Something Wicked This Way Walks

In the 20 years following 9/11, the U.S. spent over $21 trillion on militarization.

$21 trillion.

What if we had spent $21 trillion on education, public transportation, clean energy, industrial retooling, agricultural innovation, infrastructure, and housing for the poor? 

In 1953, US President, and former Supreme Allied Commander in World War II, Dwight D. Eisenhower, explained the Faustian tradeoffs of a militarized country:

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

“This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

Today, 72 years later, America is run by a neofascist regime headed by a convicted 34-felony count sociopath rapist whose best friend ran a vast pedophilia operation, and who has never met a Saudi King, Russian oligarch, or Jewish or Evangelical billionaire he has not praised for the cash deposited in his own pocket.

Masked secret police are snatching citizens off our streets, the armed military have invaded our cities, and our president is openly soliciting bribes from surveillance-state tech titans, foreign despots, and criminal drug lords.

It could have been different.  

It *should* have been different.

But we listened to the siren songs of fear and hate.  

Easily manipulated by an increasingly corportate press corps, we voted in legislators more interested in trading stocks for profit than holding town halls, visiting public schools, or walking the halls of Medicaid nursing homes.

Corporations and billionaires were given the greenlight to spend endless amounts to fund political campaigns, pay lobbyists, and hire the friends and relatives of those deciding tax rates, corporate subsidies, and government contracts.

As predicted by the communists in the 1930s, American business has bought the politicians and sold us the rope we are now hanging ourselves with.

We look in a mirror and something wicked this way walks.  It is ourselves.