Consider the story of Leah Bolger, the latest American hero up on trial:
She is a young female artist in the Midwest. She joins the Navy at 22, is made commander and serves two decades as an anti-submarine warfare specialist. After retiring she joins Veterans for Peace and becomes the organization’s first female president. Then, in October of 2011, she commits the crime of interrupting a public congressional hearing of the Super Committee to deliver a message from the 99 percent: End the wars and tax the rich to fix the deficit.
Because of her 45-second transgression, Commander Bolger now faces a court trial this Thursday morning, April 12, where she could receive a maximum jail sentence of six months. Bolger, 54, intends to plead guilty and use her court appearance to draw the connection between America’s deficit debacle and the three-quarters-of-a-trillion-dollar defense budget we, as voting taxpayers, spend as a base-mark for failed and unending military ventures overseas.
Bolger has no illusions about what Americans are up against: a corporate-run military machine that she says “is so big and complicated and intertwined with the government and Congress and the media that I don’t know where you can start unraveling the knot.” But one place to begin is with the Occupy movement, which she says has placed too little emphasis on ending America’s wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.
She feels, so far, that Occupy is “all about corporate rule and the 99 percent, with the 1 percent controlling everything. But I don’t see very many people talking about the war and the killing machine and the military industrial complex being a major contributor to this disparity between the rich and the poor.”
A “moment of epiphany”
Bolger grew up in the Kansas City area and majored in fine arts at Central Missouri State University. When she failed to get into grad school, she joined the Navy for the simple reason that she needed a job. Bolger knew she wasn’t a typical naval officer and that, in a sense, she “never really fit in.” While studying at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, RI, where she eventually became the deputy dean of students, she wrote papers on conflict termination and the importance of the United Nations, putting her “on the other side of what most people were talking about.”
“I had no intention of sticking around for 20 years,” Bolger recalls. In the 1980s, women still weren’t even allowed to work on Navy combat ships or aircraft. Yet as a commander — equivalent to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Army — and a specialist in anti-submarine warfare, Bolger’s skills led her on what she considered “exciting” missions around the world, from Iceland and Bermuda to Japan and Tunisia.
Despite all the experience, though, Bolger says she remained “naïve and ignorant about foreign policy and about what the military does. It was easy to be in for 20 years and not have to make any moral decision. I never had to shoot at anybody or launch any weapons. I never had to see the damage caused by what I was doing. And I did not have to confront the politics or the morality of what the American military machine is.”
Until later, when she did just that.
After retiring from the Navy, Bolger married and lived a traveling life on a sailboat, then in an RV, before she and her husband settled in Oregon in 2004. She began working in the peace movement soon after and, in March of 2005, attended an exhibit of the American Friends Service Committee called “Eyes Wide Open,” where she had a “moment of epiphany.”
“There was a pair of army boots for every soldier that’s been killed [since the wars began in 2001] with tags on the boots showing their names and where they’re from, boots lined up in even straight rows,” she recalls. “It wasn’t just looking at American deaths, but Iraqis too, on large posters. I just remember it affecting me viscerally, the feeling in my stomach — it was a kick in the gut when I saw that. It really, really hit me.”
By then Bolger was a member of Veterans for Peace, the St. Louis, Mo.-based organization founded by 10 U.S. veterans in 1985, which today has more than 100 chapters nationwide. She initiated a chapter in her city of Corvalis and served as the president for three years before she was elected vice president of the national organization.
When the Occupy movement got underway last fall, Bolger moved into the peace activist camp at Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C. Then, on Oct. 26, at a public congressional hearing of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction — the unelected Super Committee that ultimately failed to produce any results for their labors — Bolger walked calmly to the front of the room where she denounced the hearing, and its “obfuscating” testimony from Congressional Budget Office Director Doug Elmendorf, as unrepresentative of what the majority of Americans wants: to end the wars and tax the rich.
