Military (Gun) Madness

Back in the day… there was a popular song by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young called “Military Madness” which captured the popular sentiment of the day. It had a refrain of “Military madness is killing the country. Solitary sadness creeps over me.”  Nothing seems to have changed, except maybe for the worse.

Consider the fact that we have been at war continuously for nearly 12 years. It is the longest period of war in our country’s history. It has robbed us of our wealth, not to mention the most precious loss of the heroes who serve in the military. The continuous warfare has exhausted and demoralized our troops and bankrupted the Country. Military suicides are at an all time high, and the loss is exponentially higher when you consider the families that have been broken as the result of endless deployments, deaths and PTSD.

When “Military Madness” was first released it reflected the sadness over a war to protect a corrupt government and against the popular will of the population. It was a nonessential war which accomplished nothing except the deaths of millions of Asians and over 50,000 Americans. The wealth of our country was diverted from necessary social programs to arms merchants and the military industrial complex. Literally, money was diverted from education, health and anti-poverty programs to endlessly rain down bombs on people – to no apparent success or purpose other than to kill them. Here we are in 2013, doing the exact same thing…

It occurred to me that the madness is not just in our foreign policy – the carnage isn’t just directed to other peoples in other nations. Mass killings are being perpetrated in our own country and our society seems just as unwilling or unable to stop it as any war elsewhere. Nothing significant will be done to curb gun violence in our own schools and streets because the same people who have owned and directed our foreign policy since WWII now own our government, at least the Congress.

It’s sad.