On May 16th, Daniel Ellsberg spoke to The Marin Philosophic Society about you --the human species. The PhD., who started his data analysis with the Rand Corporation, started analysis of the human species in the early 1960's, where his Rand research discovered that the almighty USA had a Doomsday Scenario wiggling with life in its archives.
This was not Dr. Strangelove riding rockets and making us wonder and laugh in movie houses. This was Dr. Ellsberg learning that we were ready to send fleets of bombs into China and Russia and other perceived enemies around the world. The ping-pong of bombs and missiles and resultant clouds, fire, and destruction leaves the human species -- well, doomed.
Ellsberg reminded the audience that during the Vietnam War we dropped over five times as much bomb tonnage on those little brown people as we did during all of World War II. Yet, they kept fighting. The man behind the Pentagon Papers believed that if only Congress knew, if only the American people knew" the facts and truths behind the war, America would end this madness built around a fear of dominoes.
When he learned of the Doomsday Scenario, the younger and more idealistic Ellsberg felt certain that if only the President, Congress, and the American people knew they would deconstruct a weapons systems that would end life for the human species -- but not for those icky pre-historic cockroaches.
Notwithstanding the passage of years and a few Start Treaties, technology has increased the potential that our Doomsday Weapons System will probably revive life for thousands of lost species, while doing away with the human species. Could that be the Creator's rapturous doomsday loving species scenario?
About an hour into his talk, Ellsberg touched on how most species kill only for food. Even in fights for status in the herd, most species stop short of killing. Humans, on the other hand, especially those from nations with powerfully buffed arms, have proven to be killing machines.
Not only do we have weapons systems and it's gargantuan industry that enhance our machine killing capabilities, but for generations we have been turning out legions of Americans trained in delivering death and destruction. Too many of our trained warriors returned from bombing, defoliating, and killing little brown people to homelessness, disgust, and drugs. Too many returned from the bombed cities of Iraq and its million estimated dead civilians with artificial limbs and posttraumatic stress disorders.
Most who served return with a profound respect for the outgunned, who some superiors made out to be the enemy of our mostly young, moldable soldiers.
In a corporate controlled media, which increasingly portrays a good we versus sinister them" the odds of America switching gears from a killer machine economy to one that lives and gets along with human and other species is declining.
The answer?
Build another kind of 21st century army that practices, drills, and trains themselves and those they deal with to "get along and build with each other."
Annually for the last decade and for the foreseeable future, we train and send about 1.5 million Americans into our active armed forces. In addition, we send our reserves into battle whenever a President, even without a Congressional declaration of war, deems it necessary. From 9-11-2001 until 2009, 700,000 reservists were deployed into recent undeclared wars. In addition, today's Prince has found a way to build another mercenary army with scary names like Blackhawk and Z that it rents out to the US Taxpayer and foreign nations at a profit margin enticing even to bankers and hedge fund gamblers.
We are doing well at training and gearing America to be a nation whose economy is built around supplying a perpetual killing machine.
Why don't we use People's Lobby's citizen-initiated congressional proposal to build an army about 2/3rd the size of our active military that entices and sends "volunteers" into platoons with such titles as Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, Habitat, Doctors Without Borders, Head Start, Red Cross, International Rescue Committee, Oxfam, Mercy Corps, State Conservation Corps, etc"?
Those platoons do not return to disgust, do not limp home with artificial limbs, or labor under PTSD" They do not drone bombs into mistaken village processions" They walk into such villages and make friends by serving and participating in their lives"
Why don't we take seven years to build up to having one million American a year serving in these and other do-good organizations?
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