It makes me cringe when people greet me with a "Happy Memorial Day." Happy? It's a holiday to remember those who gave their lives for our country. It's also a sad reminder of our continued failure to, as a world, live in peace as God intends.
Watch a military appropriations committee hearing on C-Span and it becomes evident that even as the U.S. military has been engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq over the last decade-and-a-half, that funding for the military is based less on the needs of the soldiers sent in harm's way than as economic stimulus to the military contractors who write the largest checks to the congressional committee leaders' campaigns. In 2011 I watched then General Petraeus and Secretary Gates advocate for body armor for the soldiers serving in Afghanistan. They did not want to add a penny to the budget. They wanted to shift some spending priorities from large ticket items destined to be mothballed to body armor asked for by the troops on the ground. Let's just say that congress was not about to shift its priorities to help the troops in harm's way. http://thehill.com/news-by-subject/defense-homeland-security/148509-veteran-house-appropriator-scolds-gates-mostly-approves-funding-shift Learning Ally volunteer John Hopkinson was recording Steven Pinker's recent book The Better Angels of Our Nature. After recording a section he came out and read some of Mr. Pinker's thoughts about how much less violent the modern world is compared to the past. This poem was my reaction. It was published in Richard Vargas' fine journal Mas Tequila Review in 2014. Statistically Insignificant (A thought on Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature.) Celebrating our evolved civility, the author wields detailed diagrams that present the percentage of the American population killed in wars in 2005 to be what he calls, “paint thin and invisible.” And I know a number cruncher who will matter-of-factly tell you that when you divide 945 dead by almost 300 million living the result is “statistically insignificant.” Except when one of the insignificant is 100 percent of your son or daughter or husband or wife or brother or sister or mother or father or anyone you love and that equals everything.
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AuthorThoughts, large and small, from poet Tony Gruenewald. Archives
August 2020
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