Jim,
How’s this for profane: Why don’t we just take our military apart and become, by no stretch of the imagination, the bigger, more moral country?
How about we stop funding 55,000 military contractors, reduce the size of the military to a crack security force of, say, 100,000, for another 100,000 laborers, engineers, doctors, and educators who would deliver humanitarian relief to any country in time of need—regardless of regime, ideology, or former military or ideological circumstance?
The savings would be enormous, absolutely enormous, given that a full 40 percent of the federal budget is for the DOE. We save over 90 percent of that money by reducing the need for human beings to shoot other human beings, as well as the high-dollar, high-tech equipment to make shooting human beings more efficient.
Then we devote a fraction of that money we once put into arms and armies into our own human development—education, health care, and retirement—and the production of the physical assets of humanitarian aid, such as food, clean water systems for the world’s poor, and the encouragement of micro-loans to entrepreneurs here and abroad. This kind of development means, of course, fewer people dependent on government welfare, more people working, more people with the self-esteem and confidence to make their businesses work for their communities, etc. Not to mention the devotion, energy, and innovation Americans could give to the rest of the world—again, regardless of their status as upstanding trading partners or godless Maoists.
The risk of not having a military? Who said providing for the national defense had to be based on guns, munitions, and genocide in two-ton packages (think Colonel T.J. “King” Kong riding his bomb into eternity)? Why couldn’t national defense be building a truly independent, strong, and confident and educated people?
Plus, who would openly and wantonly destroy a country of humanitarians?
If you think “terrorists” will, well, they are doing a great job of getting us to destroy ourselves—overmilitarizing and overspending on an alleged “War on Terrorism” that seems to me to be a “War on the American People, Their Liberties and Freedoms.”
Let’s retire from the macho game and get into developing people game. If we have to die for those ideals…well, isn’t that what ideals and principles are all about. Die on your feet, and not on your knees before the Raytheon Corporation.
Patrick
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