We have become a world that lusts violence.  My oldest son will graduate from college this year, and there has never been a day in his life when we have not been at war.  Maybe there was a period when we weren’t technically at war, but we were still bombing and shooting, aiming and killing, occupying the middle east.

We celebrate killing and embrace putting arms in the hands of people around the world.  As best I can figure out, we have armed both sides of every conflict in the middle east for the last generation or two.  When we are being shot at, it is often with weapons that we provided to somebody somewhere along the line.

Our leaders vote for military funding increases year after year after year, while denying funding for education, health and general welfare.  We continue to make heavy weapons that we could never possibly need, but won’t support funding the infrastructure it would need to move those weapons from point a to point b.  http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2012/10/09/army-to-congress-thanks-but-no-tanks/ 

We buy into the notion that we need to need to have the right to carry weapons that honestly have no purpose except to kill a lot of people and kill them fast, but we refuse to accept that the result will be that people die from those weapons.  We occupy foreign lands with our military and fail to accept that it is our military presence in foreign lands that is the reason that we have people who want to attack us in our own.  We always have a way of justifying our lust of violence by saying that those people are somehow different than us.  We use religion and ideology as reasons to kill others, or arm them so they can kill themselves.  We spend more money on military spending than the rest of the world combined.  Combined!

What we fail to realize is the age old recognition that if you live by the sword, you will die by the sword.  The biggest threat to our society is not whoever we choose as our enemy today, it is our idea that we somehow need to be at war with somebody, anybody, everybody.  If you step back and really think about it, it should be clear that the path we are on is one that will ultimately lead to our own violent destruction.

I am against every war we are currently involved in, and I am against every war that we will choose to be in for the rest of time.

PEACE!

KT

Day 32