John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY JOE LAURIA IN CONSORTIUM NEWS
“Women March on the Pentagon
“Fed up with ongoing wars depleting innocent lives and the U.S. Treasury, more than a thousand women marched on the Pentagon on Sunday to declare their opposition to the continuing slaughter.”
I could not possibly be more in sympathy with the cause these marchers represent.
I wouldn't want to demean or diminish them for any reason.
But I think the main thing a march like this one tells us about is an extremely unhappy fact.
1,500 people? My God that wouldn't fill the auditorium of a big movie theater.
America, collectively, simply does not care that its government is now in the full-time killing business.
Which of course precludes so very many activities governments are supposed to be concerned with, from health care to building needed bridges.
The sad facts just reinforce my view of contemporary America as an extremely dangerous force in the world.
America’s government literally burns resources on wars, needless wars, and does next to nothing for and about the people it is supposed to govern, supposed to represent, and from whom it collects taxes to pay for the dark work that it is involved in.
There is a huge disconnect there between the American people and “their” government.
So, not only are American national elections close to a charade as to real choice - Trump versus Clinton? What a choice the plutocrats offer people - but the national government seems to enjoy virtually complete freedom to kill on a massive scale with unwarranted geopolitical wars, support tyrants also engaged in killing, men like the Saudi Crown Prince and Israel's Netanyahu, and it even freely and openly conducts a program of extrajudicial killing on an industrial scale.
My God, there's just no pretence anymore. America is about killing and bullying the planet, and America's own citizens remain pretty well completely indifferent.
The basic structure and dynamics of a situation like this are extremely threatening for the entire world. America today much resembles the 1930s jack-booted states of Europe marching around to threaten everyone. The only difference now is that jack-boots have gone out of style.
