When I was a wee lad, my Dad took my brother and me to baseball games at Pittsburgh’s famed Forbes Field. Built in 1909, this stadium hosted such immortal Pirates with terrific baseball names as Honus Wagner, Pie Traynor, Ralph Kiner, Elroy Face, and Willie Stargell for sixty-one years. The fabulous Homestead Grays of the Negro League also called it home in the 1940s. Even the NFL Steelers played there for thirty years.
The first of these games with my father that I really remember happened in the summer of my sixth year. We were sitting in the left field line bleachers for a Saturday afternoon game against the Milwaukee Braves. In previous visits, such culinary delights as Cracker Jack and a grape snow cone would keep me enraptured. But on this day, I remember taking a more active interest in what was happening on the field. I vividly recall Dad pointing out #44 for the Braves, saying that he was going to become the best home run hitter of all-time. Quite a prediction about a youngster who was still in his twenties. That player was Hank Aaron. My Pop knew his baseball.
When a particular Pirate came to the plate, Dad told me “watch this man, son. He really knows how to hit.” Later in the game, he pointed him out again in right field, and informed me “that fella is the best outfielder in the entire world.” I sat entranced watching him make his powerful throws to the centerfielder during between-innings warm ups, and how he made graceful “basket catches” down around his waist as opposed to above his head like everyone else. After he caught a fly-out, he would non-chalantly flip the ball underhanded 150 feet or more back to the infield. I’d never seen anyone throw it like that…and haven’t since.
At one point in the game, a Brave slapped a hard single through the hole into right field. As a base runner was rounding third base and trying for home, number 21 charged the ball with ferocity, and unleashed a cannon-shot overhand throw that was a white blur. As the catcher caught the incendiary peg, he waited a moment for the embarrassed runner who didn’t even attempt to slide--he was out by so much. Dad rose to his feet cheering, as did the rest of the throng. I instantly became a fan of the regal Roberto Clemente.
Throughout the 60s and early 70s, when he was in the quartet of the greatest outfielders of that era alongside Willie Mays, Frank Robinson, and the aforementioned Aaron, Clemente won four batting titles, eleven straight Gold Gloves for his defensive prowess, appeared in twelve All Star Games, earned an MVP award, and captured two World Series titles with the Bucs. He ended his career with exactly 3,000 regular season hits—a feat that only a handful of others had reached before him.
Roberto became my idol. I learned all I could about him. Upon hearing that he squeezed a rubber ball in his youth to strengthen his arm, I began regularly doing the same. I oiled-up my Roberto Clemente Rawlings glove the way he instructed. I used the same Clemente model thirty-six ounce thirty-four inch bat with the rounded handle just like he did…even though it was much too heavy for me until later in high school. Choking up on it was my only solution, and I learned a lot about bat control that way. I studied instant replays of his technique for charging a ball in the outfield, and how he put all of his being into those jaw-dropping rocket throws from right field to cut down runners (he had an amazing twenty-nine assists in one season alone).
Since the dimensions of Forbes Field were the largest ever of any in the major league stadium (355 feet down the left field line, 406 feet to left center, 457 feet to center--so deep that they stored the batting cage out there during games--and 390 to right center) Roberto adapted his hitting style to take advantage of those wide confines. Down the right field line was relatively short (317 feet), but there was a twenty foot wire fence above the eight foot wall, making it difficult for a right handed hitter to lift home runs over it. So, he became an expert of lining hard drives off that screen for extra base hits, or slicing screaming shots into the other gaps in the outfield. As a result, he hit an 166 triples in his career (no active major leaguer these days is anywhere near a hundred). Because Roberto hit that way, I modeled my style after that—becoming a “spray” hitter, and running the bases with wild abandon, trying to get that extra base if I could.
Many a night growing up in Columbus, Ohio, and Decatur, Illinois--hundreds of miles away from Pittsburgh--I would tune in the radio to clear channel KDKA (which could be heard in thirty-eight states and Canada) to listen to Pirate’s announcer Bob Prince and his eloquent descriptions of “The Great One.” When Roberto would stride towards the plate in a crucial situation, Prince would shout, “Arriba! Arriba!” (loosely translated ,“Let’s go, take us up!”) urging Clemente on to do something spectacular to help the Pirates’ fortunes.
