Let’s check the time: It’s autumn in 2018. That means we’ve been waging war in Afghanistan and Iraq for more than 15 years with trillions of dollars of borrowed money. Syria has been consumed by civil war, chemical attacks, and strife for most of the decade, and we still don’t have a good idea how or when this ends. (Hat tip to BBC News for the explainer article “Why Is There a War in Syria?” last month. Last month!) Meantime, Russian tanks have rolled across the Great European Plain to the Ukraine, taking Crimea. Lately the leaders of North Korea and our own nation either pledge to blow one another to bits or to kiss each other’s behinds with every confusing news cycle.
So armed conflict and militarism and exceptionalist macho bluster in our modern era, by current measures, seem to be the most awful, misguided, and messed-up thing you can do. It makes me wonder, why celebrate the instruments of death and destruction? For like a week?
San Francisco’s Fleet Week is a creepy, retrograde event and it’s high time to take everything that goes into it and start over.
I’m not looking to spoil the party (actually a little, more on that in a moment), but consider the upside. We’ve had decades of disinvestment in health, education, transportation, the whole lot of it, and now the foundations of local, state, and national society need fixing as the military budget “inches closer to $1 trillion” year after year after year. What an incredible opportunity! Let’s tap all the power and talent of people serving our country by recasting Fleet Week as Civic Week, with funded and committed campaigns and programming to give back and contribute to the broader benefit.
I mean, there’s already a serious amount of work going into Fleet Week — moving all the set pieces, organizing the tours, exhibits, and festivities with their accompanying security details, food and sanitation services, you name it. This is sucking up tons more time, energy, and effort than granting housing vouchers for homeless SF veterans. We’re talking a total of 21 vouchers in the city proper, nowhere near remotely adequate to the need.
I’m not balking at the event costs or the discomfiting noise, though both are sizable. I realize that this week’s series of activities honor our armed forces and the individuals in uniform. I realize there are a crop of eager sponsors and partners. It brings our city millions of dollars in business. Yes, patriotic displays go down easier than marshaling resources to clean and beautify our neighborhoods. Apparently it makes kids happy, and as a parent I realize we find family entertainment wherever we can get it. I also think planes are really cool. It’s that Fleet Week makes us look away — up, and not down at our streets, parks, and districts.
Aren’t we able to imagine what our military can accomplish in, for example, emergency housing or medical care and rehabilitation services for the homeless and addicted? We’re incredibly good at planning and logistics and staffing these kinds of things, fast. We can and must do better for the people and places where we live.
There is constant hand-wringing about how San Francisco is a filthy city that is in a crisis of one kind or another: garbage, poop, and needles being the evidence of our failure to house and care for folks who need help. Gazing at tight and graceful aerial choreography courtesy of the Blue Angels is, at best, a sort of annual analgesic and empty sanctimony at worst.
Besides, what are we watching and enjoying during Fleet Week? “We have the fastest, baddest, bombiest planes!” This is perhaps as much as what we can expect from the Pentagon, busy with its $1.5 trillion F-35 program. Certainly we can think bigger than using combat ships as backdrops for selfies. (“I’m On a Boat!” isn’t just hip-hop parody.) Setting egregious defense spending aside for gadflies and late-night comics, we’re dealing with the machinery of indiscriminate killing here, nothing else. These weapons systems were the Big Tech of another day, so I grant that they were thrilling to see. But they should no longer be thought of as wholesome fun.
Our age of Trump is a national reoccurrence of prejudice and stratification, full of hostility to differing views and runaway paranoia about ridiculous conspiracies. Our infrastructure crumbles and our communities rot from neglect and decay. We have so much to build and rebuild, and so much wealth and potential to tap and redirect. Let the Blue Angels buzz over the bay if people believe they should, but have Fleet Week turn into Civic Week — a citywide project to engage people with the streets, sidewalks, and spaces right at their feet, and contribute, improve, and repair the San Francisco right outside their doors.
Now is the time for a better generation of tools, not weapons, for deployments in the same theaters we call home. Members of our military at Fleet Week, we salute you. We’ll need your bold leadership to begin anew.
Follow Anthony Lazarus on Twitter: @Sr_Lazarus
