01/12/10 – Elaine Brower – The Scott Horton Show

All right, everybody, welcome back to the show, it's Antiwar Radio, Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
Of course, we're streaming live worldwide on the internet at chaosradioaustin.org and at antiwar.com slash radio.
And our next guest on the show today is Elaine Brower.
She is associated with World Can't Wait and is the mother of a Marine recently returned from Fallujah, Iraq.
She's an activist against the war with World Can't Wait, Drive Out the Bush Regime, and Military Families Speak Out.
Welcome to the show, Elaine.
How are you doing?
Hi.
Thanks for having me.
Well, I really appreciate you joining us on the show today.
And wow, it looks like here in your bio, you've been getting a lot of media coverage, I guess, because your son is in the military.
That means your opinion has value to the mass media, huh?
Well, unfortunately, I wound up suffering through three deployments, and it's been pretty tough.
I would rather not have gone through that, but I did.
And thank God he's home now, and hopefully he won't get called back again.
And let me ask you about what kind of activism that you've been involved in.
Obviously, as you say, you'd rather be living a different life, but you feel you are forced to do this.
But what exactly are you doing?
Oh, well, just about everything.
I mean, this started out, you know, nine, ten years ago.
My son joined the Marine Corps against my will, but, you know, he turned 18.
And so ever since then, I've sort of been fighting against it, and that was ten years ago.
I wound up going to Afghanistan for one tour and two in Iraq, and I've been against what the military's been doing all along.
So there's been a lot of events and a learning experience for me as, you know, just a mom who raised kids in sort of a middle-class working environment, and I opened my eyes to the way the government operates and what they're actually using our military for.
So I've been involved in a lot of different protests, specifically against military recruiters, and now there's the new drone bombings, and we've been protesting against that, and basically a lot of anti-war activism and against torture.
Right on.
Well, you know, I guess I'm curious as to your son's state of mind at the point when he actually joined the military.
There's sort of a combination of myths that all young men are brought up with in this society, and probably, I guess, all societies, or most societies, about, you know, going to war is how a boy becomes a man, and this is how you can be all that you can be.
And you know, I think especially the advertising campaigns of the last few years have been focused on minorities and the idea that, listen, you could never get a job as a helicopter repairman or as a fireman or something like that unless you join the army first, if you're a poor brown person in this society.
This is sort of the path from, if you're a young kid and you're kind of lost and you don't know what to do, where to go, this is the great big default in the sky, kind of.
This is the sort of fallback position for everything.
And then beyond that, of course, you have all the honor and glory and even just fighting for your country, fighting for freedom, and these kinds of slogans as a frame of mind.
And I just wonder, you know, how much of that or which parts of that carried the most weight with your son back when he joined up?
Well, it's interesting, there's a lot of different aspects to this.
He joined in 99, and that was actually, if you look at the statistics, that was the worst year for military recruitment.
And that's when the army decided to come up with these video games, and they came out with the first version of America's Army.
And he joined mainly because he wanted to.
My father was a Marine, and he was wounded in Okinawa, and he felt that it was a good thing to be a patriot and serve his country.
And he actually felt as if he was protecting his family and his country.
He didn't do it for any other reason.
So that's why, for me, it was hard.
I didn't raise him that way.
I raised him to be socially conscious and to help people, and he did.
But then, you know, the military came along, especially the Marine Corps, which, you know, he really looked up to them, and that's what he wanted to do.
And one of the things I went to see, I'm getting off track, but I went to see Avatar, and the Marine in the movie is very much like my son.
He's very myopic in his viewpoint, you know, he joined the military, he joined the Marines because he wanted to serve his country, period.
And then when he realized that he was a warrior, and the cause he was serving was the wrong cause, he switched to the right cause, because basically he's a warrior spirit.
And I consider my son that way.
And it's taken me a long time to sort of come to terms with that, although I don't like the fact that he, you know, did three tours and was in the Marines.
I have to, you know, that's what he wanted to do.
And at this point in his life, he realized that that was not what he expected.
