ARMY EXPERIENCE CENTER BOWS TO PROTEST
by John Grant
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. There were speeches by Gold Star mother Sue Niederer 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 VFP
Chapter 31 were joined by VFP members from the Long Island chapter, in the photo
below in front of Dave & Busters. VFP members Phil Reiss and Louise Legun
from Lehigh Valley were there, as was Ann Wright and VFP Board Members ElliotT
Adams and Patrick McCann. VFP member Bill Perry was there with his Delaware
Valley Veterans For America group. At least two IVAW members were part of the
march.
After a spirited march
to the mall that went past 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 earphones in their ears. 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 gave
a series of three warnings, and upon the third, everyone moseyed out of the mall
rather than be arrested. There was a report of one arrest, and that will be
clarified later. 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 and raised 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, no photographs were allowed.
The Army Experience Center at the Franklin Mills Mall sees patriotism in stirring up the primal, hormonal emotions of our vulnerable teenagers to recruit them to hunt down and kill other, equally duped kids in far flung and strange cultures like Afghanistan. Now, it is doing this 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. Drones are not enough, and young kids are still needed to hump those rugged "boonies" in Afghanistan to search and destroy armed elements of the Pashtun people who just want our "foreign" military out of their lands.
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 roped into an imperial mission
that they are dishonestly not being informed about.
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. In the future, we can not afford to micro-manage and determine how
people live in these places. For example, Pakistan's prime problem is corruption
and economic injustice, not the rise of Islam.
The deeply entrenched Militarization of our country as represented by The Army Experience Center shows how out-of-whack our thinking has become in this culture. We're spending ourselves into fiscal and moral bankruptcy. At this time of economic reckoning and change, we need to re-evaluate our national priorities and make them more practical. A good place to start is to realize, as the woman in my photo has attached to the photo of the devastated family