On behalf of the soldiers who continue to lose their lives, their livelihoods or their sense of well being, discarded after use by a for-profit enterprise built on bloodshed.
On behalf of the children who continue to lose their lives, their families, their sense of wonder at the world, because some group somewhere else gave themselves the authority to remotely execute other humans without due trial, oversight or accountability.
On behalf of the richest and most powerful global population to date, torn apart by an industry whose very existence depends upon our staying divided as a people, when the money being wasted on warfare could finally lift the entire human race out of the grips of desperate poverty.
It is time to enact The World’s People V The World’s Top 100 Defense Earners, for all the pain and suffering they continue to enable. They can still make arms all they want, but the trillions they’ve been reaping in profits will be forfeited.
Maher pleaded with the American people to do some well needed self-reflection on their own warmongering. After two centuries of perpetual war, it’s time Americans realized “We’re the gun country. Come on, we’re the war people.”
After breaking down the history and concluding the problem lies with America itself, Maher went on to say “America needs to start defining peace as strength. Do you know who the role model for every president should be? Jimmy Carter. He was the one out of all of them who figured out how to sit in office for four years and never fire a shot. And every president’s negative example,” he concluded, “should be Dick Cheney, who even shot his friends in the face.”
I cannot express how thrilled I was to hear these words on an influential US show. When a population of 313 million people – most of whom are surrounded by strife and a crumbling infrastructure – look to their sputtering economy, more and more people need to actively point out the giant elephant in the room.
Right now, America’s military industrial complex devours half of its government’s spending. It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to see that drastic cuts in military spending would likely yield equally drastic improvements for American families across the land.
But, for the most part, politicians and mainstream media sources remain chillingly silent. This is, as you may well know, due to the entrenched talons of the Military Industrial Complex itself. With billions of dollars to throw around, the war machine can buy both political parties and align all the major news channels, effectively keeping enough anti-war rhetoric from the ears (and off the lips) of the American public.
So, as with all great movements, the struggle to rid our world of war falls on the shoulders of those outside the established seats of power. While it’s great when the Bill Maher’s and John Stewart’s of the world finally vocalize some anti-war sentiments, until there are millions and millions of us doing this every single day, the war machine will keep on rolling.
Fortunately, uniting against war is exactly what we are doing. All it will take is the right spark, the right catalyst, and a Occupy-esque movement can rise against the Military Industrial Complex, and the struggle towards peace will become the latest trendy battle for the masses, maybe even earning the privilege of being trivialized by the mainstream media.
Americans spend trillions of dollars on warfare every single year. This is an absurd amount of money to spend on anything, let alone using it to blow up your fellow humans on an industrialized scale. With that kind of cash, you could end extreme poverty the world over, give every person a home and an education, and dramatically lift the tide which raises all ships.
The financial costs are an incredible burden, and the emotional scars would take generations to heal even if war ended this very second. The longer these large scale conflicts get prolonged, the worse off our entire world is.
So why aren’t Americans ending war? If the US people, much like the rest of us, just want to live and prosper in peace, why don’t their politicians listen to them and give them what they want?
The sad truth is that they can’t.
The entire American system has, to the detriment of the world, fallen victim to what can only be described as a parasitic entity, a beast that has been around in one form or another for thousands of years.
Whether through anesthetizing concepts like pride and security, the unfettered power of wealth, or, when all else fails, brute force, the war machine of which I speak has been able to keep countless populations within their grasp – and right now their prey is the American public.
In the United States, mainstream newsanchors all dance around the issue ending war, and ‘radical’ concepts like bringing home the troops rarely arise. Politicians are no better, for they too are in the pockets of the military industry, as made evident by a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate who intentionally escalates wars around the world.
So even when the vast majority of Americans want peace, a political system which is mostly theatre combined with a deliberate lack of guidance from the media makes it hard for the anti-war movement to gain the momentum needed to make a significant impact.
But peace-loving Americans won’t stay down for much longer. They simply cannot. Fueled by a crumbling economy, driven by global awareness, and united by social media, a multi-million person strong movement will prove more powerful than the entire military industrial complex. Or so we shall hope.
The world is changing faster than even those who sit atop can control. Unprecedented technology is causing new concepts like transparency and global solidarity to crash down on our world. As the old guard falls away, a newfound democracy is sure to bring to fruition the civilization our species has been cultivating for eons.
