Thank you for printing Karen Jacob’s wonderful letter from the Midwest. Her observation that a militaristic United States is all her college-age son has known in his life really struck me. With a twenty-one year-old of my own, I remember quite clearly the CNN reports from Baghdad shortly after he was born.
Of course, to his generation we have bequeathed an additional $4 TRILLION debt, as an article buried on page A4 reports. The Eisenhower Research Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute (http://www.watsoninstitute.org/eisenhower) calculates that in just the last ten years this staggering debt – almost one-third of the total – was racked-up by wars which, by objective assessment, have been dismal failures like all our wars of choice following WWII. And these recent wars, as Jacob points out, have extinguished over a quarter of a million human lives and created private psychological hells for a large number of our returning troops.
Imagine our economic strength and health, and the respect the rest of the world would show us, if we weren’t quite as trigger-happy. Yet we cloak ourselves in the delusion that the world resents us for what we have, not for what we do. When our number one national priority is building the world’s largest military, every international nail must be pounded using our expensive military hammer. This way of thinking has to change.
During the last twenty years, particularly the last decade, we have permitted our Constitutional freedoms to be systematically eroded. The big surprise to many is that the Obama administration has been every bit as hostile to civil liberties as its predecessor. You can’t go anywhere without being x-rayed, scanned, ID’d, having to partially disrobe in front of latex-gloved inspectors, or submitting to bag inspections. Federal agencies no longer need much of a reason to spy on you, search your home, wiretap you, or infiltrate your religious and political organizations. Even local law enforcement agencies are getting into the act. America in 2011 has more than a passing resemblance to the Soviet Union of 1961.
This is what we’ve bequeathed to the next generation – a nation that has squandered its riches, destroyed the safety net that ensured a healthy middle class, neglected its own infrastructure, outsourced everything but consumerism, lost the last bits of respect anyone ever had for it, and has seen other economies and nations eclipse it in both wealth and influence.
There are those who say that everything we’ve done was the unavoidable need to to fight to protect our democracy. But as the Romans, the British, the Russians, and every other empire discovered along the way, empire is a costly addiction and one that cannot be sustained.
At some point we must recognize that democracy is not preserved by buying fleets of drones, aircraft carriers, and F16’s, hiring soldiers and mercenaries, doubling the number of spy agencies, having a thousand military bases in a hundred countries, throwing our weight around in four or five simultaneous wars, building moats around ourselves, or imposing our concept of democracy on the rest of the world while our own citizens slide into poverty.
Democracy is not about fighting to keep what we have because the accumulation of power alone has never made any people free or democratic. Democracy is about being clear about who we are as a nation, and about creating as many options as possible for citizens to lead free and productive lives. These rights were intended for human citizens, not for multinational corporations promising to share a few crumbs of their prosperity with us whenever they remember to pay their taxes. Democracy implies a commitment to “others” – to neighbors, to our communities, to those who come to join us in this grand experiment, and above all to our children.
This Fourth of July, amid all the fireworks and patriotic speeches, spend a few moments thinking about what kind of nation you want to leave to your children and grandchildren.
This is what our nation’s founders were thinking those many years ago.
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