Now imagine if Kennedy had lived and if through and after the Vietnam Era we had 100,000 Peace Corps volunteers (PCVs) annually serving throughout the world. Back in the 1960's, the average cost to field a PCV was about $5,500 per year. So the cost for putting 1,100,000 PCVs into worldwide service would have been about $6,600,000,000. If we triple that average cost to $18,000 per volunteer, we still could have invested $603 billion in projects that were good for people and the earth.
Little Vietnam, long-time enemy with China, popularly run in the North by Ho Chi Minh, who worked a freighter to visit the America whose Declaration of Independence and Constitution he admired, started the dumbing down and mutilation of America's middle class and the nearly overwhelming growth of the military-industrial estate and its lobbyists; about which war-wizened President Eisenhower warned the nation.
On Vietnam, Ike couldn't "conceive of a greater tragedy for America than to get heavily involved now in an all-out war in any of those regions." Having seen the horrors of war he did not believe in hood-winking gung-ho patriots Born on the 4th of July to become disillusioned, crippled veterans due to a phony Gulf of Tonkin trumped-up war. And the Supreme Allied Commander of World War II would not go into an Iraq that had nothing to do with 911 without a ton of real intelligence, for he knew too many Patrick Tillmans, Patrick McCaffreys, and Ken Ballards would not come home where they could have been true heroes for 50+ years.
So why is it that we don't answer Marine General Smedley Butler's chilling, killing questions legislatively? Butler, one of only four to receive the Medal of Honor twice, would often ask, when not putting down a coup at home or abroad:
"How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine-gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?
"Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few -- the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.
"When confronted with foreign policy challenge or problem, we ha ve been too quick to reach for a gun to solve it. When there is an oppression or some other terrible thing in the world, the answer is not necessarily to send in American troops."
Since Kennedy's assassination and the crumbling of his Peace Corps dream, we've witnessed the growth of military-industrial estate, tax-sheltered oligarchs, economic inequalities at home and in key and struggling nations, propaganda machines twisting citizens' minds in our and other nations, terrorists growth, disastrous climate change...
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