Defense Spending

Defense spending only illustrates how insecure we really are. Our greatest vulnerability is that we think that we are great and powerful and invulnerable. Our greatest delusion is that we think that we maintain the illusion of greatness and power by spending more to cover up and obscure our own abject powerlessness to address the true enemies of our nation and national security which are poverty, inhumane economic practices, corporate take-over of our so-called inalienable rights, millions of families and individuals forced into poverty and suffering for want of healthcare —the harbingers of our own insecurity and self-delusion.

Our greatest defense is to address our greatest offences to the citizens not only of this country, but of the world that our corporate imperialism has maligned, impoverished and destroyed. Our positive thinking and misplaced optimism has blinded us to our own quagmire. We have chosen national denial and delusion over our own health and well-being.

President Eisenhower said in his Military-Industrial Complex Speech: “As we peer into society’s future, we — you and I, and our government — must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow” (Military-Industrial Complex Speech, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961, http://www.h-.net.org/~hst306/documents/indust.html).

Who knew that General / President Dwight D. Eisenhower would herald the prophetic words that have become our reality as Americans? We as a nation have lost all perspective of human experience and have retained and exploited our savagery in our nationalistic and patriotic hubris. George Santayana wrote: “progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_Santayana.

Humility comes hard when we are forced face-down in our own feculence and don’t even recognize or acknowledge our depravity. To redirect a quotation from the Christian Bible that speaks volumes to our morass “[we] are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean” http://bible.cc/matthew/23-27.htm. Our arrogance has disinterred our rotting corpse and exposed its true state. It is time to rethink our position.