Do you ever get the feeling that you are being held hostage? That there's a 'protection racket' that takes your money, ostensibly to keep you safe, but in actuality to extort huge amounts of money from you?
We've just spent over a trillion dollars on this racket; and it isn't keeping me safe. I don't know if you feel safer knowing that the current unwinnable wars are sapping our budget and claiming lives, as well as costing us the world's good will, but it doesn't make me feel safer.
I doubt that the people of Israel feel safer either, even with their huge military expenditure.
It is said that doing the same thing and expecting a different result is a definition of insanity; I want to stop the insanity.
I have been sold the notion that the wars that we are fighting and the defense establisment that we support, to the tune of several trillion dollars in this decade alone, keeps us 'safe'.
Are we really safe? Is any country, Israel included, 'safe' due to an outsized 'defense' industry? If we're so 'safe', why didn't this huge war machine stop 9-11?
I'm really tired of this game. I want to change it. NOW!
For a real view of what 'defense' is, I turn to the words of Deganawida, a prophet of the native American people. His view of defense is summed up in the third of the three great double ideals upon which the Six Nations confederacy was founded.
"Military power for self defense only, coupled with maintenance and increase of spiritual power"
A good example, in my mind, comes from Switzerland; this is a country that managed to remain neutral and was not attacked in several great wars.
Certainly a part of this is the geographical situation; it's hard to get in the door if the Swiss don't want you to.
But another part of this is the fact that the Swiss have some strong ideals, among which is a universal draft. I spent some time in Swiss schools, and from what I remember, one of the people that signed the high school diploma was an army officer, and that officer put the day that you were supposed to report to basic training, in the summer that you graduated, under his signature.
Now a universal draft has several effects;
A- everyone gets trained to defend the country.
B- everyone goes to war in one way or another.
C- The armed services are a true cross section of the population.
This means that if the country goes to war, everyone feels the pain and shares the responsibility.
It's pretty obvious that the armed services in the USA have become, since the abolishing of the draft, anything but a cross-section of the population. This puts the onus of military service on lower-income people, because they have an incentive to enlist that higher-income people do not.
But there's another reason that people want to avoid serving, a more important one, and that is that in their hearts, they know that the wars being fought are not righteous wars.
We know full well that Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan are not righteous wars, and the proof is that they not only do not accomplish their goal, which is ostensibly "Exporting democracy", but that they end up being useless. Useless, that is, to those of us who are not involved in war profiteering. Those who profit, including companies such as Halliburton and Blackwater among others, do very well from the profits of war while not incurring a lot of risk to life and limb. And these multi-national companies profit from BOTH SIDES of the conflict. They DO NOT feel the pain of the conflict, but they get the profit.
At OUR expense.
And the hidden costs bring the expense considerably higher that the one trillion that we have wasted already on our latest wars. We are feeling that waste now.
Somehow, I don't feel safer. Do you?
I believe it's time for us as a nation and as a world to look into a different way of resolving conflict; one that WORKS.
Thank you.