More Anti-war With Each Passing Day

 

I ask myself why we're in such a mess.  The only answer I can imagine is that we have put ourselves here by making bad decisions, and those bad decisions are coming home to roost in the form of a warped economy and the great bugaboo, income inequality.  Those who actually make the decisions have a penchant for making decisions that work to their advantage.  Your advantage?  Please, don't make me laugh.  This is how Congress and the DC upper crust can justify spending trillions 'to keep the government running for a few months while we sort everything out'.  Much of... most of that money benefits the average Joe not one whit.

Meanwhile, Congress is at war with its citizens because those idiot citizens insist upon staying warm in the winter and cool in the summer, and they want to drive their cars to work and play instead of staying home or taking public transportation.  To make us behave as we should, the economy will be throttled (both senses of that word) to deprive us of the wherewithal of modern living.  It seems as if the elites want us living in a 9th century village so that there will be enough jet fuel available for them to visit the Côte d’Azur.

And no one can stop them from pillaging our own assets right from under our very noses.

I ask myself where are the heroes.  We subject ourselves to costly election campaigns every two years, and we try to send heroes to Washington to fight for us, but the heroes we send often turn out to be weak-kneed liars who, within years if not months, prove to be in it for no one but themselves.  The exceptions to this are almost too rare to warrant mention.  It's the old canard about the 99% of villains giving the 1% of heroes a bad name.

When there's a dust-up in some foreign country (where we typically have no national interest) there's always some Congressman who will stand up and berate their fellows for not defending the oppressed peasants of West Wheresoever.  And the result?  We send the Army.  We send the Marines.  And we send them a few trillion dollars to help them make ends meet.

And sometimes we brush up against some country that can actually fight back.  And the heroes we sent on a mission that had no 'payback' other than more power for those who did the sending... those heroes don't come home from the mission.  Ah, well, you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.

I ask myself who is profiting from all this.  It isn't me, and I suspect it isn't you, either.  Congressmen, meanwhile, have an alarming tendency to become millionaires or billionaires during their term(s) of office.  How does that happen?  Well, it's a fairly simple process, actually. 

• get involved in a war
• send billions or trillions in foreign aid
• that foreign aid is redeemed (laundered) via domestic arms manufacturers
• who make lavish campaign contributions to those who voted correctly
• which money can be kept if left over after a campaign ends

We've just witnessed a new variation on that theme involving family members or relatives — Hunter Biden is merely one such example — who gain employment in countries that are recipients of foreign aid:

• send foreign aid to country A
• get relative hired by company B
• that is financially connected to country A
• and is paid with (laundered) funds originally marked 'foreign aid'
• some of which makes its way back to a politician who voted correctly

I ask myself when are we going to learn.  I suspect the answer is 'never'.  'Learning' in this context means grasping that 'spending money' does not equate to 'fixing problems'.  Americans, by and large, do not yet understand that.  They think — I'm using 'think' here in its broadest meaning — that all problems can be solved with sufficient greenbacks.  Decades and centuries of adverse experience has not yet penetrated into their consciousness.  They continuously send off to Washington representatives who believe — we have only their actions to inform us of this — that their job is to spend money as fast as possible.  The soldiers who march off to war in countries they've never heard of to fight for reasons of which they are either unsure or deluded will come home to us, if at all, broken physically or mentally or both.  Yes, some lives were lost, some careers ended, some families upended, but it was a very beneficial tactic, financially speaking (if you're in Congress).

Our televisions constantly bombard us with pleas for The Wounded Warrior Project or something similar, the sub rosa message being that you're a patriotic American only if you feel sorry for those who were maimed in a place they shouldn't have been, fighting a war that benefitted their fellow citizens not at all.

Those who march off to war these days fall into two broad categories: the blindly patriotic, and the weak-minded.  The blindly patriotic go because we must, in their minds, push back against any threat to the country no matter how ephemeral.  The weak-minded just do what they're told.  It's a rare thing these days that anyone goes to war because the nation has been attacked.  In a nuclear age, the major powers are not going to do that to each other.  The risk is simply not worth it.  That's why all conflict for the past 75 years has been 'strong vs weak'.  Put another way, it's 'bully vs nerd'.  On those rare occasions when the nerds score (9-11-2001 springs to mind) the bully goes crazy, lashing out wildly and generally making things worse.

If we're to work our way clear of the colossal mess we're in, we must stop making things worse.  How?  Step number one has to be 'stop spending money'.  We have to find all those places where we're spending money foolishly, and stop that.  (Yes, Pentagon and military suppliers, I'm looking at you.)  Then, we have to find all those places where we're spending money wisely and... probably... stop most of that, too.

We'll need another batch of heroes, I suppose.