Slaughterhouse 5

I am on the plane to Germany. There are a lot of elderly Germans on the plane jabbering in German. I finished Slaughterhouse 5 a few hours ago. I found the book depressing. Not because the Dresden firebombing was so tragic but because it was a non-event. The actual firebombing takes up less than a dozen pages. It passes in and out of the narrator’s consciousness with barely a blip. Over 100,000 people were killed in a single air raid; that is more than Hiroshima or Nagasaki. So it goes. I think the ultimate tragedy of my generation is our desensitizing to the atrocities of war, poverty, and natural disasters.

The widespread media coverage of Vietnam was shocking to the US public because war had never been covered in depth before. The brutalities of war were never exhumed for the public eye. I was born during the first gulf war, raised during the Bosnia/Kosovo/Hergozivania war, grew up during the second Gulf War, the Afghanistan War, and will be voting in a presidential election for the first time when we are engaged in war officially in one country and unofficially in three others. The sad part is the unpopularity of our current wars has nothing to do with the deaths of American soldiers but rather the enormous economic cost. When it comes down to it Americans care more about our wallets than human lives.

I remember in the nineties if there was a natural disaster the picture on the front page of the Washington Post would be mountains of wheat in the port closest to the disaster. We had so much excess we just gave it away; we shared what we have. This no longer happens; the corn subsidies make it too lucrative to grow corn instead of wheat. To quote Howard Zinn “We must get out of the mindset of being a military super power. Why can’t we be a humanitarian super power?” Schools, hospitals, roads, and bridges are far cheaper than a war; both in dollars and lives.

My freshman year a philosophy professor from the Air Force Academy came to speak at Wittenberg University (sorry don’t remember his name). He spoke of his time in Afghanistan. He is a member of the Corp of Engineers. He described how the region in which he was doing his work the American troops had been fighting the Taliban bitterly for years. The Corp of Engineers financed and educated the local government to build a school, hospital, and bridges. Lo and behold, in less than a year the Taliban had all but vanished from the region. Their support base disappeared with the construction of these utilities. This is an isolated case for me because I have not researched very deeply in this.

I do not argue that we do not eliminate the military and become totally focused on relief work. There are lots of bad people in the world and unfortunately I think the threat of military intervention by the US military keeps a good deal of them in line. I do however propose that we closely examine what we are buying with our money. The f-22 raptor and f-35 are failures of forward thinking equivalent to fighting a war ground war in Russia in the winter. Both planes suffer from massive overheating problems. We as a nation spent billions on planes that do not perform anywhere close to where they should in certain areas. Those billions could have spent educating and feeding millions of people.

Perhaps the largest failure of the United States in my memory is our failure to act on the genocide in Darfur. There is an argument to be made that we were already embroiled in two wars and could not afford to divide our attention to a third one. My problem is that we had the power to stop the genocide but were already using it elsewhere for reasons that were lies. What is the point of being the biggest kid on the playground if we don’t keep the bullies off of it?