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Recent Similar Articles

• > Protest at Army Experience Center

The $12 million marketing experiment in brand-selling the US Army to Philadelphia youth and adults at the Franklin Mills Mall was forced to shut down for the afternoon on Saturday, May 2nd.  Over two hundred protesters -- many from Washington DC, New York and other out of town locations -- expressed their outrage at tax dollars being spent to seduce teenagers to join the Army with violent video games and human-target shooting simulators. 

Protesters gathered at Saint Luke's United Church Of Christ a mile south of the Franklin Mills Mall on Knights Road in Northeast Philadelphia. Brandywine Peace Community Coordinator Bob Smith MC-ed the rally that included speeches by Gold Star Mother Sue Neiderer, Iraq veteran Jesse Hamilton, World Can't Wait Director Debra Sweet, the Rev. Bob Moore and others, plus the reading of an eloquent Criminal Complaint directed at both the Army Experience Center and the Simon Property Group, the owner of the Mall that rents space to the Army next to the mini Las Vegas game emporium Dave & Busters. The Army Experience Center features dozens of video stations available to young teenagers to play a host of violent video games like "America's Army," which comes in various versions, all designed around a mission that involves simulated first-person shooting with an automatic weapon directed at human targets.

Members of Philadelphia Veterans For Peace Chapter 31 were joined by VFP members from the Albany, NY, Long Island chapter and the Lehigh Valley. At least two Iraq veterans marched with the group. A very vocal element of World Can't Wait came down from New York and elsewhere. Members of the Brandywine Peace Community were a strong presence.
 
After a spirited march to the mall that went past prime-AEC-target 13-year-old Michael Gilbert advertising a beer distributor, Philadelphia Police, led by Civil Affairs Captain Bill Fisher, made no attempt to stop or re-direct the protesters. All 200 marched into the Mall and collected around the open area in front of the Army Experience Center. The Center was closed due to the protest, and active-duty and civilian staff stood in their nifty knit shirts at the opening to the Center looking very glum and serious, many with the latest tactical earphone/mike units attached to their heads. To their left, there was a phalanx of police lined up along the wall. Outside the Mall entrance under the China Buddha Inn sign, there was a line of police wagons waiting.

After several speakers pointed out how the Center exploits vulnerable youth with high-tech video seduction techniques, Captain Fisher began a series of three warnings, and upon the third, most everyone moseyed out of the mall rather than be arrested. Seven people chose to be arrested, including Debra Sweet and Elaine Brower from World Can't Wait. As usual, it was a vastly asymmetrical confrontation -- to use a favored military term -- and the forces of Militarism, Commerce and Police had the upper hand all the time. Still, the action was successful in raising real questions about the moral stature of the Army Experience Center and any future plans on the military's part for other such Centers in malls around the country.

The moral argument for the AEC can be reduced to this: The military is convinced it is protecting the empire and, therefore, it has the right to do whatever it decides to do with OUR tax dollars. And, if you don't like it, well, you just better shut up 'cause if you press too much The Man Gonna Get Ya. In this case, The Man was represented by Captain Fisher and his Philly Civil Affairs cops, who did allow a fair degree of citizen First Amendment free-speech rights to trump the Mall's and the Center's claims on Property Rights. For example, at a previous demonstration at the center, photographers were threatened with expulsion from the Mall if they took photographs.

The Army Experience Center at the Franklin Mills Mall sees it as patriotic to stir up the primal, hormonal emotions of vulnerable, mostly-male teenagers to recruit them to hunt down and kill other, equally duped kids in far flung and strange cultures like Afghanistan. Its own coffers overflowing with tax dollars, the military is now doing this branding and recruiting in a dismal economic downturn. In the Pentagon they know our colonial wars cannot be fought totally by the remotely "piloted" drones armed with lethal rockets we are favoring more and more to attack those we deem a threat to our power in the world. Young kids are still needed to hump those rugged "boonies" in Afghanistan to search and destroy armed elements of the tough Pashtun people, who are, in turn, fighting to push our "foreign" military (our kids recruited in places like the AEC) out of their lands. It's a vicious, bloody cycle.

What the military is doing at The Army Experience Center is far beyond what is needed to protect America from terrorists. Places like the Army Experience Center are where our youth are dishonestly roped into an imperial mission that they are not being informed about. 

On Photographs, Photographers and Protest
     
In the photo, above, the man holding his Nikon at the ready is a Philadelphia Police Officer. Besides a camera, he is wearing a holstered automatic pistol on his belt. Behind him, Harvey Finkle, a well-known Philly documentary photographer, does his work documenting the people and the event for different purposes than the cop. And, then there's the payoff: The woman seated on the floor holds a blown up photograph that says better than anything what is at stake in protests like the one at the Army Experience Center. But does the cop or any of the AEC staff even see the photo? Can they "see" a photo like this? Are we all by now numbed by this kind of image? It seems to be a Middle Eastern family. Iraq? Gaza? We don't know where exactly it was taken. To be fair, we also don't know from the photo who did the bombing. All we know is some kind of explosion has devastated this young boy and his father.

The protest at the Army Experience Center was an effort to express citizen outrage with our self-perpetuating militarized culture that continues to pursue the demonization of others and the use of killing and bombing to solve  problems that could be addressed in less violent ways. We seem unable to disengage from Iraq unless we can be assured it will be 100% loyal to us. We act as if Islam is some new and sinister force in Afghanistan and Pakistan, when the reality is it has been a central factor of life there for centuries. Our current economic struggle make it clear we can no longer afford to micro-manage how people live in these places. For example, Pakistan's prime problem is, and has been for decades, feudal corruption and economic injustice -- not the rise of Islam.

The deeply entrenched Militarization of our country as represented by The Army Experience Center experiment shows how out-of-whack our thinking has become in this culture. We're spending ourselves into fiscal and moral bankruptcy, and the defense budget is a chief culprit. At this time of economic reckoning and change, we need to re-evaluate our national priorities and make them more practical and in line with the manner of our lives. A good place to start is to consider the idea that the woman in my photo, above, has attached to her blown-up photo of the devastated family ...