SCREAMING EAGLES COMING HOME TO ROOST

While I was recently in South Korea I had the sad opportunity to have several of these F-15 "Eagles" screaming over my head when I was touring the end of the runway at the US Air Force Base at Kunsan with local activists. I reported in my blog at the time that in addition to the ear shattering noise, I felt my entire insides reverberate and I know that constant exposure to those sounds cannot be healthy for humans or any other living creature.

The South Koreans, and the Japanese in Okinawa who are now suing to close a similar US base there, have to live with this every single day of their lives. Same goes for the people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and other places around the world where the US empire is operating.

Now they want to fly these damn things here in Maine at 500 feet.

The Massachusetts Air National Guard is now proposing to fly these F-15's at 500 mph over 2.5 million acres in Western Maine in a proposal called the Condor Military Operations Area. They say it is just woods out there but 80,000 people live in that part of Maine and they, along with the abundant animal life in that part of the state, would be heavily impacted.

A group called Western Maine Matters was formed to fight this proposal and they have a petition on-line and are urging people to sign it. You can find it here

To me this is a perfect illustration of the steady militarism that is taking over our nation. As our government moves away from real job creation, and into security export as our primary role under corporate globalization, the Pentagon will need more and more lands across the US to test their high-tech weapons systems. As people around the world attempt to throw the US military out of their country, and they damn well should, these weapons systems will have to be tested back here at home.

As a now famous preacher (and former friend of a certain president) once said, "The chickens are coming home to roost." Now we are going to clearly see what the rest of the world has been living with since the end of WW II - the reality of the US military empire!

We must fight against these weapons systems being tested in our communities, whether they are drones or F-15's or anything else, but we should also be equally as concerned about the people who daily suffer from these same weapons systems in South Korea, Japan, or Afghanistan.

We can't just push them out of our community and then forget about them when they go someplace else out of ear-shot.

We have to become people who demand the ugly manifestations of US militarism be shut down everywhere.

10-4, over and out!

JUST IN: The noise is so bad at Kunsan AFB in South Korea that local rabbits have a sterility rate of 35%. See more here