Open Mic: A Weapons Factory in Healdsburg?

By Ian McKee

As a lifelong resident of Sonoma County, I consider myself lucky to live in a place like this. I have unending gratitude for the beauty of the world around me—the gold, ruby-crowned kinglets with their sweet songs, the elusive, keen-eyed green heron observing its muddy lakeshore. I’m excitedly anticipating the coming months, when glorious fungi of all types will emerge from tree trunks and mycelium networks hidden in the earth. I’m enthralled by the rolling hills of Sonoma Valley, and am thrilled to live less than an hour from the coast and only 20 minutes from a … weapons manufacturer?

Recently, I was shocked to learn that a General Dynamics factory exists right here in Sonoma County. This is a factory that creates technology for the 2,000-pound bombs that have repeatedly been dropped on thousands of civilians in Gaza, as well as technology used to surveil our southern border. I expect that for many of my neighbors the existence of this factory will also come as a shock. They might also be surprised to learn that engineers from this factory give presentations to students in STEM classes around the county, which in my opinion represents a chilling normalization of the violence that this factory inflicts on defenseless people around the world.

Violence meted out to poor and defenseless people is something I am personally familiar with as someone who endured homelessness for many years in this county. Violence against the unhoused population is nothing new to Sonoma County, and recently it has gotten even worse. I myself have suffered harassment at the hands of police, being told under threat of arrest or assault to move along even when I had nowhere to go.

When I look at a company like General Dynamics—one that exports these weapons for the purported sake of “national security”—I can’t help but think of how many people I know who’ve passed away on the street and wonder how much more “secure” they would have felt if they had shelter from the elements and food to eat. I think of how, in the richest country in the world, we spend billions on brutally banishing the homeless from society instead of housing them. I think of how, according to HUD, it would take $20 billion dollars to house everyone currently living without shelter—and how the United States spent $820 billion on its military just in 2023  alone.

This obscene reality is the price we pay when we invite weapons manufacturers into our own backyard.

But does a violent, reckless company like General Dynamics really belong here? Is a company that manufactures tools to enact violence at the border, violence overseas, violence against its workers with an unsafe working environment, and violence against our communities by normalizing war and destruction really welcome in Sonoma County?

Does a company that took in record profits of $11.7 billion dollars during the third quarter of 2024—profits that are  directly linked to the ongoing genocide in Gaza—have a place in our backyard? In the place that goes so far toward defining who we are as individuals and as a community? I would say absolutely not.

Today, as I shelter from the rain in my own house, without the threat of police and public harassment, I think of everything that General Dynamics is taking from us all. I think, too, of the world I want to be a part of; a world where nobody has to suffer in the cold and rain on the streets because our government, and we as a society, prioritize enacting violence at the border. I think of a world where no factory worker has to die in an explosion at a missile factory, because no such factories any longer exist.

And I dream of a world where the millions of men, women and children who became casualties of war are still alive—still laughing, dancing, singing,  creating, learning and growing without the threat of bombs raining down on them. Bombs made right here in Sonoma County.

Ian McKee is a Santa Rosa resident.