The House

The House

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Throw the dog a bone!

Someone in our town put up a flyer on light poles in a few places:



                "Outside, in the mountains, can you hear them grinding away in the quiet of the day, or at times, in the still of the night, or even the predawn hours? This grinding sound is heard too often, in these hard times, for it to be the sound of commercial or private jeTS alone. Burning jet fuel and money like theres no tomorrow. The military has money to burn. After all it's not their money. Over half a trillion dollars a year for the defense budget. The highway robbery of the high and mighty. Up above the world so high, like a sneaky ripoff artist in the sky. Or when visible, like the arrogance of the airborne bully "the arrogance of power".

The making, maintaining, repairing, fueling and flight of military jets is not an inconsequential part of our enourmous defense expenditure. As the world's most indebted nation we can ill afford such extravagance. I am appalled that so much of our tax dollars go to greedy defense contractors.

By routing jet traffic away from this area we take a crucial first step in reining in the overfunded corporate defense budget. We stop the military from doing what it wants to do, by rerouting unidentified military flights, that maybe confused with commercial flights. Building upon this success, we can encourage others to join us, until we grow strong enough in number and organization, to persuade congress to take money away from the military that it does not need, and reallocate that funding in the form of loans to worthy and needy individuals who will benefit the economy and our society, without digging us deeper into debt. (Certainly more than the recent minor if not insignificant defense budget cuts. We are in desperate need, the military is not.)

The 400 million allocated for Colorado from the Defense budjet is a drop in bucket compared to what we would and should get were there a significant cut in the defense budget. If we, and not the military, get anything. Throw a dog a bone. (A drop of equal to about the cost of two F-22 jets fighters.)

JUST SAY NO TO JETS. ESPECIALLY IF THEY ARE FREQUENT FLYERS HOT RODDING ACROSS THE SKY ON THEIR PRIMITIVE KEROSENE BURNING, INTERNAL COMBUSTION ENGINES."

Without getting into a debate over every issue mentioned in the piece or nit-picking the spelling and grammar…this act of public expression was remarkable. Albeit, anonymous it speaks to the fear, disgust and despair in our society over the now Balrog size of our military industrial complex. We know there are real people with real jobs in defense, doing the best they can to live and feel good about they are doing, being part of a military non-ending war footing. A war machine looks constantly for another enemy, real or supposed to feed itself with fires of greed and power. Why do we not hear from the religious types?  “Live by the sword, die by the sword” has new meaning now. The cry against deficit that mean no help for education, elderly or the disabled, no infrastructure repair or modernization rather than bombs and war toys that waste our resources, in a black hole where the Balrog lives.