The War Planes Sleep at Home
I bike back drunk from the bar. Too early in the year to do it comfortably, the cold stings my hands as I pedal down the path. The street lamps illuminate my way ahead, dead gardens and weeds by my side. I see the headlight of a train far down the tracks. Then I hear it.
Distant and coming closer, the roar of the jets drown out the rest of the world. My hands are on the bike and I can't cover my ears. When the sound of one fades, another comes in. The horn of the train joins the cacophony and for a moment I feel like my head is going to split. I lock my bike and go into the house, shut the door behind me. But I can still hear it through the walls.
They take off more often now. It gets louder every day.
According to a 2025 Dane County Regional Airports sound study, 1250 homes near the airport will be considered incompatible with residential use by 2027. The state of Wisconsin sued the Department of Defense for restitution to sound proof the homes of those most affected. The Pentagon flatly denied the application without explanation.
In a city already mired in a housing crisis, that level of displacement is unthinkable. It is not the rich and those with the resources to move that will be the most affected. In the path of the planes: a day care, a trailer park, low income housing, the community college, an elementary school.
Bringing the jets to the city was a bi-partisan project. A "gift" bestowed upon us by the US military.
It is not like a normal passenger jet. Inside a building the sound reverberates through the walls and is impossible to ignore. Outside, the din is all consuming, truly awful. It makes you quaver when you think that for many people, this is the last thing they hear in this world before being buried under a mountain of rubble. You live with this reminder, multiple times a day the planes fly by screaming murder.
They're just test flights, you tell yourself.
It's impossible to separate loathing for the planes from a feeling of hypocrisy. The military says it's for our defense, but that's not the whole truth. If anything, we're now more of a target than we were before. To call it an occupation would elide the fact that this is for us. These overpriced machines and their operators may annoy the city folk, but they bring prosperity to the nation. What they take by force becomes ours in time. Even as they deafen our children and poison the very ground underneath. That's the trade being made.
Years before the F-35s arrival, Madison's anti-war and environmentalist protestors made the F-35s a major political issue. You can still see many of the protest lawn signs around the city. Three years later, just a blip on the political landscape. Instead we have the No Kings, supposedly anti-fascist rallies wrapped in the flag of patriotism and nationalism. Fighting for a more rational, representative empire.
The siblings of the jets that live in Truax Field are the ones being used to bombard Gaza as we speak. Maybe the very same ones are bombing schools in Iran. We don't know.
The United State's illegal war on Iran brings all of this into stark relief. One gets the impression that many in the government are less against the war in concept and more against the way it is being conducted. Behind President Trump's arrogance is decades of American aggression. His insanity is novel, one supposes.
The people of Iran, Lebanon, and Palestine are disposable in the quest to maintain US dominance and prestige in the Middle East. As much as we might wish otherwise, that status is what enables us to live our lives. It keeps the gas cheap. It keeps the dollar strong and the economy going. Maybe anti-war activism has lost its luster among many liberals because they don't want things to change. Maybe the bloodshed and horror is too great to look straight in the eye.
University of Wisconsin is the heart of Madison, the engine that moves the city. Like it or not, the university is the reason why Madison has the reputation it does. Their money and influence is inextricable from our daily lives. The university is supposed to be a place of learning and academic freedom, the liberal bastion that Wisconsin conservatives despise. Of course, this same institution that is so invested in Israel and the Zionist project that it chose to sic the cops on its own students and faculty for the crime of occupying campus property. For many students, their formative academic experience is now watching their own peers being beaten and punished for exercising their freedom of speech.
A clarifying moment.
Three years after the encampments, the writing is on the wall and the rest of the country is starting to understand what those students were attacked, arrested, and expelled for: Israel is committing genocide and the United States is helping it do so.
We hold responsibility for these crimes. This is us. Our money pays for the planes, our tacit consent gives them power. They live down the street. We cannot close our eyes and cover our ears forever. One day the planes will come home. *