After three weeks and three days in France, I have been attempting to figure out if I’ve learned anything new and important about the United States from this 7,000 mile distance of my new perspective.

I’ve learned that what I’ve thought for most of my adult lifetime remains true:

1. Most leaders of most allegedly civilized developed countries still focus the majority of their individual nation’s wealth on maintaining and improving their military forces. The physical and human assets of each country concentrate on how to win wars.

2. The pretense for each country’s “defense” effortsis that it is necessary for each country not to actually use the weapons on one another. Rather, the theory goes, they are the “safeguards” against war – all those bombs and planes and ships and rockets and nuclear weapons. Our safeguards.

3. Each country avoids discussing two facts:

1. That the real reason each country maintains its military might is to bolster the egos of its leader(s), and:

1. To keep the profits flowing into the hands of all the nations’ financiers who support the defense game.

4. In the undeveloped countries the situation is slightly different. There, leaders are in the  government business for one reason only: to keep themselves and their partners rich.

5. No leader, from any country spends any time trying to convince the other leaders to all begin formally and consistently meeting together to discuss how much more sensible it would be if they would all divert the $$ Trillions of defense dollars to peaceful needs of people.

6. The reason given for this is that “The Political Will” does not exist to accomplish such a reasonable task. I don’t buy that reason.

7. My belief is that the real reason this charade continues is that none of the leaders of the countries has the philosophical insight or the basic intelligence to suggest and insist on such a meeting of the minds of the many countries.

8. The consequence of all this is that the remaining 7 billion or so of us on the planet are trapped by the intellectual failure of all our leaders. We are so busy fighting among ourselves, scrabbling for our little piece of the action that we just sit on our duffs and let the status quo continue.

9. How to inspire the leaders of the world to discuss how to stop wasting all the world’s assets on such a stupid scenario is the Priority One issue of humanity.

10. Our $$ Multibillionaires spend their $Billions taking one- and two-minute rocket trips to the edge of outer space while millions of humans suffer, many literally starving to death. Their leaders’ leadership too is nonexistent. It’s all about their over inflated Egos

11. So – No, I don’t see anything new from Europe. It’s just the same old same old as the world spends itself silly building machinery and equipment to kill one another with, and grasp for more Luxury and Wealth to bail us out.

12. A colleague of mine keeps telling me that the Youth of Today are going to solve the problem. I doubt that. If those of us with some education and experience can’t even get the discussion discussed in our “Free Press,” how can some youngsters still wet behind the ears bring about meaningful change?

13. I am decidedly not terribly optimistic.

14. The Greeks maintained there is one human trait that may eventually bring us to our senses. That trait is the ability to Hope.

15. A fragile trait at best.

More later,

Hal

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