I remember getting into arguments with other kids about whom the best baseball player was. I was often looked at funny because I revered this black Puerto Rican with the funny accent, as opposed to Mickey Mantle, Pete Rose, Carl Yastremski, or Johnny Bench. All great players, mind you. But because of the way I was raised, my Dad never noticed things about color or language—it was how someone carried themselves, and what they did with their lives that defined them according to how I was taught. And Roberto was the man for me.
Playing in a non-media center like Pittsburgh did not give Clemente the acclaim that he might have received otherwise. But during those two World Series in ’60 and ‘71, when the whole nation (as well as all of Latin America) was watching, he hit safely in all fourteen games, and led the Pirates to victory over the heavily favored Yankees and Orioles, respectively. In fact, he won the MVP award for the 1971 series by hitting .414, driving in or scoring most of the clutch runs, and making stalwart plays and throws out in right. It was on that stage when everyone noticed what an amazing star he was. Even women noticed him looking so dynamic and charismatic in his uniform...I dare say he was one of the most handsome men to ever play the game with his intense, brooding eyes, high cheekbones, and perfect lips. He carried himself like a proud steed, with the body of a world class ballet dancer: muscled shoulders rippling down to a narrow waist—thirty inches—the same throughout his entire career. He had powerful arms, and hands so magical they were said to have eyes in their fingertips.
The excellent biographer, David Maranis, wrote the definitive telling in Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero. It brought back so many memories of times shared with my father watching “El Magnifico” play eighteen seasons for the battling Buccaneers.
Eloquently, Maranis states: Anyone who ever saw Clemente, as he played with a beautiful fury, will never forget him. He was a work of art in a game too often defined by statistics. And though it is a great book about baseball, the author explains it is more than that: Roberto Clemente was that rare athlete who rose above sports to become a symbol of larger themes. Born near the cane breaks of rural Carolina, Puerto Rico, at a time when there were no blacks or Puerto Ricans playing organized ball in the U.S., Clemente went on to become the greatest Latino player in the major leagues. He was, in a sense, the Jackie Robinson of the Spanish-speaking world, a ballplayer of determination, grace, and dignity who paved the way and set the highest standard for waves of Latino players who followed in later generations and who now dominate the game.
Since coming to the United States in the mid-50’s, at the dawn of the civil rights era, Clemente had grown more assertive on questions of racial equality. Martin Luther King, Jr. was at the top of the list of people he admired. They had met several times, and King once spent a day talking with Clemente on his farm in Puerto Rico. When King was assassinated in April 1968, Clemente led the way in insisting that the Pirates and Astros delay opening the season in Houston until after the slain civil rights leader’s funeral. The schedule called for games in Houston on April 8 and 9. King was buried on April 9. The Pirates and Astros, at the player’s request, held off on playing until April 10.
Al Oliver (who went on to become another tremendous hitter under Clemente’s tutelage), a black teammate who considered himself one of Clemente’s disciples, said Roberto would draw him into long discussions, more about life than baseball. “Our conversations always stemmed around people from all walks of life being able to get along well, no excuse why it shouldn’t be…He had a problem with people who treated you differently because of where you were from, your nationality, your color, also poor people, how they were treated…that’s the thing I really respected about him the most, was his character, the things he believed in.”
What Clemente admired most about King was not his philosophy of nonviolence, but this ability to give voice to the voiceless. “When Martin Luther King started doing what he did, he changed the whole system of the American style. He started saying what they would’ve liked to say for so many years, but no one listened. Now that wasn’t only for black people, but all minorities. People were empowered by him. That is the reason I say he changed the whole world.”
Because Clemente had a thick Puerto Rican accent, and was often fiery in his interviews and interactions with sportswriters, many misunderstood him. Few knew what he was really like in his private time. He regularly visited sick children in hospitals in every city the Pirates played in. He gave away great amounts of money to the poor. Since he had chronic back pain most of his adult life after a car accident in 1955, he was very sensitive to those with neck and spine problems. He studied chiropractics long before it was en vogue, and helped many—even complete strangers he met—who were in pain with massages and adjustments. He did much in his native Puerto Rico to assist with programs to help young people have opportunities other than delinquency and drugs.
When Clemente went to a splashy New York awards banquet to accept the award for the Outstanding Player of the World Series Ward in October 1971, famed sportswriter Roger Kahn said “He spoke with a huge, bursting beautiful heart.” His speeches in the past few years had become sharper and more powerful. He had a specific goal, the creation of a sports city in Puerto Rico, but also a more urgent sensibility, one that he had first articulated at a speech in Houston back in February 1971, before the start of the championship season, when he received the Tris Speaker Award. “If you have a chance to help others, and you don’t, you are wasting your time here on earth,” he said that night. This line of thinking is why Roberto Clemente has stayed much more than just a childhood idol to me. He still influences me greatly.
