(The following piece by John Miksad originally appeared as a Facebook post. Miksad is a coordinator for the Fairfield chapter of World BEYOND War and coordinator for Chapter 19 of the Veterans for Peace)
By John Miksad
We live in a violent society.
We are violent at home and abroad.
We’ve been at war for most of our existence as a country. Our leaders choose violence over diplomacy and we let them out of fear, apathy, ignorance, and propaganda driven xenophobia.
We are ok with spending $1 trillion a year on the Pentagon and having over 750 military bases scattered around the globe in other nations yet our government would violently resist any attempt of another nation to place a military base in Mexico or Canada. Our government has killed 4.5 million people, created 38 million refugees, and wasted $8 trillion in the "War on (of) Terror" and the most we can bring ourselves to say about it is that it was "not successful" and criticize the way we departed from Afghanistan.
Our government (under D and R administrations) has funded, armed, supported, and provided political cover for a apartheid, ethnic cleansing, illegal occupation, war crimes, and genocide with a death toll that we may never know. We never forget the 3000 who died on 9/11, but we sure as hell spend no time thinking about the death and destruction we caused in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon, Yemen and so many other places around the world.
We are violent to other people, to animals, to Mother Earth, and even to ourselves (take a look at our suicide and overdose death rates). We routinely choose profit over people, clean water and clean air. As much as we say we love our children and grandchildren, we love our comfortable way of life more. Rather than choosing a sustainable path forward that would avoid suffering for future generations, we maintain an unsustainable status quo. All while the planet heats up, tides rise, species go extinct, wildfires burn out of control, and storms rage more intensely.
We know our industrial farm system abuses billions of animals they raise for our consumption but we turn a blind eye to its cruelty. Television, movies, books, and sporting events glorify violence. We go about our lives while millions of our fellow citizens live in poverty, live without healthcare (including mental healthcare), go bankrupt due to illness, and live on the streets.
We lead the world in mass shootings, assaults, prison population, military spending, weapon sales, guns, murder rate (in industrialized world) and in imposing brutal sanctions on other nations that kill millions of people (38 million since 1971) and create tremendous suffering around the world.
We have been on the brink of nuclear annihilation for 80 years and for a few brief moments feared mass suicide enough to place some constraints on these WMD's. Now all the guardrails are off (thanks to our government) and we find ourselves in a second nuclear arms race always 30 minutes from the apocalypse and we go about our lives as if this is normal.
Like fish who don’t think about being in water, we are so accustomed to the violence of our culture, we don’t even realize we have been swimming in it all our lives.
The first step to any change is understanding the problem. The problem is OUR violence. It is the violence of empire. It is the violence of imperialism. It is the violence of capitalism. It is the violence of white christian supremacy. It is the violence of American "Exceptionalism."
We need to evolve. We need to raise our consciousness and join the struggle for change. We need to become a nation among nations. We need to integrate back into the web of life. We need to build a society that returns as much as it takes. It's the only rational path forward. It is the only sustainable path forward.
