On Thursday evening, co-sponsors Amnesty International, Americans for Informed Democracy (AID), the Office of Residential Life, and the Boston College chapter of No More Victims (NMV) teamed up to present a controversial panel entitled "The Human Cost of War."
The panel featured Rev. Raymond Helmick from the theology department, Paul Marcus from the philosophy department, Sandra Sandiford Young, the associate director of African and African Diaspora Studies, and Michael Chapman from the history department.
Kira Suyeishi, an executive board member of Amnesty International and A&S '08, said the panelists were chosen for their diverse views in hopes of pinpointing and discussing some of the multiple interpretations of what "the human cost of war" can mean. She said that beyond having an opportunity to raise awareness and money for the "No More Victims" cause, the panel was a healthy way of facilitating a forum to discuss how "innocent civilians are affected by war," a subject often ignored by the press and American public.
Marcus explained during his segment that one of the largest problems in evaluating a "human cost" of war is that the everyday civilian has no sense of the actual amount of money that the government spends while in a state of war. According to the National Priorities Project, over $469 billion has been spent to date in Iraq.
"When we're talking about that kind of money, think about what we're not doing with it," he said.
But it is not only the fiscal sense of the word that Americans fail to comprehend as the "cost" of war. Marcus said the everyday citizen is ignorant about the effects of war on the environment as well.
"We don't talk about the global environmental impacts of militarism," Marcus said. "The U.S. military is the No. 1 polluter in the U.S. … [it] produces a ton of toxic pollution a minute, or 500,000 tons annually. [And the military is] the largest consumer of energy. When you see a jet take off in an aircraft carrier, in less than an hour it uses more gas than an average citizen uses in two years in their car."
2008 Woodie Awards