In his final years, Clemente often quoted his mother’s favorite philosophy: “Life is nothing, life is fleeting, everything ends, only God makes a man happy.”
In December of 1972, just a few months after the last game of the season where He had collected his 3,000th hit in his final at bat, a ringing double off the left center field wall at the still new Three Rivers Stadium where they Pirates had moved a few years before, Clemente’s mythology grew greater.
He had coached some winter league games in Nicaragua that fall, and had fallen in love with the people there. When the world heard of the massive earthquake that shook the small Central American country, killing tens of thousands, and leaving scores more homeless and in dire need, Clemente sprung into action. Within a matter of days, he raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, as well as four planeloads worth of food, medication, and clothing in his homeland of Puerto Rico. After the first few shipments were delivered, and it became apparent that dictator Anastasio Somaza’s strongmen had confiscated them for their own purposes instead of letting them be distributed to the poor, Clemente determined that he needed to fly with the next load to assure that everything would be taken care of properly.
In the haste to get things done during New Year’s weekend, Clemente naively contracted an additional plane with an unscrupulous air trafficker to make the three-hour trip from San Juan to Managua. It turns out the DC-7 that was rented had mechanical problems, the captain had a terrible flight record and a history of drinking, the other crew were untrained, and to top it off, the plane was overloaded by at least ten percent.
On New Year’s Eve, 1972, at 9:18 PM, after several hours of delays trying to get various elements of the plane working properly, with Roberto’s insistence, the slipshod aircraft and crew took off. Clemente wanted to get to Nicaragua as quickly as possible to bring this aid, and to help unclog the bottleneck there, and hopefully be back home by the next evening to celebrate the holiday with his wife and three sons. The plane wheezed and groaned down the runway, barely achieving lift-off after using nearly all of the one and a half miles of concrete. Just avoiding some palm trees, it heaved and lurched out over the ocean, beginning to make the turn back towards the west, when it suddenly lost what little altitude it had gained, and crashed a mile off shore.
The skeleton staff at the airport (due to the holiday) didn’t know what had happened at first. In the darkness there was much confusion, and not enough rescue equipment to get out quickly in the rough seas. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway, as later salvage operations proved that with the shredded fuselage and shrapnel-like remnants that everyone was most likely killed instantly upon high impact with the water. No bodies were ever found, most likely due to heavy shark population in that area.
Within hours, the revelry of New Year’s Eve celebrations across the island came to a grinding halt as the news spread that the great Roberto Clemente had been killed in a plane crash. By New Year’s Day, the airwaves across the America were sobered by the bulletins. I hadn’t been watching TV or listening to the radio when I got up, so I heard about it from my best friend, Duke, who called in tears to tell me around nine AM. I remember leaning against the washer in our downstairs laundry room where I took the call—stunned, and then began sobbing.
When all-star pitcher and teammate Steve Blass heard, he thought, “My God, Clemente! He’s invincible. He doesn’t die! He plays as long as he wants to and then becomes governor of Puerto Rico.” He and fellow all-star, reliever Dave Guisti, drove over to Pirates’ General Manger Joe L. Brown’s house in Pittsburgh’s southern suburbs. Brown let them in and they sat around drinking coffee, talking about Roberto, and crying. Brown says, “we recalled the depth of the man, and the intelligence of the man, and the humor of the man. Clemente never held anything back from the people. He gave them more than they had any right to expect from him. He reminded me of a panther—the grace and power of a panther. I will always remember of footage from the ’71 Series of Roberto rounding second and sliding into third, so graceful and strong, such spectacular passion. What a good man.”
On January 2nd, Hernandez Colon was sworn in as Puerto Rico’s new governor. But the proceedings were quite somber, and all the festivities that were scheduled were canceled. In his inaugural speech, Colon said of Clemente, “our youth have lost an idol and an example; our people have lost one of their glories.”
