PEACE IS A DREAM THAT SOME OF US HAVE
Afghanistan - Another failed war for democracy. When will we ever learn that you can’t bomb people into cooperating and electing their leaders? Now that we have massacred, maimed, and destroyed, it’s up to them to repair themselves. Kind of like beating and raping a woman and then leaving her in the gutter to fix herself up. Healing will take generations. We should be helping with financial aid, but if it’s not a democracy of a dictator we have endorsed, we won’t give them a penny.
The real culprit, the real facilitator of mass destruction is in the manufacturing of these implements of war. We have never downsized our production of war equipment since World War I. Creating weapons has been America’s manufacturing ace-in-the-hole and it is the one factory job that hasn’t been shipped off to Asia. Those factories must have product demand to keep them open and hence the undeclared wars every 2 to 5 years. We like to call them military actions, like that makes it sound more temporary.
What would the USA or even the world look like if we didn’t make any more automatic weapons? Maybe kids wouldn’t be killed while going to school or people would be safe to shop at grocery stores or better yet, we wouldn’t be over in third world countries making life there, worse. The world’s violence is facilitated by US manufacturing of weapons.
A Soviet officer shows off his American M16 acquired from Mujahideen fighter. Soviet-Afghan War 1979-1989
The other un-talked about repercussions of these military actions is that our people come back to their home life all screwed up. Family abuse skyrockets. Children of vets are raised in fear as the trauma of war is spilled onto them. It takes generations for the violence to be healed. So when we send our people over to another country to kill and pillage, we should be thinking that we are training a portion of our population to be violent. They leave as hopeful youths and return traumatized for life.
What would happen if we taxed the weapons manufactures with a healing tax? A trauma relief fund for victims of war and gun violence. It would be a hefty tax to pay for all the therapy and financing of reconstruction for war torn countries. Let those who want to play Rambo pay for the clean-up. It won’t be perfect, like cigarette taxes paying for lung cancer but it would be a start.
The tragedy is that so many solutions to our problems can be very simple, but what stops necessary change is attachment, money, and power structures that won’t budge.