Guns and Butter 

Gary G. Kohls, MD

06/13/03: It's long past time we well-meaning Americans connected the dots between America's recurring economic crises, domestic job losses, infrastructure rot, moral decadence, spiritual decay, increasing violence, worsening suicide statistics, gender inequaltiy and our addiction to an obscene and unaffordable military.

That spirit of homicidal violence represented by the willingness to kill for the local fuhrer must be understood as being the opposite of everything one regards as life-affirming.

The voracious 800 pound gorilla we call the Pentagon has been bleeding us dry every April 15 for 50 years, so that, especially since the two decades since Ronald Reagan's costly pro-nuclear weapons ideloogy, America has not been able to afford to provide for all of its citizens’ basic human needs: safe streets, adequate shelter, nutritious, nontoxic food, access to quality health care, safe and clean drinking water, protection from exploitive and ruthless capitalism, freedom from gun violence, assurance that our votes will be counted, etc, etc.

America is now # 1 in homeless veterans, manufacture and exportation of weapons of mass destruction ("gun-runner to the world"), perpetration of military violence, senseless and useless violent entertainment and sports, the sexual exploitation of women, spiritually starved children, the sales of obscene videogames, the use of dangerous, addictive medications for children. And the embarrassing list goes on and on.

The point that needs to be made over and over again is that the military establishments never slim down, never volunteer to embark on austerity plans, never sacrifices and by refusing to downsize it makes all programs of social uplift unaffordable, risking the bankrupting of everybody except for the economic, political and military elites. And their arrogant refusal to get out of the stalled truck and help push is going to be the death of us all.

The Pentagon's subsidiaries are the biggest industrial polluters on the face of the earth, irrevocably fouling the ground water, aquifers, soil and air as well as the bodies and brains of those who live on military bases everywhere. And we American taxpayers are paying through the nose for the "privilege" of getting ourselves poisoned and allowing the destruction of Mother Earth for all time.

Depleted Uranium has a radioactive half-life of 4.5 billion years, and it is lying around in thousands of tons in numerous nuclear weapons dumps, near Pentagon labs, near nuclear power facilities, in the sands of the Iraqi deserts, in the mountains of the Balkans and in the soil of Afghanistan. And it's in the lungs and kidneys and bladders and seminal vesicles of hundreds of thousands of American GIs who were in Desert Storm and in a few hundreds of thousands of younger, not yet used-up GIs who endured the sand storms and inhaled the radioactive dust of Operation Enduring Freedom.

It's time that we exposed the BIG LIE of the "Glory That Is War" and the false patriotism that precedes wars and make the connections between the universal hatred of Americans, the teacher's layoffs, the cuts in health benefits, the closing of industry, the cost of everything, the loss of farmland, the loss of water resources and the red, white and blue patriotic Rogue Gorilla that is rapidly poisoning the nest.

It's time we demanded that the beast stop fouling everything with its saber-rattling and chest pounding. And it's time we stop over-feeding the beast before we can no longer tolerate its excrement, before we can't breath the air or drink the water or eat the toxic food grown on the poisoned farmland.

And one of the first steps every true peace-lover needs to take is to stop sacrificing our naive adolescent boys and girls to the God of War. We need to heed those occasional exhortations of certain patriotic warmongers and "keep them out of harm's way." We need to be smart and save the children from the subtle and not-so-subtle soul destruction that starts with JROTC, moves on to basic training and then proceeds to the killing fields, where the traumatic stress either produces conscienceless killers or victims of posttraumatic stress disorder, either one of which may be incurable.

The roots of much of what is wrong with our violent, self-destructive, militarized nation are clear. And the solution is also clear. We have to make a choice, but it is obvious that America can no longer afford both guns and butter.
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Preventive Psychiatry e-Newsletter # 48:
The U.S. Military's War On The Earth

by Bob Feldman - March 2003