In early 2013 a tool by The Spark Project will help concentrate people power into a force so powerful that it can counterbalance giant institutions like corporations and bad governments, even rivalling the biggest scourge of the earth – the military industrial complex.
The Spark Project was started 1 year ago by a group of Redditors who were inspired by the site’s amazing ability to filter through nonsense while bringing the best and brightest ideas to the top. They thought, ‘why not take this effective formula of crowdsourcing and use it to foster a true democracy?’. And so they did.
While still looking for funds and volunteers, the team have made tremendous headway and will likely release their tools early in 2013. Read more about the project at thespark.org.
It is tools like these which, once refined and widely adapted, can truly reshape the world. By channelling the voices of millions (and billions) of people into practical political clout, we’ll finally be able to enact real changes to the global establishment. We can finally make our world what we want it to be.
No more gross inequality where billionaires can hoard more for themselves while billions of people are left to starve. No more rampant exploitation of weaker nations by the more powerful in what is no less that modern-day slavery. No more politically or corporately organized armed conflict, meaning world peace will finally be upon us.
All this, and more, can and will be ours once we truly start working together as one people. Awesome!
Over a year ago, I set a goal to blog everyday. I knew it would help me as a writer and artist. And it has.
Still, the time has come for my blog to evolve. Now, instead of updates coming a set seven times a week, they will come frequently. So if you came here seeing one of my promotions promising daily posts, first, thank you, and second, sorry for the deception by obsoletion.
What I’m hoping to happen is for new ideas/insights/rants to continue to arrive often, albeit without forcing it. So instead of putting up a video or picture to fill in the blanks, I will only post when there’s something I have to say and yelling it to my screen just isn’t enough.
On a positive note, I’m better informed and increasingly in tune with the world more now than ever before, and nothing has dissuaded me from my rationally founded believe that world peace is coming. If anything, I grow more optimistic by the day. The signs are here for all to see.
Cheers and thank you for making my site one of your destinations.
Thanks to a rising rate of Internet adoption, our world is uniting faster than ever before. This is revealing how humans everywhere on earth, in every circle, in every society, are pretty much the same. The vast majority of us – everyone but the fringe minorities – could peacefully co-exist with anyone, anywhere else on earth.
The more we come to see this, the more evident it will become that modern warfare has grown obsolete. We don’t need wars anymore because we no longer see entire populations and foreign countries as a threat requiring an army to fight.
Combined with some other factors technology is making possible, like the eradication of poverty, this unprecedented interconnectedness puts humans alive today right on the brink of world peace. It’s only a bit longer until enough people see this to be true, and then make it happen.
Wars happen when two (or more) populations get locked into violent armed conflict. Once armies are in a battle zone, it’s very tricky to get them out. Not only do they see their fellow comrades falling around them, soldiers are also fed a constant supply of myths about their evil, hateful enemies.
This dehumanization is what makes killing possible, especially on such a massive scale. If you start seeing your foes as regular humans, as people just like you, then it can be several orders of magnitude more difficult to murder them.
It is for this very reason that world peace is coming. The Internet is bringing us together faster than ever before, bridging the gaps between the world’s cultures and populations. This great unification is destroying the myth that we are different, and revealing our common humanity.
The more this happens, the more we will see modern warfare for what it truly is – manufactured as a for-profit business endeavor. We’ll learn how the majority of international conflicts exist because certain entities are exploiting our instinctual natures – feeding us lies and milking our fears – to garner enough of a drive for war to erupt.
As awareness grows about the powerful military industry, pressure will mount against it. War-profiting industries will see themselves on the receiving end of class action suits and heavy taxation. Governments will lose all support for major armed conflicts. The forces driving us to war right now will soon meet their match.
An empowered human population is rising together to forever dismantle the war machine.
The world today can be especially distressing, considering all the economic turmoil and ongoing global conflicts. But we’ve more reasons than ever before to be hopeful, if we just take a moment to reflect.
A decade or two could be all it takes to transform ourselves into an advanced species, having ended all wars, eradicated poverty, and overcome the limitations of our biological tyranny.
But don’t just take my word for it. Watch as proponent of social justice and equity Angela Blackwell and veteran journalist Bill Moyers discuss the state of modern events and why it is entirely logical to be more optimistic with each passing day.