At Robert’s memorial service a few days later, nearly all of the Pirates’ players and front office staff, as well as hundreds of other baseball dignitaries and many US government officials came to Puerto Rico to honor him. Many spoke, but it was when Willie Stargell stood up, that everything came into focus. For nearly a decade, Stargell had been the other pillar on the Pittsburgh team. He towered over Clemente physically, but always looked up to him. “I’ll tell you, it’s really hard to put into words all the feelings that I have for Robby,” Stargell said, fighting back tears. “Since I’ve been with him I’ve had a chance to know a really dynamic man who walked tall in every sense you can think of. He was proud, and he was dedicated. He was in every sense what you can determine a man to be. And I think going the way he went really typifies how he lived. Helping other people without seeking any publicity or fame. Just making sure that he could lend a hand and get the job done…the greatness that he is, we all know the ballplayer that he is. For those who did not know him as a man they really missed a fine treat for not knowing this gentleman. I had the opportunity to play with him, to sit down and talk about the things that friends talk about. And I am losing a great friend. He will always remain in my heart.”
In Spanish, Clemente means “Merciful.” How fulfilling of his moniker to die while on a mission of mercy. So touched was the baseball world with his death, that he and the immortal Lou Gehrig are the only players to have the five year waiting period waived so they could be enshrined in the Hall of Fame immediately after their deaths.
In one of his final interviews, Clemente said “Even though I make a lot of money, I live the life of a common fellow. I am not a big shot. If you go outside the ballpark you are never going to see me trying to put on a show or pull attention, because that’s not the way I am. I am a shy man, but you see me with all kinds of people all the time. The only thing I worry about is being healthy and living long enough to educate my sons and help them respect other people. As long as they grow up to respect others, I will be happy.”
Thanks, Dad, for introducing Roberto Clemente to me. But, after all is said and done, it is you who taught me the most about a love for baseball, and respect for others, and social justice---Roberto just echoed it.
Here are some video tributes to Roberto Clemente:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzR5RvttxJ0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FDJhHnnoas&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbltQjJk0Bo&feature=related
Showing posts with label Martin Luther King Jr.. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Martin Luther King Jr.. Show all posts
Sunday, June 19, 2011
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Let Them Eat Tanks
Ben & Jerry's co-founder Ben Cohen talks with Jim Wallis of Sojourners Magazine about ice cream, Oreos -- and how the bloated military budget is destroying our economy and making us all less secure.
Jim Wallis: Why should you, a successful businessperson, be worried about the military budget? Why did this become such a life mission for you?
Ben Cohen: It was the same spirit that led Ben & Jerry's to work to improve the quality of life in the communities that we're a part of. There are things a business can do to integrate concerns for social justice and people who are being oppressed, but there are also things that only a country can do.
When I was working through Ben & Jerry's, it was clear that even big businesses, even huge foundations that have gobs of money, pale in comparison to how much money the federal government has. To restructure the edifice that creates injustice and poverty, you really need to look at the federal budget. That's where there's enough money to solve all these problems, without raising taxes, just by moving some money around. So that’s how I got to that point.
Wallis: How did you first become aware of how much money we're talking about and what that could mean for everything else?
Cohen: Part of it was getting just the vaguest idea of how much $1 billion is. You hear numbers such as 500 million, a billion, 500 billion, and they're all more than you can ever imagine. As Ben & Jerry's became a $100 million business and then a $300 million business, I began to understand how much that really is. Three times that is still less than $1 billion. It is shocking to me that we now spend $700 billion a year on the Pentagon budget. When I first started working on this issue a decade or so ago, the Pentagon budget was about half that amount.
Wallis: How do you help people visualize a number that large?
Cohen: There are two demonstrations I've done that have been incredibly popular. One is the BB demonstration and the other is the Oreo demonstration. The BB demonstration was shown to me by Sen. Alan Cranston of California. He used it to demonstrate the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. He would drop one BB into a container to represent the 15 kiloton bomb that went off over Hiroshima. Then he would drop in 60 BBs to represent enough nuclear weapons to blow up all of Russia. Then he would say, "And now I want to show the number of BBs that represent the U.S. nuclear arsenal," and he would pour in 10,000 BBs, and the noise just went on forever. It was so clearly illogical and irrational, and so clearly a waste, not just of money, but of our spirits and our soul -- in the same way that Martin Luther King Jr. warned that a nation that continues to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
Spending money on unnecessary weapons is taking away from our schools and hospitals and housing, and taking away the hopes of our children and the genius of our times. It's just amazing to think about the huge expenditures of money on these unneeded weapons and what could be done with that same amount of money, if we used it to actually help people, especially people in poverty.
Wallis: Tell me about the Oreo demonstration.
