FROM MY CORNER:What Leaders?
Following my last column, three readers emailed me they agree it would make sense if all nations’ leaders would stop spending $$Trillions on weapons of mass destruction with which to repeatedly – century after century – kill many of each other’s country’s citizens.
The rest remained silent.
Do you suppose most of you also agree with the above proposition? Or do you suppose some still support the national policies of all our countries spending massive $$Trillions continually, confirming war as the acceptable means of resolving our political problems?
Have you ever seriously considered this question?
One reader pointed out to me that the problem with the idea of us citizens lobbying our leaders to consider the question, is the fact that “so many people” will have to be convinced of the idea. Well, yes. That is the issue.
However:
Put in simpler terms, I suggest for the preceding to occur, we all must first stop thinking and behaving as consumers – and become citizens willing to protest our many governments’ war policies. For us, specifically, that means questioning our own U.S. government’s war policy.
That is the real crux of our personal national situation, I believe.
We, our country’s relatively “financially adequate” people, have allowed ourselves to become consumers, rather than U. S. citizens. And our poor citizens are required by us to pay the short-term bill for our silence to the acceptable concept of institutionalized war.
That is an intriguing syllogism, is it not?
A syllogism, should you have misplaced its definition, is a form of trying to think logically. And logical thinking can be defined as a means of lengthening our existence, rather than encouraging its eventual, potentially tragic, abrupt end – which we seem passionately bent on doing.
My reader expressing the necessity of getting “so many people” convinced of the idea, also pointed out that – in the meantime – we should win the war in Ukraine. Which brings us obliquely to F. Scott Fizgeralds’ definition of “Intelligence” – the capacity for a person to envision two opposing thoughts at the same time.
Our two opposing thoughts are to:
- Maintain an active, working military, while
- Pursuing equally strong the pursuit of a long-term international rejection of national weapons of mass destruction and war as rational means of solving political problems – which they clearly are not.
May we now vote again?
How many of you think this over-all concept is worth pursuing; the simple lobbying, by us, of our own U.S. government, to consider engaging in this two-pronged policy of sustaining short-term war versus the long-term policy of persuading all nations to vote and agree on making war internationally illegal?
In other words, force the world’s Leaders to officially position themselves on the acceptability of war versus no war. That will effectively divide the world into two simple opposing forces, and we can all see which side has the most people supporting it – and proceed accordingly to eliminate those who want to keep war intact.
Your voice is invited.
Hal