Surviving

Oh my God, doesn’t it seem like so many recent events are telling us that if man has any hope of surviving the next couple of generations, we have all got to face up to the fact that we simply cannot live with the super wealthy billionaire class and their inevitable wildly outsized effect on the politics that regulate all of our lives? Nor can we live with, fiscally, and in terms of its carbon footprint, the gargantuan US military. This colossus, with its 800 bases spread all over the world, has a carbon footprint greater than all but the largest countries.

I was disheartened to hear about polling which shows that a great percentage of Americans trust and respect the military above all other parts of our government. How can this be, given the unbroken stream of pointless and counterproductive conflicts in which it has engaged ever since my daddy served in World War II, the last war that made any kind of sense at all? Even though, looking at the genesis even of it, it clearly needn’t have ever happened, had Western governments not allowed right wing oligarchs and their corporations to coddle dictators like Franco, Mussolini and Hitler until they dragged everybody into the life and death struggle against the fascist nightmare they had in mind for us all.

Today is the 75th anniversary of the horrifying war crime that was the devastation of Hiroshima. The same military that trained their Latin American proxies to commit genocide against the Mayan population, under the aegis of fighting communism, the same military that is featured in Howard Zinn’s classic, “A People’s History of the United States”, where a commander, writing

back from the campaign in the Philippines to Washington, expresses his gushing pride in the fact that he and his troops, after completely surrounding a caldera filled with fleeing villagers, from the edges of which they could shoot down into it, had slaughtered every man, woman and child, “down to the last baby crying for its dead mother.”

I wonder if those fools flying double American flags from their gas guzzling pickup trucks are aware of any of the atrocities committed by the US military? A couple of the most annoying policies of recent years/ decades are our brutal embargo of Cuba, a beautiful, huge island just off our Southeast mainland. In a decades-long hissy fit over the nationalization of various American mafia casinos down there, we have deprived these righteous people of their most basic needs. Screw those Mafiosi who lost their investment there! Cuba has been the go-to country for medical help for poor countries. Despite the vicious capitalist-led attack on its fiscal viability, Cuba still manages to train an awful lot of excellent doctors, many of them going to help people in poorer countries, where the capitalist West doesn’t see the point of doing so.

Then, of course there is Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires, also known as God’s gift to insurgent fighters. I remember (so many years ago now), when we were making our first forays into this Vietnam-grade morass, the convoy of 100 big fuel semis, on their way to support the US invasion, all of them shot up and burned. And now, however many years later, we are basically leaving on the same terms that we could have gotten from the Taliban on year one. So much destruction of this desperately poor country, and for what?

The Pentagon’s three quarters of a trillion or more budget constitutes a capitulation of civilian rule over the military. Let’s face it, the US military has been serving capitalism as its first principle for just as about as long as it has existed, but today, as severe and life-threatening climate change becomes more apparent by the day, simple human survival requires that we somehow find the intestinal fortitude, as a people in a country that is supposedly ruled by the democratic majority, to demand a major restructuring of our military.

Like the Maginot line, the completely useless French line of massive canon emplacements that could not even turn to the angle from which the Germans ended up invading, the US military, with its laughably overpriced F 35 ‘joint strike fighter’, is a similar monument to myopia and the institutional reflex to fight again the last great war, which is simply not ever going to happen again.

Obviously (to anyone with eyes in their heads) the real enemy today is climate change; the hundreds of millions who will be driven from their homes by merciless changes in their environment, and the wildfires and floods that will emmiserate even the wealthy in prosperous countries. The Pentagon can do nothing to address these problems, other than to make them worse.

And now we have a whole political party, with close to half of the population, devoted to denial of the reality everyone can see; that we are, as a species, crushing the Earth’s ability to sustain us and so many other species. The gray whales, whose migration along the West Coast supports so much whale watching, are dying in unprecedented numbers in their Mexican calving grounds. The deaths of the incredibly hardy Joshua trees in their eponymous national Park are dying, and the un-survivable oven that is Death Valley, where historic high temperatures are being shattered, the 118° weather in Siberia, all cry out for major changes in the way humanity is managing the only planet will ever live have.

And please, don’t even get me started on Jeff Bezos and Sir Richard Branson, with their ridiculous, polluting joy rides for multi-millionaires; perhaps the most galling finger in the eye of the vast majority of sane people looking for the fastest route to decarbonization of the environment. Will we survive as a civilized species? Time will tell.