Cohen: That's a demonstration I developed on my own. It makes it easier to understand the federal budget. One Oreo represents $10 billion. The $700 billion Pentagon budget is just a stack of 70 Oreos -- you can understand 70 Oreos. In comparison to that, the federal government spends just four-and-a-half Oreos on education, just one-half an Oreo on alternative energy, and a fraction of an Oreo on Head Start. If you take just seven Oreos off the Pentagon budget, you could provide health care for all the kids who currently don't have it. You could provide Head Start for all the kids who need it. You could eliminate our need for Mideast oil through energy efficiency. You could change our country into one that cares about people, eliminates poverty, and helps people climb their way out, through education.
Wallis: You mentioned Dr. King's comment about a nation that makes these choices being on the path to spiritual death. Are there spiritual roots to your concern about military spending?
Cohen: It's definitely a spiritual issue, as far as I'm concerned. My life is interconnected with the lives of everybody else. When people are suffering, I’m suffering. The thing that motivates me is the understanding that there is no lack of resources. We do have enough money. I've been inspired by a quote from Teilhard de Chardin, who wrote, "The day will come when, after harnessing space, the winds, the tides, gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And, on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, [humanity] will have discovered fire."
I believe that we can create Martin Luther King's beloved community. And the thing that just drives me crazy is that we have enough money. We're just spending it in the wrong places.
The military budget grew to half of what it is now during the Cold War, based on the idea that the Soviet Union was spending more than we were, so we were in this neck-and-neck arms race. We had a peer competitor; there were two superpowers. We thought that they were out to get us, so we needed to spend as much as the Soviet Union.
Today, there is no peer competitor. There is no other superpower, and we are spending more than five times as much as the next country that's not an ally. And that country is China, our biggest trading partner; we're not about to go to war with China. And yet we continue to spend this ridiculous sum of money for weapons that we plan never to use.
Wallis: How did you bring these issues into the last presidential campaign?
Cohen: We were trying to encourage presidential candidates to take a stand against militarism, to take a stand in favor of shifting money out of the Pentagon budget and into social needs. We did that by educating people in Iowa and New Hampshire about how the federal budget was spent. We didn't really need to do much convincing.
The huge majority of the population is not aware of how the federal budget is split up, and they're not aware of how much other countries spend on their military compared to us. In a recent poll, 16 percent of people thought that less than 20 percent of the budget goes to the Pentagon, and 64 percent of the people thought that military spending was less than half the budget -- it's actually around 58 percent, not even including the costs of past wars or foreign military aid. The Pentagon happens to be the biggest-ticket item in the entire discretionary budget.
Once you give them that information, you don't need to do anything else. They come to the conclusion themselves that we should shift money out of the Pentagon and put it into stuff that people need today, like better schools.
Wallis: You've done incredible work educating people about this issue. You've convinced people of this pretty readily, but you've had a tougher time with the politicians.
Cohen: That's exactly right. Politicians are deathly afraid of being accused of being "weak on defense." They regard that as political suicide. But the reality is that we are muscle-bound on defense. The reality is that it's our excessive military spending that’s creating the deficit that we have. That's what's making our country uncompetitive economically, because so much of government spending goes into building weapons instead of into creating things that people really need.
Wallis: It really isn't about "defense" anymore, is it?
Cohen: No, it's definitely not about defense. I called it the "military budget" or the "Pentagon budget"; it's definitely not the "defense budget." The huge majority of the money that's being spent is not being spent to defend the United States -- it's being spent to prepare to fight wars of aggression against countries that have not done anything to us. The United States has an ocean on each side that prevents countries from coming and attacking us, and we've got two good allies on the north and south. There's no country that has the ability to attack the U.S.
Wallis: How does the fact that we're engaged in two major wars, and now a third, in Muslim nations affect the politics of military spending?
Cohen: When you take into account the size of the military budgets of our opposition in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now in Libya, they're virtually nothing. They’re way under $10 billion a year. If what we're concerned about is terrorists -- they're spending a lot less than $1 billion a year. So these huge Pentagon expenditures of $700 billion and more, it’s like trying to take an aircraft carrier to hunt down one terrorist. It's overkill.
Wallis: Of course, people would say, sure we have the oceans and allies, but we were attacked on 9/11, and that's what we're afraid of now. How do you defend against terrorism?
