on this Armistice Day i will repeat my annual theme for this day (I used to hand write a letter to the president to this effect each year, but once Shrub got in the White House that started to seem less that worthless): rather than celebrate and commemorate the millions upon millions of people who have died in wars in the 96 years since the end of the War to End Wars, let alone the 37 million who died in that Great War, i hope we can all pledge to teach our children to not participate in wars and violence in general and above all to learn forgiveness. some countries (the US heading the class) have embraced eternal war as a model and huge parts of our economy are based on the notion that we will be involved in sequential wars that are HUGELY profitable to many massive corporations and billionaires. they are sold to the public as the only way to keep our country safe even though it is really really really hard to find a single war that does not have its roots in previous disastrous military engagements and/or lingering resentments over past slights. if war is the only way to keep people safe it would seem that the only two countries in the world to not have standing armies (Costa Rica and Antarctica) must be the scene of regular invasions. ok, i will admit that Antarctica does not really have a resident population so lets not look at them, but then there is Costa Rica. this is from their Wikipedia page: Costa Rica was sparsely inhabited by indigenous people before it came under Spanish rule in the 16th century. Once a backwater colony, since attaining independence in the 19th century, Costa Rica has become one of the most stable, prosperous, and progressive nations in Latin America. It permanently abolished its army in 1949, becoming the first of a few sovereign nations without a standing army.[7][8][9] Costa Rica has consistently been among the top-ranking Latin American countries in the Human Development Index (HDI), placing 62nd in the world as of 2012 country in the world. in short no one has invaded them in the 65 years since they shut down the military. just imagine how much better off the world would be if all counties did the same thing? (at least $1.7 Trillion dollars a year - which translates to almost $240/person on the planet every year). as much as we might not wish for the government that we have, or want to live in a place more progressive than the one we are in now, i think we all can be a lot more like Costa Rica in our personal lives. children do not have to learn to be warriors.
Posted on: Tue, 11 Nov 2014 20:03:22 +0000
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