Ever since I was born, I have witnessed the U.S. going to war again and again. Young soldiers and their weapons being sent by old men to fight --Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Syria. We buck up the fighters' families by collectively putting on blinders and telling ourselves that our sons and daughters are up against a foe whom we must defeat for our freedom and liberty.
Our heroic status as a nation, as the saviors of democratic Europe in WWII, seems to have intoxicated us for the seventy years since. How else can we carry on justifying so much carnage? Ike was right: beware the military-industrial complex. All the men who make money producing obscene numbers of weapons and all the lads trained to deploy them, all have been spoon-fed the idea that military service is noble, no matter what.
And what about the people who have been on the receiving end of so much fire power? Can we really swallow the sickly self-serving narrative that we will ever be met as liberators, as examples of success, as the paragon of right over evil? Surely it can't be hard to imagine how we appear to the poor and downtrodden, how we are producing hatred everywhere we go? People are not born wanting to lay down their lives in order to bring terror and destruction to "the enemy." To justify the cruise missiles, the drones and the bombs, we carry on making ourselves believe that these people so far away are indeed our enemies, feeding the vicious cycle of killing and hate in the name of protecting ourselves.
Of course we must take care. We must be clever and we must be thorough. That's called using our intelligence, in all senses of the word. But, dear Reader, in your heart of hearts, can you not imagine a world in which a nation such as ours can support education, self-sustaining economies, and the elimination of world hunger? With the resources we've used over my lifetime to feed our war hunger, we could have solved the energy crisis, the education deficit, the healthcare shortage and so much more many times over. But that would mean walking the walk, that walk we're so good at talking about, that walk of compassion and peace.
I have always so admired President Obama's striving for peace, attempting to use diplomacy before resorting to what must always be the very last resort. Our stars and stripes will never give us a free pass to start war after war. I don't have any easy answers about What do we do next? But if our representatives in Congress don't have the guts to even debate the issue, if their re-election is more important than our lives, here and overseas, then they are not representing anything except their pride and their bank accounts.
My own feelings of sorrow and isolation are my own to deal with. Since money is speech these days, and I haven't got much to spare, I need to get out and find my sisters and brothers who still feel that peace and freedom are not compatible with ignorance and blind patriotism. We cannot ever bomb away evil. We can only destroy human life with our incredibly huge stockpiles of weaponry. We cannot make peace with war.
All my fellow citizens who've swallowed the lie and have gone off to war in order to make our world a better or a safer or a more righteous place, all of the soldiers and sailors and pilots who've "seen action" will never be the same. They will or they won't come home. When they do make it back, they are forever changed. And we don't want to deal with that reality either, so we leave it to Veteran's Affairs or some other disembodied idea that will help us forget what we keep on doing. Doing because we can. Doing because itchy trigger fingers need their triggers, while the old men at home get rich providing more triggers than we can ever imagine.
I'd better stop. The choir is getting restless, uncomfortable. I've had my say. For today. Thank you from my heart for listening.