When people discover that the author is a veteran of military service, they often say “thank you for your service.” They are attempting to be appreciative in the moment and I typically respond politely, “you're welcome.” Saturday, at the Iowa Peace Initiative Conference at Loras College in Dubuque, Board President of Veterans for Peace, Mike Ferner suggested another answer: “Pardon me, but you don't look like an oil company.” It was that kind of day for the hundred or so Iowans active in the peace movement who were attending the conference.

What Ferner was getting at was that so often militarism serves corporations or what President Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex.” Ferner called it “serving empire,” and many at the conference believe that the hegemony of large corporations in our lives is an infringement on our freedom and democracy. Perhaps the best example of militarism is the United States nuclear weapons complex upon which we have spent $5.5 trillion between 1940 and 1996 for a weapons system most people realize should never be used.

According to Eisenhower, “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.” With a corporate media that appeals to the lowest common denominator and “dumbs down” complex issues, it is becoming increasingly difficult to follow Eisenhower's advice and remain knowledgeable. We are lulled into a false sense of security by the propagation of consumerism when we are told the economy will get better if Americans resume purchasing goods. With all of this going on, many have not been alert to the growth of militarism or the related corporatism.

At the conference, Dr. Jeff Patterson, Board President of Physicians for Social Responsibility said, “we are such a militaristic society.” We accept unawares the extent to which militarism is driving the United States economy. Top defense contractors like Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, Boeing, Raytheon and others generate tens of billions of dollars in government contracts. To the detriment of our democracy, these corporate citizens, and others like them, in every industry segment, have become the glue that holds our society and its economy together.

Most Blog for Iowa readers are familiar with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, where the court ruled that corporations are persons. We know better than this, that human beings are persons entitled to protection of the rights guaranteed by our constitution. If the Supreme Court determined that our laws say otherwise, we must insist that our lawmakers fix them. There is a campaign to amend the constitution to fix this called Move to Amend although whether this is the best option remains an open question.

What is less of a question is that if within the built environments in which we live we can become acclimatized to acceptance of the world from a perspective just beyond our noses. We live in society and respond to things as we are comfortable doing. It is almost stimulus-response, see a veteran? Thank them for their service.

Instead, what we should be doing is taking Bob Dylan's dictum, “you're gonna have to serve somebody” and asking ourselves, what are we serving? We should then work to make sure it is not the military-industrial complex and the corporations entwined therein.