Under the Illusion

I was overhearing the TV this evening, a program on the History Channel on the theme of warfare. A soldier from this present age was talking about how cheap landmines proved to be, compared to tanks and other artifacts of war. He then flung around the extravagant sum of 40 million dollars: the cost of a single tank.

Which set me to thinking.

Have we really realized how costly it is to wage a war? Billions of dollars go into killing a foreign nation, toppling its government, instating a new one and keeping the order in general until opposition subsides. This bothers me greatly. This money could be used to improve upon the culture, infrastructure and knowledge of this nation, instead of being spent on squandering another. What bothers me even more, to the core of my beliefs, is that this great deal of money is actually being used for violent purposes - to kill people, if you will! Don't people see this is just another WWII situation? Of course, we're "the good guys" now, and no one has grabbed us by the balls, no jews are protesting in English, but our ears are quite deaf to any other language, no matter how loudly spoken. Apparently, "Mercy, please" doesn't count unless spoken in English. That's why no one is moved by these stories: no one has bothered to place the subtitles.

The other part of this that bothers me is that MY money, the money I earn each day as I wake up and make the goodwilled effort to go and work for, the money I spend in food, clothes, sometimes some little extras to make my life better... are directly or indirectly making someone's life far away much worse. I'm obviously referring to the silk road of Taxes. Each year, if you pay your taxes yearly, or each day, if you pay sales taxes... you pay the government a bit of what you earn, a bit of what you spend. We gripe about it, of course, but only because it is money we would rather have in our pockets so we can spend it in yet more things to make our life more pleasant.

I believe most people don't stop to think that with every bit that each one of us puts in, we're amassing a great sum of money. Money we're giving to the government. Money the government spends on war. Our money, our efforts, our sufferings are going bit by bit into making warfare. We work so Dubya can kill peole off. Wow.

Now I am not very comfortable with this. Actually, I disagree. So, do I stop paying my taxes? No, I can't. I would go to jail in a matter of a few years. We are actually paying taxes so they won't throw us into a cell. Our freedom is an illusion, it's bought! No matter what I do for a living, I have to pay taxes, otherwise it's considered illegal and prosecutable by law. This so-called freedom they sell you is not for free. It is not my born right. I have to earn freedom and actually agree, in principle, to kill those muslim motherfuckers, even if at heart I totally hate it and disagree with it.

So, what do we do? We live on, under the impression we're free, but we're not. We've been caged in a structure called society. We're all born the same way and brought into a societal structure into which we're educated for the final purpose of, at due age, integrating ourselves into the worforce and toil away at the turning wheels of the mechanism of war. We are The Big War Machine. Billions of humans wasting away under the impression of freedom, trapped into the mechanisms of the art of warfare.

Just a few steps away from Aldous Huxley's A Brave \New World.