It wasn't all that it was cracked up to be.
And he does not want to return.
He hopes that they don't recall him.
So there's a lot of different levels to a person who wants to actually join the military.
So today, what happened over the last nine years that I've witnessed is that they flipped it around, and because of the economy, and because they needed to feed the military with new cannon fodder, they came up with all these different techniques to sort of sterilize the military and what the Army and Marine Corps, what they do actually, and what the Air Force does.
They bring the kids in, and they don't ever talk to them about, well, you're going to go kill people.
They talk to them about their career expectations, and they give them the ASVAB testing, and they sort of pump them up to be good citizens, and this is what your country needs for you to do.
And just think of how proud your family is going to be when you graduate with that, you know, degree in mechanics or something like that.
So they've totally changed their approach to recruiting because they need more bodies to feed the war machine.
Well, you know, I kind of have a real bone to pick with the particular series of, I think it was U.S. Army ads, it may have been Air Force, but same difference anyway, the ones that the subtext is just as clear as it could be.
If you're Mexican or if you're black, you're never going to amount to anything unless you work for us first, period.
I mean, that's just what it says.
You know, oh yeah, right, like you're going to be poor and black and ever have a job as a helicopter repairman only if you work for us first.
I mean, that's that's pretty harsh.
In fact, I'm surprised that no, you know, organized, you know, NAACP type groups complained about that.
I mean, they were pretty blatantly, you know, what I would consider racist.
And I'm not the worst on the political correctness thing.
Seems like somebody worse than me on political correctness would have really attacked them for that.
The Pentagon is sacrosanct.
Well, it's interesting that you mentioned the NAACP.
We protested there.
The world can't wait.
And some other New York activists, they had the convention here in, I believe it was June last year, and they invited the Army Strong Tour.
Now, the Army Strong Tour, if anybody knows about it, is they bring they actually bring the video games and they sometimes arrive in one of those big what they call Army Adventure vans, which, you know, they open up the back and the kids get in and it doesn't matter what age they are.
They can play all kinds of very violent games and very racist games.
If you look at them, you know, they're killing brown people in these games.
So we went to the NAACP, we wrote them a letter and we said, why are you asking the Army Strong Tour to come and participate in your in your recruitment process?
Because they, you know, they had other companies there.
It was a job fair, but specifically geared towards the Army, the Marines, the Air Force.
And we went and challenged them over that, because we felt that at this point in time, yes, the Army, the Marines, they are recruiting inner city young people because of the economy, because they can offer them training and education.
And they do.
They get sucked into that.
And it's not only in the urban, inner city environments, it's when you go to the poor white environments all over the country, you know, they hang out in the worst areas in the country where kids know that the only job they can get is either Walmart or McDonald's or Target.
So we actually did protest the NAACP and we did get our point across to them.
So you're right.
They do target the Latinos and the blacks and the inner city kids.
But it also, they do target everyone.
I've seen kids walk in, because now at this point, it's not even kids anymore.
I take that back.
It's, they've reached the age limit to 42 in the Army.
And young people, teachers that can't find work, go and join the military because it's an income and they get health benefits, have very good health benefits while you're active duty.
So how can we go up against this whole system?
Well, and the thing is, too, right, I mean, this is the problem is because that teacher, you know, that you're referring to there or any one of them, there's no stigma attached to it.
Still to this day, even though everyone knows that America is an empire, that we start the wars and never finish them, ask the Koreans, that this is wrong.
You're not supposed to join the Army.
It's like being a meter maid.
It's wrong to do that.
Go around giving people parking tickets.
Find some honest work for a living, you know, come on.
And yet we still on every time you take an airplane trip, everybody stop and clap for the soldiers and nobody wants to be called, you know, a spitter like back during the bad old days of Vietnam, who spit on the soldiers and call them baby killer.
But apparently there's no middle ground there either.
It's still perfectly honorable in 2010 for anyone to go join the Imperial forces and go invade someone else's country.
Yes, that's very true.
And because because if you go to any town in this country, what do you see?
