Thursday, May 18, 2006
To Feed, OR NOT TO FEED, the Maw of War
Surrounded by Republican leaders and Vice President Dick Cheney, The New York Times informs us, President Bush endorsed a Republican Senate measure that "calls for increasing military spending by 7 percent, to nearly $558 billion in 2007, a figure that includes $50 billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The package would essentially freeze or cut spending on most domestic discretionary programs, including education, energy and national parks, and it calls for trimming $6.8 billion over five years from entitlement programs like Medicaid and farm subsidies.
"The plan would raise the debt ceiling by $653 billion, to $9.6 trillion, and it assumes that the shortfall next year will be $348 billion, about what it is likely to be in 2006."
Meanwhile, the government is throwing yet another bone to the military-industrial complex, this time putting out to bid efforts to erect a "virtual fence" on our border with Mexico. The National Guard can't do it, they're already hemorrhaging too badly thanks to the occupation of Iraq. So let's leave it to the mercenaries. What's a few more hundred billion dollars of debt?
I have been reading Starhawk's book Truth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Authority and Mystery lately, and lingering over the passages where she talks about the power of vision to change reality. Many people have been saying this of late, in many different ways. We have to start telling another story. We can't leave it to "our" government representatives and their lapdogs, the media, to tell us how it is. We have to start telling them how it must be.
This is how Starhawk sees it:
"Politics is a form of magic, and we work magic by directing energy through a vision. We need to envision the society we want to create, so that we can embody aspects of it in each act we take to challenge domination.
"The edifice of war and domination is supported on three main pillars: our obedience, the construct of the enemy, and the enormous resources we devote to war. Each of these footings can be undermined. When our vision of what we want is clear, each act we take against an aspect of domination can become a positive act for the alternative we create. "
In the reality I want to envision, it's the military budget that will be cut and cut again, not the supposedly "discretionary" budgets of education, health care, the quest for renewable energy, and safeguarding our national parks. We won't waste money on patroling our borders with ever newer and more expensive gadgets! We won't spend billions on spying on our own citizens! If we were to focus on cooperation and collaboration with our neighbors (and in this global society, everyone is our neighbor), on making sure that everyone is able to live a decent life of dignity and self-respect, that no child is hungry, that health care is a basic right of global citizenship....if we were to send our energy in this direction, there would be no need to spend nearly $600 billion a year feeding the maw of the military. Let the military beast starve.
