Traditionally, it has been my belief that an all volunteer, or professional, military is a good thing. I believed it was a form of kidnapping to take a young person and forcibly interrupt their lives by mandatory military service. After all, if a person is not inclined to be a soldier, then they shouldn't be forced to serve. I am now having second thoughts.
Our nation finds itself embroiled in the longest war it has ever fought and nobody seems inclined to end it. Is it possible that war has become too easy for us? As a people have we become detached from the horror of the wars we fight? We take comfort in the fact that everybody maimed and killed in overseas military operations made a conscious choice to go. As a people our conscience is clear. War has become tolerable and accepted. The pain has been removed and all that's left is the glory. We cheer, we pay tribute, we pontificate but, with the exception of a few volunteer soldiers, we don't fight. We don't share the burdens. We have become little more then spectators, watching the sanitized version of the war given to us by main stream media and not having to tolerate any of the hardship.
Unfortunately, war still costs. Spend a few minutes at a VA hospital and you can really get a feel for the cost of war. Amputations, traumatic brain injury and PTSD are just a few of the life long disability soldiers suffer. Flag draped coffins return home from Asia and the Middle East in a staedy stream. The numbers of civilian dead continue to climb. Suicide bombings, drone strikes, stray bullets and out and out massacres have killed hundreds of thousands in this conflict. Families are torn apart, economies destroyed, mass displacement of populations, crops ruined, rampant starvation and disease, as well as repression and corruption that seems to be the brother and sister of all wars.
If one is not moved by human tragedy then there is always the expense. Since 2001, as a nation, we have spent in excess of one trillion dollars on this war.. California's share of that is $140 billion. The San Francisco Bay Area (my home) has paid $38 billion of that(cost of war.org). For that same money we could have built 2714 hospitals (Reed Construction Data) or provided a years education for 572 thousand kids (CA Dept of Ed). Then there are fire stations, police officers, drug treatment programs, public transportation and all manner of vital public services that are neglected for this war. The next time you step over a homeless peson, muttering to himself in the gutter, remember that it is probable that he is an untreated psychotic with nowhere to go for help. Our public mental health system has been dismantled in the name of cost cutting, yet "defense" budgets continue to increase.
Of course, war brings economic benefits. War contractors, weapons manufacturers and government vendors reap huge profits. War is one of the most efficient means of moving money (our money) from the public sector to the private. Instead of badly needed public utilities and services, these funds wind up lining the pockets of the corporate elite. Government, at every level, abdicates it's responsibility to administer public funds for the public good. Instaed, they siphon it into the coffers of the weathy. Martin Luther King once said that every bomb that explodes in South East Asia also explodes on the streets of the inner city. That is true now as it ever was, only the location of the war has changed.
The sting of war has been removed and we are separated from it. It is fought in far away places, generally by people we don't know so it becomes acceptable. We can talk about sacrifice and service to country but very few of us are actually sacrificing or serving. Since there is no pain, then there is no motivation to end it.
Perhaps if we returned to conscription and a wider cross section of the population was forced to share the pain, then maybe, as a nation, we would not be so quick to go to war and tolerate endless conflict for the sake of national security concerns that are dubious at best. Maybe there would be motivation to find peaceful means of business and policy. Maybe if we all had to share the pain, we would go to greater lengths to prevent it. We have learned to take war lightly and it is far too horrible to do that.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
One of the reasons that we mobilized so strongly against the Viet Nam war was the fact that there was a draft. Young men were getting snatched away from their families and homes and sent to the hell hole of war. Young people knew it was a senseless war. The slaughter affected so many that we finally all rose up against it.
ReplyDeleteI believe the corporatocracy would like us in a permanent state of war; it's good business. And you're right; there is no sting. For the most part, we don't feel it, we don't see it, we don't think about it. That has to change, or war will be waged with cease. That might change with a conscription but it would be someone's political suicide. But we can't keep this up; it's breaking us in more way than one. We have to rise up against a permanent state of war.