You see war memorials to the dead, those heroes that fought for our freedoms on every monument in every town.
It's either a bench or a light post or they have some kind of some kind of statue, you know, dedicated to somebody or to a group of people.
And what is it?
What a high school do?
I went to Washington and I observed this one time during the winter soldier testimony.
If you go to D.C., you'll see busloads of kids with teachers and guidance counselors and parents touring every single war memorial there is in Washington, D.C.
And if you listen to the tour guides, they actually play up the fact that these people are heroes and that is not going to change.
Even the Vietnam War Memorial, which was for us back in the 60s and 70s, it meant, you know, horrible things, you know, that 58000 soldiers died.
You have this granite wall that was very, you know, morose.
But people go there now and they they lay flags and yellow ribbons and wreaths and it's taken on a whole new meaning.
And that's the other thing we do all the time.
We say we support the troops.
We have to support the troops.
Well, we don't, but we shouldn't support the troops.
I don't support the troops.
I don't support my son.
I told him that when he went on his third tour.
I said, you need to refuse to go because I don't support this and I don't support what you and your buddies are doing.
And after three tours, you should know better.
You should say, no, I'm not going.
But because the country, even the pundits on television and radio say constantly, well, yeah, the war is bad and what we're doing is terrible, but we have to support the troops.
No, we don't.
Because if we keep supporting them, they're going to keep doing what they're doing.
And the only way to end this is for the troops to say, no, I'm not going to go fight your wars for empire.
I am not going to kill innocent civilians around the world so that Exxon Mobil can strike a deal with the Iraq foreign oil ministry to dig holes and steal their oil.
Yeah, well, and I say to Exxon Mobil, good luck with that anyway.
You know, none of that's going to last past New Year's 2012.
Anyway, so one more thing here that I want to ask you about is, well, I guess I'll set it up with another stream of commercials other than, as you say, where they kind of sanitize it and say, oh, you'll get to play with remote control planes all day and you'll get to have a good job later in life and whatever.
And don't mention the wars.
They also had a series of ads that were focused on, we will help you deal with your parents who don't want you to go.
And they had you remember those they had just last year, they had at least three or four different ones where the mom or the dad is really skeptical and doesn't really want to do it.
And then but the kid comes in, boys and girls with and they have all the flyers and brochures and information.
They sit their parents down and give them a good talking to because, you know, a lot of times people do no better than their parents after all.
And they're just old fuddy duddies.
And you've got to get them to understand.
I mean, what about that?
What about all the moms and dads out there who, after all, you're talking about a time in kids lives when they're turning 18, they're going out on their own.
The decision is kind of theirs.
It's more theirs than their parents.
What are they supposed to say to their kids who have bought into this?
I mean, geez, I remember thinking, Elaine, that, boy, they're going to have a real hard time recruiting people, especially after they never found the weapons of mass destruction or whatever.
But yet not just continues on year after year after year.
People graduate high school and then go and join the military.
Well, because they sterilize it, because they don't actually look.
We watch TV at night.
Do you ever, ever on any even on the cable shows, do you ever see any coffins?
Do you ever see anything about the wars at all?
Bombing?
Look at the CIA bombing last week.
Did they show any pictures at all about that?
No.
All they talked about was this Christmas Day of Bomber.
They've been talking about it for two weeks now.
But you never see the actual war on television.
You don't even see it in the newspapers.
So people sort of put that in the back of their minds because they don't want to deal with the bad news of war.
They just don't want to hear about it.
They don't want to know we're spending 10 billion dollars this year in Afghanistan alone and how much and trillions in Iraq.
So their kid comes to them and especially if it's a troubled child who's had trouble getting through high school.
My son wasn't an angel.
I had a very hard time raising him.
I would have looked forward to him joining the military if I didn't know any better.
So, you know, they say, oh, no, they're going to learn a trade and they're going to look so great when they come out of boot camp.
And then off they go to fight in Afghanistan or in Iraq or in Pakistan or, you know, whatever they're going to be doing.
But they're going to be killing people.
They're going to be part of a war machine.
