My father was a refugee from Germany in the 1930s. As a kid, I remember coming home from school and finding him comfortably sitting in an armchair eating a bottle of pickled herring and a boiled potato. There were few things that pleased my dad more.
That little bottle of fish symbolized the importance of food for my father. He got the whole fish and he got a whole potato. In Germany, he only got the heads and tails and a peeling or two. He came from successful middle-class Lutheran roots, but that was before a few wealthy men in charge put the war and weapons industry ahead of life.
Many Germans were forced to flee their beloved country. My dad worked hard for his U.S. citizenship and told me I was lucky our government supplied programs to feed its people. It is good that he is no longer with us, because if he saw how much the U.S. government is adopting a love of weapons over humanity, it would break his heart.
Before and after my dad fled Neubrandenburg, nearly a million German civilians just like him had starved to death, and hundreds of churches that peppered the landscape were reduced to rubble. A once-thriving city ended in decay and mass graves. When he did get to return, in attempt to gather the remains of his family, there were too many piles of body parts to identify them.
The Germans had their moment of military glory and expansionism, all to be later taken by the next superpower Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, who was even more bloodthirsty and murderous than Hitler. So goes the U.S. government funding of weapons and unnecessary military bases and operations for the same nefarious purpose as Hitler. All the while, our Congress votes to starve millions of American civilians by defunding food resources, to write protectionist legislation for the greedy few who happened to be born in the lap of extreme luxury.
Just the Iraq and Afghanistan military invasions/occupations for wealth resources cost over four trillion U.S. tax dollars and more than 800,000 innocent lives. And it benefits no one aside from mega-corporation CEOs and oil giants. That is nearly a quarter of our national debt, just to steal foreign lands and kill people to make the deplorable plutocrats richer and more powerful. Four trillion dollars would feed every American, and provide health care for a very long time.
As Noam Chomsky put it, “There are major efforts being made to dismantle Social Security, the public schools, the post office — anything that benefits the population has to be dismantled.”
The U.S. think tank talking heads are boasting a drop in unemployment. They say there are a lot of new jobs in the U.S. That may be true, however most of them are monotonous low-paying jobs as corporate slaves and millions of Americans are still going hungry. The satisfaction in jobs rate is at a 22-year low. Furthermore, the massive low-paying jobs by no means feeds a family.
I think in order to save the American society my dad loved so much, we need to end U.S. war crimes, such as illegal drone attacks that kill innocent civilians in sovereign countries. We also need to end wasteful and needless defense spending that is spoiling our reputation and middle class.
Feeding starving Americans is the moral and correct thing to do, particularly considering it is our tax dollars. Paying for weapons that can eradicate our planet, at the expense of our people, is a deplorable Hitler sort of thing to do.