Rep. Kathryn Bowers

Dear Friends,

If you were looking for empowerment, you now have it. This year, women will do the electing.

Men will go to the polls, but it is the women’s vote that will carry the day.

Even though the absence of a foreign threat has lulled the electorate and the candidates into a false sense of security, women know that peace and security issues demand attention: to stop gun violence, end senseless violence against women, and create economic and health security.

Between now and election day — November 7, we have a further responsibility. We must ask all candidates how they will make the world safer. Will they stop selling weapons to dangerous countries and making other coun-tries poorer because they waste money on our arms sales? Will they create methods to inter-vene in foreign conflicts without military intervention? Will they work to eliminate the most violent of all weapons, the nuclear ones poised on hair-trigger alert?

And will they stop lavishing money on the military industrial complex at the expense of many unmet domestic human and environmen-tal needs? Including paying our military personnel a living wage? We are the military might of the world, but we still have poverty, illiteracy, massive drug abuse, a nightmare of an environmental legacy from nuclear weapons, and homelessness.

Women will vote in larger numbers than men. We need to ask the right questions and encourage others to vote. Remember, had one less person per precinct not voted for JFK, he would not have been president. Every vote counts.

Peace,

Kathryn I. Bowers, State Representative, Tennessee
WAND President