Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
-The Chance for Peace speech, Dwight D. Eisenhower, April 16, 1953
How far we have fallen. But . . .
Fwiw I also blame the party heads and the ever-failing ‘consultants’. That’s more or less a constant. But this wasn’t, as some would have us believe, two horrible candidates. This was between supporting progressive initiatives and institutions and - well, all this. This fascism, corruption, degradation, humiliation, incompetence, and plain insanity.
Voting is the last line of defense. Refusing to do it for any reason, after seeing all the horrifying predictions come true, and still promoting it as reasonable or validated is abhorrent.