Stealing The Hopes Of Our Children

These are the words of one of our greatest modern warriors -- President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and he said it at a time when this nation faced real enemies with substantial armies. But he didn't go looking for unnecessary wars to justify a bloated military budget. He knew that every penny spent on the military was a penny that couldn't be spent helping American citizens, and he was not afraid to say it.

Today we live in a different world -- a world where our biggest threat is from terrorism, both from without and from within. That is not a threat that can effectively be dealt with by military power. It is much more effectively dealt with using our intelligence and law enforcement capabilities -- the CIA and the FBI. And yet we continue to spend more that we ever have in the past on our military budget -- with much of it going to the corporate honchos in the military-industrial complex. In fact, we spend nearly as much with the military budget as the rest of the world's countries combined.

There is no excuse for this kind of military spending, except to make even richer some of the richest people and corporations in this nation. With much of the country still hurting from the recession we just had, it makes even less sense. We should be spending this money on education, on lifting the poor and disadvantaged out of poverty, on housing the homeless, on providing decent medical care for all Americans, on creating jobs to put Americans back to work, on funding the science and technology to spur future growth, and on cleaning up the environment and stopping global climate change. Those things would enrich the lives of all Americans.

But the congressional Republicans want to spend even more on the military, while cutting all the programs that would help hurting Americans -- just the opposite of what needs to be done. I just wish today's Republicans had half as much intelligence and common sense as President Eisenhower had. The whole country (and probably the world) would be a lot better off.