Cohen: I don't think that's the reason to go to war. I think the terrorists that attacked us were criminals, and they should be hunted down like criminals and brought to justice. But terrorism is a tactic that's been used for centuries. Other countries have dealt with terrorist attacks, but no other country that I know of has gone to war over it.
Wallis: The Pentagon-related think tank The Rand Corporation put together a pie chart with statistics on how, historically, terrorism has been defeated. One big chunk, 40 percent, involved police tactics, intelligence, preventing things from happening. Another 43 percent involved reaching a political settlement, such as in Northern Ireland. In 10 percent of cases, terrorists win. And only 7 percent of the time has terrorism been defeated by military solutions. So why are we investing all our money in the 7 percent solution? What's driving all this, if it isn't our legitimate defense needs?
Cohen: No, it's definitely not our legitimate defense needs. It comes down to the military-industrial-congressional complex. You’ve got the Pentagon that is run by people whose careers depend upon getting a certain weapon system built, and they are always lobbying Congress to fund these weapon systems. The standard operating procedure is to do what's called "political engineering." Political engineering means to spread out the production of a weapons system across as many congressional districts as possible, so if there's a threat of cutting that weapon system, the majority of members of Congress hear howls of resistance from the people in their districts that have jobs making those weapons. And then you've got the weapons manufacturers themselves that are lobbying Congress to provide more funding, and providing campaign contributions to pressure them, in a form of legalized bribery, to keep the money rolling in from Congress.
Wallis: You told me recently that you thought that we now have the second biggest opportunity ever to really challenge military spending. The first was the end of the Cold War, with the "peace dividend" that never really happened. In fact, we've doubled the Pentagon budget since the end of the Cold War. But you think now might be an opportune time.
Cohen: Absolutely, because of the deficit. Because people are starting to understand that we can't continue to run up all these unpaid bills. When you start looking at where the government spends the money, and you start trying to find places to cut to bring the deficit under control, you realize that over half of all discretionary government spending is the Pentagon. If you're going to start bringing the budget under control, you can't just be fiddling around the margins; you've got to deal with the really big-ticket items. The bipartisan deficit commission came up with $100 billion a year worth of obsolete, unneeded Cold War-era weapons systems that do not need to be built.
The whole time I was running the campaign to cut Pentagon spending, we were desperately trying to make the campaign bipartisan, but we couldn't find any Republicans that would get on board. Now, the campaign to cut Pentagon spending is being led by Republicans. A lot of the people that got elected as part of the tea party have been fighting to cut Pentagon spending. It's logical. You can’t avoid cutting the Pentagon when you take a look at how the federal government spends its money. So you've got tea partiers and libertarians speaking out in a very loud voice about how the Pentagon should be cut.
Wallis: Where are you finding support for your efforts?
Cohen: I think that religious people are likely supporters. They're the people that make so much sense to be on this bandwagon because this is what the Bible and Jesus is all about.
Wallis: We do have these scriptures about beating our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks.
Cohen: It's unbelievable that politicians give all this lip service about how religious they are, but when it comes to putting their money where their mouth is, they don't do it. People talk about the needs of children and education and hunger and poverty, but there's very little money that they ever come up with. On the other side, there's very little talk about the Pentagon budget. It's not really a subject of conversation. And yet that's where all the money is going.
(Copyright, Sojourners Magazine, June, 2011 issue)
Jim Wallis: Why should you, a successful businessperson, be worried about the military budget? Why did this become such a life mission for you?
Ben Cohen: It was the same spirit that led Ben & Jerry's to work to improve the quality of life in the communities that we're a part of. There are things a business can do to integrate concerns for social justice and people who are being oppressed, but there are also things that only a country can do.
When I was working through Ben & Jerry's, it was clear that even big businesses, even huge foundations that have gobs of money, pale in comparison to how much money the federal government has. To restructure the edifice that creates injustice and poverty, you really need to look at the federal budget. That's where there's enough money to solve all these problems, without raising taxes, just by moving some money around. So that’s how I got to that point.
Wallis: How did you first become aware of how much money we're talking about and what that could mean for everything else?
Cohen: Part of it was getting just the vaguest idea of how much $1 billion is. You hear numbers such as 500 million, a billion, 500 billion, and they're all more than you can ever imagine. As Ben & Jerry's became a $100 million business and then a $300 million business, I began to understand how much that really is. Three times that is still less than $1 billion. It is shocking to me that we now spend $700 billion a year on the Pentagon budget. When I first started working on this issue a decade or so ago, the Pentagon budget was about half that amount.
