I am writing in response to a column “Amherst sends the wrong message with vote,” written by Justin Thompson, published on November 15.
My name is Ben Grosscup and I am a member of Amherst town meeting, a position in which I served since 2006. Contrary to claims in Thompson’s column, the Bring the War Dollars Home resolution was not aimed as an attack on a former president. Rather, it was a rebuke of a long-standing policy of the U.S. government – across multiple presidential administrations – to fund immoral and insane wars while stripping funding that supports our communities’ needs for education, health care, basic infrastructure, and other things that perpetuate the common good.
In the debate over war, there is no group of people – veterans, students, health care workers, or professional politicians – whose opinions count more than another group by virtue of their position in society. Moreover, Veterans and active duty soldiers – like the rest of the population – have wide-ranging views on the wars. Many brave veterans have formed organizations like Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans against the War. These organizations have helped the peace movement to expose the plainly immoral things – extra judicial murders, random shootings, torture, and use of depleted uranium – that the military as an organization is doing to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan – and now Pakistan and Yemen as well. These individuals have realized that they have been part of carrying out the evil enterprise of U.S. Imperialism, and they are making amends for these deeds by building a movement to stop the wars and to help themselves and their comrades heal from the horrors that they have both been subjected to and involved in perpetrating.
But let’s zoom out from what each group of people might have to say now and look at where American policy is going in the big picture. The Obama administration and Congress, just like the previous administration was doing, are steadily working to make these occupations and their attendant carnage a permanent fixture of the national policy.

Although we’ve been told in the media that the Iraq war has ended, the fact is that is has merely been re-branded by the Obama administration. The U.S. occupation has merely shifted towards ever greater reliance on corporate mercenary forces like Blackwater, which kill without accountability to American or Iraqi law. And when these mercenaries themselves die, their deaths are not counted in the official casualty rates, even though they now rival that of regular soldiers.

Rather than just quietly enduring the local budgetary crisis that the town of Amherst is suffering as a direct result of the government’s vast expenditures on such folly, I’m proud that Amherst Town Meeting took a stand to call for an end to this madness. The amount of money used for the military from Amherst tax payers would solve every aspect of the budgetary crisis the town is in now and have plenty left over for providing sick people, including returning veterans, with health care.

But it is not enough to talk about our suffering in Amherst as it is related to these wars. We must also acknowledge the suffering our government is causing abroad to the primary victims of these wars: the civilian populations of the countries the U.S. Military is occupying and bombing.

Regular Afghans and Iraqis suffer from desperate poverty on an every day basis, but the U.S. presence in their homelands simply makes their lives more unstable. I think it is time that students at UMass who see the immorality of these wars challenge the Student Government Association to join with the town of Amherst in condemning them. There’s no hiding anymore behind the hollow rhetoric of “support the troops,” when it is so plain that the primary thing hurting the troops is the military itself. Let’s connect the dots and recognize that the same war machine that destroys lives abroad, destroys them here as well. It’s time that we stand up loudly, and to be more daring in our resistance to militarism and war.