During the Super Committee hearings, Occupy D.C. and the October 2011 movement produced its own Occupied Super Committee hearing, which aired on C-SPAN, revealing that cuts to military spending and increased taxes on the super-rich would achieve President Obama’s and Congress’s 10-year deficit targets in two years, while funding a jobs program, forgiving student debt and securing vital social programs.
“We tell Congress, our representatives, ‘No, we don’t want our money spent that way,’ but they’re not listening to us. They’re only listening to their corporate lobbyists, to their campaign donors,” says Bolger. This is why, she believes, “it takes breaking the law, making a spectacle to interrupt a congressional hearing in order for some attention to be paid to the average person’s voice. So that’s what I did.”
Stepping outside the comfort zone
On Thursday, a press conference will be held at 8:30 a.m. in front of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, located at 500 Indiana Ave NW, Washington, D.C., prior to Bolger’s court appearance.
Aside from receiving media support from Michael Moore, Ben Cohen and Roseanne Barr, Bolger’s case has caught the attention of consumer advocate and former Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader. “Bolger showed what active citizens should be doing peacefully — confronting the corruption head on,” said Nader, “and making sure the public knows what is really going on.”
For Bolger, whether she gets charged criminally or not, it is the act of speaking up — challenging the belief that America’s corporate-controlled government can continue to indefinitely squander the nation’s human and economic capital — that she hopes to see replicated in others.
“We have to reclaim our voices, we have to demand to be heard,” she says. “The energy and the outrage and the righteousness of the Occupy movement [needs] to latch on to the war problem — for us to understand the connection and talk about it.” Bolger urges people to find “the motivation to step outside their comfort zone a little bit.”
“If they’re comfortable writing letters to the editor, maybe they can go stand at a protest. I know most people can’t take off work or fly to D.C. — they have children, responsibilities, they have to work. But I want to push people to find the courage and the strength to stand up and be a part of the resistance to our government. When I do something like this and I hear from thousands of people who write and say thank you, it makes me feel like I’m part of a big movement. We all are. We all have to amplify each other’s voices and find courage in each other’s voices.”
And for Bolger, presenting the raw numbers — the facts — is the place to start.
“This is how you make the connections: Let people see in their own communities what is being funded when Congress and the Super Committee are trying to find $1.3 trillion and the Republicans want to cut Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security and the Democrats want to raise taxes. There’s no reason why we should have to cut anything. We should be slashing the military budget.”
It’s been said since the fall that the Occupy movement lacks demands. What Bolger, through her actions, has shown is that the people themselves, rather than profits, must become the demand.
“We have the power,” she says, “we just have to reclaim it.”
This article appears through a collaboration with Occupy.com and was jointly published there.
Bolger’s actions are inspirational. I hope she has made an impact on more of the middle class. I’ve been involved with Occupy and numerous other activist groups and trying to get more people involved in any one of the 99% objectives. It seems that many middle class people are too comfortable and don’t see the need.
I, too, thank Ms Bolger for her act. I’ve been wondering what I can do. I have stood at protests, but I wanna get in and mix it up a bit. I’ve written editorials. I’ve commented. I still don’t feel like I’ve moved much government. I am certain that I will find some leverage if I just keep pushing at it.
I share much of this action abovewho fully believe that we each can reach out to learn and do as much as possible. For me it is in deciding what are the most focused important actions that I personally can contribute. Also, I have been thinking about how we are UNIFYING and how we can get to doing actions fully UNITED. I think about what impact we could have if all the organizations unite more fully than is being attempted by the 99% Spring this week. How can we together accelerate this process? This is where my ideas are right now. All good points made by other comments here. Peace
Leah Bolger hit the nail on the head with the cost of war and the rich not paying their due. But she did miss on one thing. The massive costs of prisons for minor crimes, such as up to 30 years for having too much Meth in ones possession. Murder in many cases rates a small time compared to drugs, esp. when it involves the poor man drugs such as crack and meth.
This story about Leah Bolger, like the one in OWSJ on Sgt Shamar Thomas gives an inside perspective on what seems our immoveable, too-big-to-fail military machine. Each time there’s a revelation from a Bolger and Thomas, it’s a chance to protest their privilege of knowing everything, of being unassailable–which they’re not. Keep publishing these pieces.