Wallis: How do you help people visualize a number that large?
Cohen: There are two demonstrations I've done that have been incredibly popular. One is the BB demonstration and the other is the Oreo demonstration. The BB demonstration was shown to me by Sen. Alan Cranston of California. He used it to demonstrate the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. He would drop one BB into a container to represent the 15 kiloton bomb that went off over Hiroshima. Then he would drop in 60 BBs to represent enough nuclear weapons to blow up all of Russia. Then he would say, "And now I want to show the number of BBs that represent the U.S. nuclear arsenal," and he would pour in 10,000 BBs, and the noise just went on forever. It was so clearly illogical and irrational, and so clearly a waste, not just of money, but of our spirits and our soul -- in the same way that Martin Luther King Jr. warned that a nation that continues to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
Spending money on unnecessary weapons is taking away from our schools and hospitals and housing, and taking away the hopes of our children and the genius of our times. It's just amazing to think about the huge expenditures of money on these unneeded weapons and what could be done with that same amount of money, if we used it to actually help people, especially people in poverty.
Wallis: Tell me about the Oreo demonstration.
Cohen: That's a demonstration I developed on my own. It makes it easier to understand the federal budget. One Oreo represents $10 billion. The $700 billion Pentagon budget is just a stack of 70 Oreos -- you can understand 70 Oreos. In comparison to that, the federal government spends just four-and-a-half Oreos on education, just one-half an Oreo on alternative energy, and a fraction of an Oreo on Head Start. If you take just seven Oreos off the Pentagon budget, you could provide health care for all the kids who currently don't have it. You could provide Head Start for all the kids who need it. You could eliminate our need for Mideast oil through energy efficiency. You could change our country into one that cares about people, eliminates poverty, and helps people climb their way out, through education.
Wallis: You mentioned Dr. King's comment about a nation that makes these choices being on the path to spiritual death. Are there spiritual roots to your concern about military spending?
Cohen: It's definitely a spiritual issue, as far as I'm concerned. My life is interconnected with the lives of everybody else. When people are suffering, I’m suffering. The thing that motivates me is the understanding that there is no lack of resources. We do have enough money. I've been inspired by a quote from Teilhard de Chardin, who wrote, "The day will come when, after harnessing space, the winds, the tides, gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And, on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, [humanity] will have discovered fire."
I believe that we can create Martin Luther King's beloved community. And the thing that just drives me crazy is that we have enough money. We're just spending it in the wrong places.
The military budget grew to half of what it is now during the Cold War, based on the idea that the Soviet Union was spending more than we were, so we were in this neck-and-neck arms race. We had a peer competitor; there were two superpowers. We thought that they were out to get us, so we needed to spend as much as the Soviet Union.
Today, there is no peer competitor. There is no other superpower, and we are spending more than five times as much as the next country that's not an ally. And that country is China, our biggest trading partner; we're not about to go to war with China. And yet we continue to spend this ridiculous sum of money for weapons that we plan never to use.
Wallis: How did you bring these issues into the last presidential campaign?
Cohen: We were trying to encourage presidential candidates to take a stand against militarism, to take a stand in favor of shifting money out of the Pentagon budget and into social needs. We did that by educating people in Iowa and New Hampshire about how the federal budget was spent. We didn't really need to do much convincing.
The huge majority of the population is not aware of how the federal budget is split up, and they're not aware of how much other countries spend on their military compared to us. In a recent poll, 16 percent of people thought that less than 20 percent of the budget goes to the Pentagon, and 64 percent of the people thought that military spending was less than half the budget -- it's actually around 58 percent, not even including the costs of past wars or foreign military aid. The Pentagon happens to be the biggest-ticket item in the entire discretionary budget.
Once you give them that information, you don't need to do anything else. They come to the conclusion themselves that we should shift money out of the Pentagon and put it into stuff that people need today, like better schools.
Wallis: You've done incredible work educating people about this issue. You've convinced people of this pretty readily, but you've had a tougher time with the politicians.
Cohen: That's exactly right. Politicians are deathly afraid of being accused of being "weak on defense." They regard that as political suicide. But the reality is that we are muscle-bound on defense. The reality is that it's our excessive military spending that’s creating the deficit that we have. That's what's making our country uncompetitive economically, because so much of government spending goes into building weapons instead of into creating things that people really need.
Wallis: It really isn't about "defense" anymore, is it?
