Here’s a fairly typical image of a sort that constantly clogs up my FaceBook page. I take it to be the full and open expression of someone or some group’s honest outlook. I don’t think they’d identify themselves at the bottom as “Jesus, Republicans & Other Bullshit” if they were self-censoring.
And I certainly appreciate the cursing and the criticism of religion.
Here are my concerns:
“We’ve been at war now for over 12 years.”
No, we haven’t. The U.S. government and the U.S. military have, and it’s been for over two centuries now. This latest installment has been actively opposed by many of us and opposed in many ways in opinion polls by a majority of the U.S. population for years. It’s OK to take responsibility and blame for insufficient resistance, but not to identify with the criminals. If “we” are at war, we want “us” to win or to “redeploy responsibly,” but certainly not to face prosecution or to make restitution — as basic morality requires.
“Experts put the total cost at $4 – $6 trillion dollars.” That’s a sum of direct and indirect costs of war spending. The direct spending on the wars that is included in it is much smaller. It’s certainly right to include the indirect damage. But we should start from the right place. The Pentagon and the media, and everyone who sees or reads the media, separate war costs from routine basic military spending. The latter is spending preparing for wars and provoking wars. It is justified by the existence of the wars. The wars are fought using the weapons and bases not counted as “war spending.” That basic war preparations cost is now over $1 trillion each year. That’s over $10 trillion each decade. Then add some extra hundreds of billions in “war costs.” And then calculate the indirect damages and lost opportunities, which are enormous. The $4 – $6 trillion figure is ridiculously low, subservient to propaganda, and builds in the notion that possessing the sort of massive military that guarantees eternal wars is perfectly acceptable.
“Imagine if we had invested that in our own country and people.” The war on Iraq was not an investment in the people of Iraq. It killed a million, injured millions, made millions into refugees, and absolutely destroyed a society, leaving behind the disaster now being addressed with another war. Yes, of course, we should have invested many trillions of dollars in people’s needs rather than in mass murder. But anyone who’s really tried to figure out how to spend many trillions of dollars would know that it’s almost impossible to do. One will be obliged to let the other 95% of humanity have some of it for sheer lack of ways to spend it in the United States. And anyone who’s given any thought to global suffering would be sickened by the idea of 5% of humanity hoarding such unfathomable wealth, just as many of us are sickened by the military using it to kill — and to kill many more by taking that money away from where it’s needed than the military ever kills using weapons.
Moving away from militarism requires identifing with humanity, not a nation. “We” must begin to mean humanity. Our graphics should not push nationalism, falsify numbers to make militarism seem normal, pretend war is something new to the United States — which was born out of war and for the sake of war. Moving away from militarism requires dumping the Democratic Party along with the Republican, and along with both great mountains of bullshit. In certain of his comments, Jesus was actually closer to where we need to go than FaceBook posters are.