The "War on ..." as a phrase snuck into our lexicon sometime after World War II and for some reason we have not been able to shake it off. There was the war on poverty, then the war on drug, and now the war on terror. These three wars have at at best mixed out comes for the west, particularly for the US. As a result of the war on terror, American black males are more likely to go to jail today, than go to college - 40% more likely today than in the 1960s, just before the assault on their liberty, tagged the war on terror became the law of the land. 40 years on, American has become the incarceration capital of the world, with its prisons bursting at the seams, literarily. This one war, America lost.
The war on poverty has its own mixed blessings too, and today more than 40% of Americans pay nothing into the treasury, but depend on tax funded largess, helping fuel the largest national debt in the history of mankind. Yes, America remains the richest nation on earth, but many of the compromises necessary to enact basic protection for society's weakest have been hijacked for political patronage and corporate welfare. Today, the bean counters claim America is more poor than it was in the 1960's hundreds of billions of dollars later. This too is a lost war.
And then, after a heart breaking attack that murdered more than 3000 Americans and foreigners in New York in 2001, an unwise President declared an another war, this time on terrorism. True the dastardly act by a bunch of fanaticism imbued, blood thirsty criminals who kill and wreak destruction in the name of a religion, and a god needs a response, but a war? And now more than 12 years later, all evidence point to another lost war.
Perhaps, it is time we begin to roll back the romantic semantics of war and start working to eradicate the ills that scourge our societies and world; from intolerance, to illiteracy, from unregulated greed, to unregulated pollution. There are real problems ailing our world, but wars with their unintended consequences and collateral damages will not save us from ourselves and self imposed delusions.
The ongoing attacks in Kenya offers another opportunity, no less than the saga in Syrian, albeit for a different reason. The terrorists in Kenya must be treated like the criminals that they are and not lionized like some warriors as their peers near Damascus are. After all, America has seen a great deal of arm attacks in the last 3 years, most claiming the lives of innocent people going about their regular life from kids in their classrooms to movie goers, and from congresswomen attending to her constituents to soldiers reporting for duty in the barracks. Regardless of the state of mind of the killers, they are still a bunch of cowardly murderers who can only articulate their views through the barrels of a gun.
The war on poverty has its own mixed blessings too, and today more than 40% of Americans pay nothing into the treasury, but depend on tax funded largess, helping fuel the largest national debt in the history of mankind. Yes, America remains the richest nation on earth, but many of the compromises necessary to enact basic protection for society's weakest have been hijacked for political patronage and corporate welfare. Today, the bean counters claim America is more poor than it was in the 1960's hundreds of billions of dollars later. This too is a lost war.
And then, after a heart breaking attack that murdered more than 3000 Americans and foreigners in New York in 2001, an unwise President declared an another war, this time on terrorism. True the dastardly act by a bunch of fanaticism imbued, blood thirsty criminals who kill and wreak destruction in the name of a religion, and a god needs a response, but a war? And now more than 12 years later, all evidence point to another lost war.
Perhaps, it is time we begin to roll back the romantic semantics of war and start working to eradicate the ills that scourge our societies and world; from intolerance, to illiteracy, from unregulated greed, to unregulated pollution. There are real problems ailing our world, but wars with their unintended consequences and collateral damages will not save us from ourselves and self imposed delusions.
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