The diaries about our sad state of infrastructure even as we spend hundreds of billions of dollars in Iraq reminded me of President Eisenhower's 1953 "cross of iron" speech. Eisenhower became famous as the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II and though he was president during the Cold War, his warning against the military-industrial complex sounds just as prescient today as it did almost 50 years ago. However, Eisenhower's lasting accomplishment is the interstate highway system. Has any infrastructure project done so much to change America?
Below the fold is an excerpt from Ike's "cross of iron" speech. Its sad that it took a 5 star general to recognize that spending money on war means spending lives at home.
And when you drive home tonight on an interstate Eisenhower built, remember the plaque on architect Christopher Wren's tomb in St. Paul's Cathedral, "If you seek his monument, look around you".
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms in not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
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