DEAR LEGISLATORS

“Unchecked militarism is the fatal disease of empires.” – Historian Arnold Toynbee

 

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”                                                                                                                                       – President Dwight Eisenhower warning of the dangers of the military/industrial/congressional complex.

 

Dear Legislators of All Colors and Stripes,

Read the above quotations. Read them again. Make a copy of the quotes and tape them to your bathroom mirror. Read them every morning before you go off to the Capitol. Hang a copy of them on your office wall. Make them large for all to see. Put a copy of them on your nightstand. Make them part of your nightly prayers.

But most of all dear Legislators, read the above quotes when you take blood money from the merchants of death, from Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon Technologies, General Dynamics and on and on to fill your campaign coffers. Read the quotes when like lemmings jumping off a cliff you approve nearly a Trillion Dollars on “defense,” each year while you refuse to do anything to actually defend and care for the people of America.

Read the quotes dear Legislators, because it is you, not Russia, not China, it is you who are the enemy of my family. It is you who are the enemy of my nation. It is you who are the enemy of Earth. It is you who hang humanity on a cross of iron. It is you who are the fatal disease of America.

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