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Fact: Since planting its first American flag on Boston soil in 1776, the United States has been at war, domestic and externally, during every single decade with the exception of the 1830s.
Let that statement sink in, and then allow its implications to wash over you before pondering the number of lives lost to the sum total of all those wars or the nearly incalculable sum of money we've spent on war in nearly 250 years as a nation (if you must know, the total, adjusted for modern dollars, is $8,695,112,000,000--$8.6 Trillion).
Though we comprise just 4.5 percent of the entire world's population, we spend 39% of the world's annual military budget.
I have a simple question: why do we fight? If we can't answer that question critically and clearly as a society, then I fear we have no reason to believe the next 230 years will look much different than the preceding 230.
Do wars result from the vestigial behaviors of our evolutionary past? Do we fight because doing so achieves swifter outcomes than does diplomacy? Do we do so because our weapons and our war tactics are more advanced relative to our political skill sets? Or is it that we view democracy as a necessarily bloody oasis between stasis and revolution?
Whatever the answer is, wars carry consequences. Sometimes those consequences lead to increased socioeconomic opportunities (for some), strengthened economies for the winners, and technological leaps that help us address our non-martial needs as a world. The consequences can also lead to unfortunate side effects: the GI Bill, for instance, created an instant (white) middle class, in turn generating a carefully advertised and insatiable thirst for consumerism. Flush with cash to spend on an American Dream predicated on material possessions and the accumulation of wealth, post-war baby boomers became willing participants in an economically unexamined way of life that eventually strained our planet to its limits. In fact, we are now more mobilized for war than we were before, during, or immediately after the second World War. That a mid-century war of moral necessity created a class of winners who instead of applying its lessons to shape a better, more war-averse world chose to spend its spoils on the accumulation of material excess and to position itself for military perpetuity speaks to something we would do well to explore as a society.
President Obama catches a lot of flak around here for not doing enough to end certain wars or close certain prisons on the one hand and for expanding drone military operations on the other. Yet in looking at our trajectory as a society--the number of wars we've sparked or participated in, the investments we've made in ensuring military dominance, the ongoing commitment to spend far more money on weapons and defense systems than we do on education or political innovations--our addiction to war goes back to our very beginnings. One would hope that it does not also someday lead us to our very end.