Approximately 500 people packed the Resurrection Lutheran Church in Roxbury Saturday for an anti-war forum hosted by Boston City Councilor Chuck Turner and California Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-Oakland), in which community groups expressed their discontent with the government diverting community funds to war.
Lee, a member of Congress since 1998 and the only House member to vote against military action in Afghanistan after Sept. 11, called the war ‘unnecessary and unwarranted,’ because the ‘hundreds of billions of dollars’ could be better spent in local communities.
‘One hundred billion dollars could create 1.4 million public housing units,’ Lee said, ‘because housing should be a basic human right.’
According to Lee, other domestic uses for the money includes rebuilding 80 percent of the 30,000 public schools in desperate need of repair, providing health insurance for every uninsured American child for five years or covering the salaries of 1.9 million teachers for one year.
Instead of fixing these social ills, however, the $100 billion will be spent on top of the Pentagon’s $400 billion budget, Lee said.
‘This money will come from our communities,’ she said, ‘working men and women.’
Turner agreed with Lee, citing that communities would have to face budget cuts of up to 30 percent to ‘fight this foolishness.’
‘We have not looked critically enough at the way our federal government spends money,’ Turner said. ‘The only way we can achieve peace abroad is through economic and social justice at home.’
A number of local community groups also testified at the event, including Dimock Community Health Center, Greater Boston Legal Services and the African-American Federation of Greater Boston (AAFGB).
David Wright, representing AAFGB, blamed the government itself for the decay of community services.
‘The cuts that are affecting our community are causing a long, slow death not by terrorists, but by our own government,’ he said.
Wright also spoke about community programs like mental health services ‘being cut to the bone’ in order to meet reduced budgets. Decreases, he argued, would have a particularly strong impact on the Roxbury community, where cancer rates are high and people depend on programs for treatment.
‘God forbid we have health care, because then we’d be like Cuba,’ he said.
A representative from Dimock Community Healthcare, one of the largest employers in Roxbury, complained that budget cuts would mean cutting preventive care, which in turn would cost more when patients require treatment for preventable conditions.
‘Dr. [Martin Luther] King [Jr.] warned us of ‘the wasteland of war,” said Lee, ‘and once again, in 2003, we are standing on the edge of that wasteland.’
‘Fight against the real axis of evil: poverty, racism and war,’ Lee urged. ‘Resist this wartime budget.’
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