Cohen: No, it's definitely not about defense. I called it the "military budget" or the "Pentagon budget"; it's definitely not the "defense budget." The huge majority of the money that's being spent is not being spent to defend the United States -- it's being spent to prepare to fight wars of aggression against countries that have not done anything to us. The United States has an ocean on each side that prevents countries from coming and attacking us, and we've got two good allies on the north and south. There's no country that has the ability to attack the U.S.
Wallis: How does the fact that we're engaged in two major wars, and now a third, in Muslim nations affect the politics of military spending?
Cohen: When you take into account the size of the military budgets of our opposition in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now in Libya, they're virtually nothing. They’re way under $10 billion a year. If what we're concerned about is terrorists -- they're spending a lot less than $1 billion a year. So these huge Pentagon expenditures of $700 billion and more, it’s like trying to take an aircraft carrier to hunt down one terrorist. It's overkill.
Wallis: Of course, people would say, sure we have the oceans and allies, but we were attacked on 9/11, and that's what we're afraid of now. How do you defend against terrorism?
Cohen: I don't think that's the reason to go to war. I think the terrorists that attacked us were criminals, and they should be hunted down like criminals and brought to justice. But terrorism is a tactic that's been used for centuries. Other countries have dealt with terrorist attacks, but no other country that I know of has gone to war over it.
Wallis: The Pentagon-related think tank The Rand Corporation put together a pie chart with statistics on how, historically, terrorism has been defeated. One big chunk, 40 percent, involved police tactics, intelligence, preventing things from happening. Another 43 percent involved reaching a political settlement, such as in Northern Ireland. In 10 percent of cases, terrorists win. And only 7 percent of the time has terrorism been defeated by military solutions. So why are we investing all our money in the 7 percent solution? What's driving all this, if it isn't our legitimate defense needs?
Cohen: No, it's definitely not our legitimate defense needs. It comes down to the military-industrial-congressional complex. You’ve got the Pentagon that is run by people whose careers depend upon getting a certain weapon system built, and they are always lobbying Congress to fund these weapon systems. The standard operating procedure is to do what's called "political engineering." Political engineering means to spread out the production of a weapons system across as many congressional districts as possible, so if there's a threat of cutting that weapon system, the majority of members of Congress hear howls of resistance from the people in their districts that have jobs making those weapons. And then you've got the weapons manufacturers themselves that are lobbying Congress to provide more funding, and providing campaign contributions to pressure them, in a form of legalized bribery, to keep the money rolling in from Congress.
Wallis: You told me recently that you thought that we now have the second biggest opportunity ever to really challenge military spending. The first was the end of the Cold War, with the "peace dividend" that never really happened. In fact, we've doubled the Pentagon budget since the end of the Cold War. But you think now might be an opportune time.
Cohen: Absolutely, because of the deficit. Because people are starting to understand that we can't continue to run up all these unpaid bills. When you start looking at where the government spends the money, and you start trying to find places to cut to bring the deficit under control, you realize that over half of all discretionary government spending is the Pentagon. If you're going to start bringing the budget under control, you can't just be fiddling around the margins; you've got to deal with the really big-ticket items. The bipartisan deficit commission came up with $100 billion a year worth of obsolete, unneeded Cold War-era weapons systems that do not need to be built.
The whole time I was running the campaign to cut Pentagon spending, we were desperately trying to make the campaign bipartisan, but we couldn't find any Republicans that would get on board. Now, the campaign to cut Pentagon spending is being led by Republicans. A lot of the people that got elected as part of the tea party have been fighting to cut Pentagon spending. It's logical. You can’t avoid cutting the Pentagon when you take a look at how the federal government spends its money. So you've got tea partiers and libertarians speaking out in a very loud voice about how the Pentagon should be cut.
Wallis: Where are you finding support for your efforts?
Cohen: I think that religious people are likely supporters. They're the people that make so much sense to be on this bandwagon because this is what the Bible and Jesus is all about.
Wallis: We do have these scriptures about beating our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks.
Cohen: It's unbelievable that politicians give all this lip service about how religious they are, but when it comes to putting their money where their mouth is, they don't do it. People talk about the needs of children and education and hunger and poverty, but there's very little money that they ever come up with. On the other side, there's very little talk about the Pentagon budget. It's not really a subject of conversation. And yet that's where all the money is going.
(Copyright, Sojourners Magazine, June, 2011 issue)
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