A Parade Of Death Along Constitution Avenue

Two of the sixty-ton M1 Abrams tanks and one of the M109A7 Paladin Self-propelled howitzers that were among the hundreds of killing machines displayed in the June 14 parade.

I found it heartening that on the day of the nation's $45 million military parade in D.C. that some 30,000 attended a ceremony in Chicago's White Sox stadium Friday to hear Pope Leo XIV speak via video. According to the Catholic Diocese of Chicago, the first 10,000 tickets for that event, at $5 each, were sold in the first 15 minutes.

Meanwhile, the highly publicized event celebrating the Army's 250th anniversary drew a crowd of an estimated 20,000, and the No Kings Day gatherings across the nation Saturday attracted some 5 million participants in over 2000 cities.

I don't want to read too much into those numbers, and I intend no disrespect for the well over a million men and women who are a part of the Army's active duty and reserve forces  They, along with members of the Navy, the Air Force, the Marines, the Coast Guard and other military units, are all fellow citizens I respect and love, but are under the command of a gigantic Defense Department with a budget equal to that of the combined spending of the next nine most heavily armed nations in the world, including Russia and China.

What saddened me Saturday was the realization that our massive Department of Defense is intended to protect us by threatening the use of every means possible to destroy as many of our enemies' lives and means of livelihood as efficiently as possible. Not one of the multimillion dollar death dealing machines in Saturday's parade was designed to feed the world's hungry, heal its sick, house its homeless, preserve its environment, or educate its young. 

Yet some will say that kind of investment is necessary to protect us and to make the world a more peaceful and habitable place. But how has the world benefited from our prolonged wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, to cite some recent examples of how the world's greatest military might has been incapable of bringing peace and human wellbeing through military means.

As Lawrence Korb, assistant secretary of defense under President Ronald Reagan noted in a recent Wall Street Journal article, "To go marching down Constitution Avenue looks like you've won something, Unfortunately, the way things have been going, it's been pretty tough for our military to achieve its objectives lately." 

But what about World War II, you ask, which resulted in the loss of some 50 million lives and at a cost of trillions of dollars worth of destruction?

A far better way to have prevented that holocaust would have been having the citizens of pre-war Germany, then one of the most Christianized countries in the world, simply refuse to support the rise of an authoritarian and hyper-nationalistic regime bent on promoting "Deutschland Uber Alles." And a far better way to defend against enemies is to win their friendship through cooperative efforts at improving the lives and fortunes of our neighboring nations around the world.

The direction we are going now, a hundred years later, will almost inevitably lead us to World War III, the effects of which could destroy us all.