And people don't understand that the war machine is just over encompassing in this country.
It has taken over every part of our lives.
There's there's all kinds of Department of Defense contractors out there.
You cannot get away from this stuff.
And it's really unfortunate for those parents because a lot of them really don't understand because they don't see it.
They don't read about it unless they dig deep like I do on the Internet, like you do, like most activists do.
And they completely understand the situation in Afghanistan and what we're doing in Pakistan.
And now there's drums of war beating for Yemen that they don't people don't understand what their kids are going to be doing.
And that's really unfortunate because it's the dumbing down of America and people are allowing it to happen.
They just sit and watch the regular five o'clock news, which is like not even seconds of information on all sorts of topics except the wars.
So that's what I blame.
I blame the media and I blame people for not educating themselves.
And I blame the economy.
The government tanked the economy, gave money to the banks.
And now kids really have nowhere to go.
People have nowhere to go.
And they say, what am I going to do with my life?
Well, I've talked to some of these kids in these recruiting centers.
They say, oh, I'm not going to go kill.
I'm not going to be a grunt.
I'm going to learn how to fix airplanes or I'm going to learn how to fly drones or something like I'm not actually going to kill people.
And what I tell them is they're part of the killing machine.
They're part of that war machine.
They shouldn't be doing that.
And then they say, well, what am I supposed to do with my life?
College education is way too expensive.
The Pentagon budget, the Department of Defense is 700 billion dollars this year.
The Department of Education was 68 billion.
I mean, talk about a country that is pouring all of our taxpayer dollars into war funding.
People don't understand that.
And then they say, well, there's no school for my kids to go to.
Even in these schools in middle America, they actually have to pay to play a sport.
Now, they have to close down the football field and close down the baseball field because there's no money in the schools for after school activities.
So parents have to come up with fifteen hundred dollars a year for their kids to buy uniforms and play a sport.
So the recruiters come in, they look all spiffy and they say, look, you don't have to do this, you could just join whatever the Air Force, the Navy, the Army, and we're going to take really good care of you.
Which they do, except the downside is they're going to kill oppressed people in foreign land and it has absolutely nothing to do with our national security.
Please tell the audience a bit about the actual boots on the ground activism where the rubber meets the road.
What are you guys doing over there at World Can't Wait at military families speak out at drive out the Bush regime, which they were still not in prison.
It should be drive the Bush regime into prison should be the name.
But anyway, tell us about some of this counter recruiting.
Tell us how people can get involved, because you know what?
And this one really sticks in my craw, right?
I took a young relation of mine to see the Transformers movie a few years back, the first one.
And the whole thing is nothing but a Lockheed commercial the whole time.
It's really incredible, the product placement in there.
But what really got me, other than how bad the movie was, which Transformers were my favorite from when I was in first grade.
So it was really bumming out how horrible it was.
But what really made me mad was they did about and there's a whole new rock video out now about joining the National Guard, which is which they're playing at the movie theaters, which is maybe even worse than the one I saw.
And neither of them, I think, show a single desert scene.
Neither of them show a single.
Everybody's wearing green camouflage.
They're flying in C-130s, looking out the back cargo bay over what looks like it might be Tennessee down there or something, basically just having a good time.
And this, you know, this particular commercial that I'm going off about, it was three or four minutes long.
And it's here's all the fun you can have in the military.
And it doesn't even show a single clip, not a single scene of Iraq or Afghanistan or even sand.
It's just completely has nothing to do with the recruiting.
As you said before, they completely sanitize the war out of it.
They make it all about your career and playing with remote control planes and all these things.
And they just completely leave the war out.
And I'm thinking somewhere there's got to be some people who are, you know, doing the the real work necessary for the counter recruiting to tell these kids that, hey, you notice there's no Iraq in that commercial.
You notice there's no dead burning bodies in that commercial.
Here's what's really going on.
And it's not like there's no footage at all.
It's just not on TV, you know?
Yeah, well, we at WorldKill...
Sorry for the long convoluted question, but I just had to get that off my chest.
