had a growing number of anti-nuke people within it, and the badgered government was reducing its arsenal of nuclear warheads. One physicist making the bombs told me that just before he quit he looked at his tote board and saw the number 33,000 to indicate the number of nuclear warheads the US government had, enough to destroy civilizations, were they to exist, on all the planets in the solar system.
Without the warheads one cannot justify the manned bombers, the ICBMs, and the shipyard workers who make the seaborne component of the launch and delivery systems—hence, the bullet through my front window.
Environmentalists encounter the same problems. In order to have clean air and battle climate change, we must abandon coal, which pisses off the coal miners. Coal miners, in large numbers, voted for President Trump because he said he’d bring back coal. Coal miners see environmentalists as their enemy, just as shipyard workers saw me as their enemy.
I live in Hampton, sandwiched between the Newport News shipyard and the Norfolk port facilities that send mountains of coal daily to the far corners of the world—shipping more coal than any other US port. Many local people support the coal industry as well as nuclear weapons, it is how they feed their families.
Coal is one of the dirtiest contributors to climate change, and having large numbers of nuclear weapons increases the likelihood of an accident, while we wonder when a president goes mad and begins global thermonuclear war.
When people work to oppose nuclear weapons or coal, two of the things that are damning to the very existence of our species, they also work to destroy jobs that sustain working class families. This is a dilemma that activists must consider if they are going to achieve success.
The strategy
Usually activists battling various climate change or global nuclear war Armageddons think they have but one enemy, the capitalists who push for profit at any cost to the public interest. These capitalists obviously control the government with their campaign financing, and they obviously control the mainstream media with investment ties to owners, board members and advertisers.
But there is another constituency willing to fight to the death, because they have no alternative—those whose jobs are threatened by this. Where do you find living-wage jobs in an economy hollowed out by “free trade” agreements that have already sent good-paying factory jobs abroad by the millions? A large part of our workforce is desperate for any way to feed their children, now unemployed or under-employed.
And that is why the major part of activist strategy has got to fix this problem before we will find success. We can’t succeed if we have millions of people hating us and voting for the likes of Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton gave the Trumpster millions of votes when she said, “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”
Of course, Hillary Clinton thought she was speaking to environmentalists when she said this—always telling the group in front of her what they want to hear. WikiLeaks let us know she’d told the banksters, in effect, that she was going to do their bidding but had to tell the riffraff what they wanted to hear. The coal companies had no reason to believe that a Clinton would go against them, but the damage was done and Hillary bit the dust (to say it was just coal is an oversimplification, there were lots of Trump voters in the Rust Belt believing that The Donald would bring back their factory jobs).
I read environmental articles saying clean energy is better for jobs, but these articles are only read by environmentalists, they don’t seem to reach coal miners. And the “defense” workers don’t have any reason to believe they will be able to find work if their weapons projects are ended.
So, if we are to move to a better world we must convince the victims of progress that we are with them. The capitalists don’t care, they knowingly make products that kill millions of people annually and will continue until they are forced to stop. Profit is the only thing that interests them, but they will shift their investments if there is enough of a public outcry.
The tobacco industry alone, knowing they are slaughtering their own customers, shamelessly kill from six to eight million people annually around the globe in the name of profit at any cost. There are many other industries that premeditatively murder employees and customers in less obvious ways, year after year as regulatory agencies turn a blind eye on behalf of the campaign financing going to the president who appointed their boss.
Immediately after getting rid of the nuclear weapons and fossil fuels we must have ready a plan to hire millions of citizens to rebuild our infrastructure. We must have jobs to massively replace the fossil fuels supplying power plants, homes, offices and transportation, with millions of solar panels, wind turbines and other renewable energy such as geothermal and tidal.
These projects should be the first things mentioned in election campaigns for those we support. The first thing the masses should hear is that good, living-wage jobs will be available as part of the program, as we dismantle nuclear weapons and shut down the last coal mines, and the people losing their jobs in this transition will be eligible for free training and priority on the jobs list.
Capitalism has failed us and keeps pushing workers to do the same things that have endangered our environment and way of life, and will continue to do that until we come together, uniting Greens, socialists, labor and the sold-out progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which is now anxious to find a new home.
Immediate funds are available by declaring victory and shutting down all the wars, combined with shutting down the 800 or so foreign military bases and bringing the troops home. The troops should be given priority in the new jobs as part of the military/industrial complex dismantlement so necessary for us to move to a better world.
With a platform offering to not only put anybody to work who wants a job, but doing work to actually make a better world, we can have shipyard workers joining us rather than shooting at us. We can have coal miners making solar panels. We can have the world we want.
We are only limited by the size of our dreams, and we live in a time which requires big dreams. I am 72 years old and don’t expect to have time to see the finished project, but I have faith in the young people I see marching in the streets, and I know they can do what I have failed to do.
Jack Balkwill has been published from the little read Rectangle, magazine of the English Honor Society, to the (then) millions of readers USA Today and many progressive publications/web sites such as Z Magazine, In These Times, Counterpunch, This Can’t Be Happening, Intrepid Report, and Dissident Voice. He is author of “An Attack on the National Security State,” about peace activists in prison.