Start to unravel the knot? How about just throw the damn thing in the trash and start with a new rope/string/thread.
Another thing that stands out is the fact that it is not 1% and 99%. The 99% expands with the UNACCOUNTABLE status given to the law makers, the law enforcers and the law judges. The power of the UNACCOUNTABLE status lets them commit crimes, just so long as it’s not a crime against the UNACCOUNTABLE. This makes them slaves to the 1%. This reduces the 99% to a much lower number.
The deterioration of our government and Constitution is becoming daily clearer as we watch the turn toward fascism with the repeal of the posse comitatus act (prohibition on the use of the military for civilian police work), the destruction of the Fourth Amendment (now allowing almost unlimited surveillance and intrusion), and the incredible sophistries of Supreme Court decisions that oppose consumer interests and not only empower corporations, but also empower corporate cheating, lying, and swindling. The expansion of “fracking” to release resources of natural gas (without first securing adequate means of decontamination of the soil and groundwater that will certainly result), and of contamination of food with genetically modified organisms (whose nuclear material is not organically related to their cytoplasm and mitochondrial RNA/DNA) are symptoms of the process. In making corporations persons, the Supreme Court abdicated its responsibility to replace the monarch who in the prior English system had been the source of authority for corporate charters. This set us on the road to the currently evolving fascism and rule by a tiny corporate oligarchy.
Mr. Lawrence, you stated the facts most appropriately. Thank you…and peace….and a reminder to all of us…P-s-s-t….DO SOMETHING! We shall, each of us find our voices, and with courage, speak truth to power. The time has come.
Oh…one more note, fracking is why Oklahoma had an earthquake with aftershocks, a while back.
One of my favorite memories of seeing Bolger at work was after an action in the early days of the Freedom Plaza occupation. A Vets for Peace action at the White House went a bit awry, and she led a debriefing meeting afterward. It was so cool seeing her and a bunch of vets use their military mindset, their mission-centeredness, their strategic wisdom and applying it to nonviolent tactics. When war is abolished and armies are disarmed, I hope that the sense of discipline that is to be found in militaries can be somehow preserved! Bolger’s witness certainly makes me think it can be.
Thank you for supporting her courageous act. But please do not call it a “defense” budget; that is simply flat out factually incorrect. It is not for defense.
Less critical but relevant, is that it’s closer to 900+ billion counting various types of military spending. I do not think they are even including the CIA/DIA budgets, which are almost entirely military/empire related and have been declassified as 80billion (see “Overall U.S. intelligence budget tops $80 billion”) in
latimes website.
That would put us at pretty close to a round 1 Trillion dollars per year on militarism (this still does not include healthcare costs from wounded returning vets, nor, I believe, the part of the interest on national debt that is from past military spending)
See here: http://economicdemocracy.org/images/900billion-militarydefense.us-spending-2001-2011.png
Commander Leah Bolger: Thank you so much for your exemplary example that all people for peace, including OWS, need to be doing–pointing out that the military idustrial complex is the cause of 1.) the indebtedness of the US; 2.)unqualifiable damage to human being; 3.) the destruction of the earth; 4.) that our government has been lying to us for generations; 5.) has downplayed and justified war; and 6.)has hidden from the population the real intent (greed and colonialization of the world, particularly the world’s resources.) You are indeed a brave woman, whose actions teach us so much.
Many thanks to her and all who honor her and act in her honor! May there be a thousand fold more of us as a result of this American citizen who made great use of her Constitutional right in a participatory government. In the words of our founding fathers/mothers, speaking out is not only a right but an expectation in such a context.
I am glad to find people who know what is happening The Catholic Church has blurred the real issues and appears to want poor, lots of kids, Catholics. Some people are looking for a perfect candidate there will not be a perfect person. Let us not put in who got us here. Think middle class it is about jobs, homeless, corruption in America to the highest justices in our land.