Why don't we redo what JC and JFK envisioned?
Send apostles we already have. Sandal wearing teachers who keep classrooms buzzing. Habitat builders raising simple walls, tin roofs, and latrines. Nurses and nursing aides containing diseases before they emerge. Full time stipended teacher's aides to Appalachian schools. Candy strippers to hospitals.
Why not resurrect that once gleaming image of Camelot?
Mount a cost effective financial investment that leaves a modest environmental footprint, that fields a million Americans a year at home and abroad into peaceful, development oriented, common sense, cost effective national service through already proven non-profits that contains crazed "isms," dramatically reduces wars, and works to rebuild the havoc an angry Mother Nature is dumping on pebble earth?
JFK's Peace Corps and other existing do-good service corps have proven we can do this today for $30-74,000 per sandal wearing volunteer, whose wounds are generally limited to empathy-induced domestic or poverty-induced reverse culture shock.
If the answer continues being, "We can't bother doing that, because we have so many radical "XXXXists to kill," then Camelot will be replaced by Dronealot. Droning a lot over time increases the odds that the stealth enemies such droning produces will, in time, cause America's ascendancy to stall and then fall.
"Ask forgiveness later."Too often our public policy has been: "Kill 'em first... Ask forgiveness later," or foolishly expect that those bleeding or weeping will forget the loss of loved ones.
Our policy immediately after 911 should have been a thorough investigation augmented by a worldwide police action, including swiftly dropping our Special Forces into those areas where some of those purportedly involved were reported to be. That would have been a worldly wise policy causing the least bloody disruption.
It should not have been an invasion into uninvolved Iraq, which promised to open a hornet's nest for the violence prone and gold mine for greedy war profiteers in a part of the world that was so anxious for jobs that many easily fell into the ranks of crazed terrorists. That was a dumb policy.
Putting our armies on the ground in Syria today would also be dumb.
When specious fear centric arguments are made and big media foxes out the truth or fails to fund unbiased investigative reporting, we tend to march off to another trumped-up war, where the .5% who have served in recent wars suffer most. The minuscule percentage who serves, mostly the low and middle classes, often unknowingly bear much more of wars' costs than the connected, politically aware, and war hawks do.
Adding to war's bloody stain, our recent wars have not been over what's right, but more over the benefits accruing to the .5% at the top end of the economic spectrum.
Before "kill 'em" is decided upon, the electorate should know: What are "killings" long-term effects? Who benefits? Who suffers? Who pays? Who preys?
"Kill 'em... Ask forgiveness later," may have worked pretty well pre-21st century, when this warer was protected by large oceans. But warfare's terrain is growing more complicated daily as drones, chemical agents, nuke plant targets, internet economic dependencies, kidnappings, beheadings, virginal post-life attractions, public relations hero making, two-legged stealth suicide bomber delivery systems, dumbed-down myopic religious interpretations, military industrial estate money makers, monetized political puppets, climate weirding, poverty, refugee burdening, proliferating craziness, dumb gun laws, etc., becomes part of or connected to usable weapons systems.
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