I was delighted to see the Rose Parade back, but I must confess that I was nervous seeing so many people crowded together during a skyrocketing pandemic surge. What made me even more uncomfortable was the way commentators glorified the stealth bomber, a weapon of mass destruction designed to carry nuclear weapons undetected into enemy territory. The stealth bomber program will cost over $203 billion over ten years. Each bomber costs two billion dollars to build and maintain. What does this mean in human and moral terms?
In his famous “Cross of Iron Speech” (1953), President Eisenhower put this expenditure into a moral perspective. He said, “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. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children…This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”[1]
In a similar vein, Dr. King called war “the enemy of the poor” and concluded that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”[2] The four billion spent on the two stealth bombers that flew over Pasadena could have been used for one of the following:
1) Housing every homeless person in California in a market rate studio apartment.
2) Paying the salaries of 46,000 teachers, or
3) Providing every low-income Californian with Calfresh food stamps twice over.
I could go on, but it’s clear that a stealth bomber comes at a huge human and moral price tag. It is one thing to honor our military, it is quite another to glorify weapons of war. Morally speaking, gushing over a stealth bomber is obscene. As a Quaker and a pacifist, I take seriously the teachings of Jesus who said, “Those that live by the sword die by the sword” (Matt 36:52).
We need to ask ourselves what has our bloated military budget done to make our country safer and improve the quality of life for our people and the world? Our nation will spend $735 billion this year on the military, over half of our discretionary tax dollars. The United States spends more on the military than China, India, Russia, United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, Italy, and Australia — combined.[3] As a result, we have some of the poorest social services, including health care, of any industrial nation.
We need to stop glorifying war and focus our money and resources on human needs. Let’s dream, believe and achieve a world without war—a world where every American has access to free health care, education, food, and affordable housing.
Anthony Manousos
Pasadena
Got something to say, email Managing Editor André Coleman, at andrec@pasadenanowmagazine.
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One thought on “We Get Letters: Let’s Dream, Believe and Achieve A World Without War”
Whether its interpersonal relationships or major power dialogues, we must now realize that the only way to achieve peace is through communication with each other. That involves listening to each other and hearing each other. It also involves compromise. No one person should expect to get or achieve everything they want. And we must learn to be patient. Truly understanding the other person’s views will not come easily. Deep listening is required. But fortunately we human beings are capable of it. Just look at the long and complicated effort that went into creating our constitution. So let’s start talking, listening and working together to pull our nation together and again affirm the values that our founding fathers (and mothers) worked so hard to achieve.
Christle Balvin