I just hate these commercials so much.
I mean, I remember who I was when I was 17 and what kind of, you know, excitement, you know, being in the military might have held if I didn't already know better.
Right.
That's well, that's the thing.
It's very exciting.
And it's like the alpha male or a kid who wants to be an alpha male or even a young girl who wants to look in the in the magazines and the female magazines.
Now they have, you know, you can be this woman.
And they show this really physically fit woman who's in the army.
But going back to, you know, on the ground activism, the best place to go is WorldCan'tWait.net.
That's our Web site.
You'll see everything we're doing.
I also have a Web site up called Shut Down the Army Experience Center.
It's shut down the AEC.net.
And that's where we there's this Army Experience Center in Philly that they just opened up to the pilot program.
They have 19 Xbox games and computers where they play nothing but war video games.
And if you check out the Web site, you'll see what we're doing there.
And WorldCan'tWait is doing activities all over the country all the time to talk about war and torture and the drone bombings.
So that's our main focus.
If you check that out, you can hook up with us and get into a street protest because that's where we need to be out on the streets.
No more petition signing, no more sitting back behind your computer.
We have to get out in the streets for this.
Well, yeah, that's really great.
And in fact, as long as we're on the video game thing, I bet you have a couple of wise things to say about it.
But I wanted to point out that I saw a great episode of Penn and Teller show on Showtime where they go around debunking things that aren't true.
And one of the things that they debunked was the idea that video games lead to violent behavior, all these first person shooter games.
And they really did debunk it like Matt.
But where I'm going with this is that what the Army recruiters are doing, because, see, the lie is right that going around playing a first person shooter game is basically training for being a mass murderer or whatever.
And that in real life, you know, shooting a gun is nothing like playing one of those games.
Killing people is nothing like playing one of those games.
And the kids who play those games don't go around killing people.
They go around playing video games.
But what's going on here is the military is creating these these arcades basically come in, play video games, it's great, and then telling people this is what the war is like.
In fact, I even saw a picture, one of these video games.
You're actually in a mock up of a Humvee with an M60 shooting out the side of the damn truck.
And then and they're telling people, if you like video games, you'll love doing this in real life.
It's the same thing.
Right.
Right.
Exactly.
That's what they're doing.
And I don't know.
I don't know about that whole debunking thing.
I've seen these kids play these games.
They get hot under the collar.
They scream and they call them hajis.
They they they start cursing at the computers.
I'm sorry.
I think it makes them violent.
When they leave there, they're agitated.
And especially if a kid comes across a gun in a household in America, I think that that adds to the calamity of the situation in the high school.
We see a lot more violence in the high schools and I would bet that has got to do with these games.
And I'll just tell you something real quick.
My son plays called Call of Duty and he plays it on the Internet.
So he has challengers from all over the world.
And he says that there's a lot of young kids that play against him.
And he tells them to get the hell off those computer games because they are violent.
And he tells me that they do psych you up.
They do make you want to kill people.
And I, I can tell you from watching him, he walks away and he's jittery and nervous and that's what he wants to do.
And I don't care how they debunk it.
Any parent can go and sit down at one of those computer terminals and watch those kids play those games.
They will see it for themselves.
Yeah, well, I wonder if anybody's ever done a study about recruiting and video games exactly and whether the kids that like the games more are easier to recruit and that kind of thing.
I guess Penn and Teller's point was most of these kids sit at home or with their friends and they play games.
They actually aren't out committing crimes like young males are likely to do because they're inside pretending to commit crimes basically and having fun with their friends and staying out of trouble, you know.
Anyway, I'm sorry.
I got to go.
We're way over time here.
I'm in trouble.
My producer is screaming at me here in the chat room and I got to cut this off.
But I hope we can do this again.
Elaine, you're really good.
Thank you.
OK, thanks very much.
Thanks.
All right, y'all.
That's Elaine Brower from World Can't Wait.
And military families speak out and and I promise we'll have her back on the show.
All the guys in the chat room are saying, oh, you better make a deal to have her back for this thing is over.