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Coalition for Peace with Justice
Letter to Raleigh News & Observer [to CPWJ Letters page] [ to CPWJ home page] May 15, 2003Heavy price "Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living." Those were the words of Gen. Omar Bradley in a speech to West Point cadets in 1952. Those of us who participated in the funeral march reported in your April 20 article "Activists march for peace" seek to create a different world. We want people to live freely and to prosper from the peace dividend promised us after the end of the Cold War. But the peace dividend was squandered through massive military budgets that continued to grow until we, the taxpayers, now spend more dollars on the military than does the rest of the world combined. We pay for this excessive military spending through canceled social programs, reduced funding for education and health care, and more insecurity. Dissent has fallen out of fashion and our civil rights are under attack, as we haven't heeded a warning sometimes attributed to Julius Caesar: "Beware the leader who bangs the drum of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor. For patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and patriotism, will offer up all of their rights to the leader and gladly so." Wael Masri |
