EMU Student, Soldier, Photographer

By Jimmy Bates

Ray Bowyer was deployed to Iraq from October 2006 and returned home October 2007.
Bowyer’s unit was in Mosul, Iraq where they ran combat missions and trained Iraq police forces. While deployed Bowyer took pictures as he drove and of his brothers in arms.

Bowyer, 28, has been deployed three times since September 11, 2001 and in Iraq he took pictures using a small point and shoot canon camera. While driving he would click pictures from the vehicle and when he returned after his tour, he did not look at the pictures often.

Towards the end of 2007 he began looking at the pictures and working on them until there was an 11-piece collection now being shown at the Plymouth Coffee Bean at 884 Penniman Ave.
The collection is under the name “Walking is Still Honest” which comes from an album by the band Against Me!.

“I was just listening to them a lot, always been a huge music fan. Some albums define parts of my life and Against Me! I would listen to them before missions, it kind of kept me grounded in my mind, kept me back home” Said Bowyer.

While training the police forces, Bowyer’s unit was out every day. Bowyer said at first they stopped every time they were shot at but it happened so frequently that after a while they only stopped if someone was hit. Bullets did not worry the unit, they were more worried about IEDs on the roads.

IED stands for Improvised Explosive Device, roadside bombs that were disguised at trash or other objects that blow up vehicles. Despite these dangerous conditions, Bowyer took a large number of photographs, many from inside the vehicle he drove.

Bowyer said he did not look at the pictures initially because they brought back bad memories but after a while he began looking at them and now he is sharing them. The series features other troops and local people, culminating in the title piece, Walking is Still Honest, which inspired the show, Bowyer said.

The show will run until May 31st and several of the pictures are for sale.

What Happened to Detroit?

By David N. Smokler

What American city was once called the “Paris of the Midwest” and the “City of Champions" after all its major professional sports teams won championships in a seven month period? What city had the greatest industrial output, the first paved highway, the first freeway and the first shopping center? What city had the best public school system in the nation? You guessed it: Detroit, Michigan. What happened to that great American metropolis now known as the “murder capital?” Automation and computer assisted production have caused jobs to leave Detroit. Most importantly, this new technology has actually replaced human labor, taking away workers jobs, forever.

And what happened to Detroit’s great school system? Let’s be clear, our education system’s basic function is to produce the type of employee that business needs. As science was applied to industrial production and society became more complex, the owners of industry needed educated workers and developed a publicly financed educational system designed to create them. When machines began to replace human labor in the late 1960s and early 1970s, public education became less necessary. Computer-based production limited the employer’s capacity to exploit the labor of workers. The workers were hamstrung in their capacity to sell their ability to work and buy the things that they produced. As a result the whole system of production for profit is fast becoming obsolete. There are fewer and fewer things where the corporations can profitable investments. As a result, they have begun to privatize public services. The public education system in this country is a $750 billion enterprise, ripe fruit in private hands.

In Detroit half the public schools have been ordered closed by the state legislature with 41or more to become “for profit” charters. A two or three-tier system is being created with some students going to elite schools and the rest being educated for low paying or no-paying jobs in the prison industrial complex. Our youth won’t be educated to see through the smoke and mirrors and outright lies of the system or to think and to ask tough questions while making demands that the system can't meet.

Teachers, parents and supporters have been marching and protesting in Detroit and in Lansing the state capital. On May 21st over 10,000 people rallied at the capital to oppose republican governor Snyder’s new tax plan giving corporations huge tax breaks, cutting per pupil funding and taxing senior citizens’ pensions. On May 24th thousands of teachers in 40 communities throughout the state protested drastic changes in the Michigan Public Schools Employees Retirement System.

To promote the corporate agenda, the state is using Emergency Managers to take over schools systems, cities and counties who can eliminate the powers of elected officials. Their agenda is privatization. The Detroit Public Schools have already privatized their security guards, bus drivers and janitors. What is happening in Detroit is just the start of what will happen nationwide.

