A theft from those who hunger

[Note from Kathie Malley-Morrison:  As Congress and the public debate issues regarding the U.S. budget, particularly the growing deficit and the status of the debt ceiling, we again welcome guest contributor John Hess, who writes about the financial and other consequences of war.]

Homeless veteran in Boston
Homeless veteran in Boston. Photo by Matthew Woitunski. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

Both Congress and the American public continue to ignore the warnings from earlier lovers of this country–conservative as well as liberal, military as well as civilian.

In a earlier post, I quoted from the final speech of President Dwight Eisenhower, a conservative Republican, but now I want to include a reminder from his first term: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

Eisenhower’s warning was echoed in the Vietnam War years by Senator J. William Fulbright in his book The Arrogance of Power: “An excessive preoccupation with foreign relations over a long period of time is more than a manifestation of arrogance; it is a drain on the power that gave rise to it, because it diverts a nation from the sources of its strength, which are its domestic life….” (pp. 20-21).

Finally, the late Chalmers Johnson brought that warning up to date in an essay titled “Going Bankrupt,” collected in his final book Dismantling the Empire: “going into 2008, the United States found itself in the anomalous position of being unable to pay for its own elevated living standards or its wasteful, overly large military establishment” (p. 135).    The “time of reckoning,” he said, “is fast approaching,” unless we correct three major problems (p. 136):

“First, we are spending insane amounts of money on ‘defense’ projects that bear no relationship to the national security of the United States …. Second, we continue to believe that we can compensate for the accelerating erosion of our manufacturing base and our loss of jobs to foreign countries through massive military expenditures … Third, in our devotion to militarism (despite our limited resources) we are failing to invest in social infrastructures and other requirements for the long-term health of our country” (p. 136).

Saturday, May 21, is Armed Forces Day, a good day to reflect on the fact that perhaps nobody suffers more from our devotion to militarism than former members of the armed forces. Their return from battle is often greeted by a lack of jobs and health care; enduring physical and psychological problems pushing them into drug abuse, homelessness, assault on others, and ever-increasing rates of suicide.

Our returning warriors discover that this is a country that forgot their sacrifices once they returned home.

John Hess, Senior Lecturer in English and American Studies, University of Massachusetts, Boston