Normally, when one develops all the symptoms of a disease, the response ought not to be exacerbating the disease, but seeking to cure it. Approaches to healthcare in the United States have gone off the rails, of course, but think about the disease of military spending.
What are some of the symptoms we've suffered recently? Wars, bombings, threats of wars, kidnappings of foreign presidents, arming of distant genocides, attempts to take over or control various countries, hatred, resentment, terrorism, wounded veterans, militarized police, militarized culture, militarized borders, militarized occupations of U.S. cities by masked thugs who might shoot you in the face, erosion of the rule of law, corruption of morality, environmental devastation, mass homelessness and refugee crises, endangerment of public safety, impoverishment, loss of civil liberties, exacerbation of bigotry and xenophobia, insuperable impediments to urgently needed international cooperation, and the greatest risk we've ever had of nuclear apocalypse.
And what we've lost by not spending even some fraction of the trillion-dollar military budget on useful things has caused more deaths and more injuries than those directly caused by the militarism. Spending on wars means not spending on the environment, on education, on healthcare, on housing, on transportation, on infrastructure -- and that means death and suffering on a massive scale.
The United States government spends by far the most money in the world on its military. Even ICE, it's domestic paramilitary, costs more than the military of most countries. Adding another half trillion to the trillion-dollar annual military budget is unspeakable madness. Already, per capita, the U.S. government spends more on its war machine than any other except Israel, whose war machine is of course heavily subsidized by the U.S. government. This latest insane proposal from Washington, however, will place both U.S. military spending and U.S. per capita military spending far above and off any chart on which the rest of the world could appear -- and that is despite the fact that U.S. military spending is used to pressure other governments of every sort to increase their military spending as well. The profiteers' products are often found on both sides of a war.
In fact, the ludicrous new fashion of measuring military spending as a percentage of an economy is an attempt to find some measure by which U.S. war spending can be made to seem reasonable -- reasonable, however, only to someone who has blindly accepted the notion that maximizing military spending without limit is a public service, a philanthropic enterprise, rather than a disease.
If impoverishing our future generations, dooming them to environmental catastrophe, and training them to create conflict and to view escalated violence as the solution to conflict is not a disease, what is?
The failure of any member of the United States Congress to take every possible step to block the spending of another dime on the so-called "homeland security" military aimed at the United States itself, or on the military aimed at the other 96% of humanity, is the most immoral failure that could be engaged in at this time.
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