Our schools are being used to fit the corporate agenda and its insatiable thirst for profit. Isn’t it our duty to recreate the educational system in our image and not in theirs? If computer assisted automation permanently eliminates the need for workers and has the capacity to create abundance for everyone our young people won’t have to do the jobs that we once did. They can truly reach for the stars and let their imaginations be their guide. To achieve this goal we need national legislation to insure that our countries public schools remain public and properly funded. Education is crucial to our entire nation and is recognized throughout the world as a human right. It should not be used to satisfy to the needs of a few people. We must have a national system of educating our children for the 21st century. They have the right to realize their full potential as human beings. Let them fulfill their destiny in the age of electronics to recreate the world so that mankind can finally realize its age old vision of a beloved community on a peaceable planet.

Needed: A grassroots foreign policy to resurrect communities in the U.S. and abroad

By Charles E. Simmons

Following the jubilation over the assassination of Osama bin Laden, America once again will ask whether and when troops will return home from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Even before this event, some Pentagon officials have hinted there may be a long-term military presence in that region, similar to the U.S. presence in South Korea in spite of the fact that that war ended in the mid-1950s. Or consider the fact of U.S. military bases in the Philippines and Guantanamo, Cuba following the U.S. War against Spain in 1898. 

One of the central issues in the current struggles for social justice and peace across the planet is the question of corporate and military globalization led by the U.S. and former colonial Western European nations under the umbrella of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Although this extension of power of the multinational corporations has led to a rapid rise in Wall Street profits and an expanding global wealthy class, it has also resulted in increasing impoverishment and a deterioration of domestic services and benefits among workers, family farmers and the middle classes in both the rich and poor nations. 

As the local middle classes, workers and farmers of the Third World see their resources and rights being stolen with the complicity of local puppet dictators, they often revolt and demand real democracy that benefits the little folk, as we are currently witnessing in the North African nations at this very moment. Some of the oppressed youth from these impacted communities will also turn to various forms of suicidal terrorism, just as many of our youth in the rich nations adopt suicidal behavior. But Americans must also remember the slogans from the freedom fighters in U.S. history, such as Patrick Henry and George Washington, and Nat Turner, who cried, “Give me liberty or give me death!” when challenging the might of colonial Great Britain or southern slave masters. 

In many cases, the muscle of a misguided U.S. military power back up this current expanding economic power of Wall Street and Fleet Street. Hence, Americans can expect a continuing spiral of rebellion followed by the intervention of western military forces under the umbrella of the United Nations and NATO, a coalition of the former European powers that brought us slavery and colonialism. This military foreign policy costs trillions of dollars annually and drains the local domestic budgets for education, housing, community development, infrastructure and security. Combined with the rapid deindustrialization of America, these forces guarantee continuous deepening of poverty, foreclosures, unemployment and environmental degradation in this great land. 

Many supporters of current U.S. foreign policy argue there is no choice given the dangers of the international community, and that war has always been the norm among nations. The old ways, however, cannot continue in this nuclear era of weapons of mass destruction that will leave no survivors. And there are other alternatives. A U.S. grassroots movement must call for a new foreign policy that promotes peace as well as defense by spending an equal amount of the military budget to study sustainable development that will build thriving communities in the poor nations that will allow farmers to grow food for their own consumption and create their own industries to feed, clothe and house their own peoples. This diplomacy will include citizen-to-citizen relationships among cultural workers and non-governmental organizations from ordinary people across the nation to discuss mutual interests and needs. It will also expand the student exchanges so that youth will develop a sense of international as well as local justice and humanity. The cost of this foreign and military policy will be half what it is today, and the human cost in the short and long term will decline tremendously. 

So let our jubilation turn from assassinations to a new future for our cities and family farms, our environment and the health of the planet. 

Copyright Charles E. Simmons 

Professor Simmons teaches Journalism and Media Law at Eastern Michigan University and is Co-Director of The Hush House Black Community Museum and Leadership Training Institute for Human Rights. Charles.simmons@emich.edu.