Vonnegut's Civics Lesson: The Cost of War (With Update)

I was taught in the sixth grade that we had a standing army of just over a hundred thousand men and that the generals had nothing to say about what was done in Washington. I was taught to be proud of that and to pity Europe for having more than a million men under arms and spending all their money on airplanes and tanks. I simply never unlearned junior civics. I still believe in it. I got a very good grade.

Kurt Vonnegut (1971)

(graphic: Salagram.net)

How can we fathom the amount that is spent on warfare and arms? How can we help others make the connections between this skewed ratio and the problems we face in our economy? How can we prove that "the war" and "the economy" are not really "apples and oranges" that candidates can rank, rather than integrally related? How can we break through the mainstream media screen, to start some public dialogue, and do it on a shoe string?

Having just come from Mexico, I am thinking of the visual media that were used, over time, to "educate" as well as "convert" people. Some of the "art" in certain churches, as in the UNESCO site Atotonilco, was aimed at those who were not literate. Modern educational displays are still seen in churches (particularly against drugs, abortion, certain rock music) and murals in the public buildings (antiwar, having known war, or pro-labor, having had revolution.) For two beloved muralists, see Orozco and Diego Rivera. The mural shown below is Orozco's "Gods of the Modern World," painted in 1932.

Today, in our own culture, we hear of "sound bites" and the need for political messages that can be "reduced to a bumper sticker." Fast food menus are shown as pictures, with less of a cognitive load and to assure comprehension without the requirement of much reading of text. Corporations and news agencies spend big dollars to produce quickly absorbed and powerful messages.

How can we use this concept of graphic and potent visual education at the grassroots, such as to teach about the unfathomable economic (not to mention moral) cost of war? There is a local guy who appears at every street fair and spends the whole day educating people about the cost of war. He uses pie charts, spinners and a street barker approach, with "contests." Ben Cohen's political org True Majority has used stacked Oreos as well as pens with pullout charts, to educate people using quickly-digested visuals. True Majority's pie chart is shown below, along with the Oreo video. (CLICK ON THE OREO GRAPHIC, which will take you to the video.) Links and codes are provided on the site, to encourage people to educate others as to the enormous costs of war.

Since 2002, my friend Bert and I have amassed thousands of images from antiwar rallies and the like. Among them are many examples of graphic educational devices, to put war and violence into perspective, such as posters with the number of war dead, the relative costs etc. Karen has been involved in the Fear Up productions and other actions which "wake people up" and let them know what's really going on. Backbone Campaign started locally and now has the graphics, such as huge puppets of political figures, to be able to use them all over the country. Similarly, the many "art vehicles" that have travelled the country, often with travelling displays inside, educate everyone they can.

"Necessity is the mother of invention." Signs with numbers of the dead, posters showing misprioritized assets (with profits ahead of people), certain YouTube videos, blog entries, homemade documentaries, street graphics, T-shirt messages - these can all be examples of populist-driven education. The general idea is that people be "taught something they didn't know," as my son learned a few years back in a Journalism class on persuasion.