“Light Wages, Heavy Tanks” – Still So True After All These Years

Happy Memorial Day from May 1968.  This is a piece of protest art from 55 years ago in Paris, and if you don’t speak French, it says, “Light Wages, Heavy Tanks”.  Guess what, it’s the same sad story!  Of course there are exceptions, some people are being paid very well, but clearly many are not.  Apparently funding war is more important than providing for people.  That does not make for a successful society.  It shows that destruction and weapons are valued more than us, which does not instill love and loyalty for such misplaced values.  A system that does not support its own citizens shouldn’t be surprised when they don’t support it.

You can recite oaths and sing patriotic anthems all you want, but that brainwashing wears off when people don’t even have their basic needs met.  Then they realize, “Wait a minute, if this place is so great, why is there so much suffering?”  Spoiler alert, it’s not great; it just wants you to think it is.  It’s like being in an abusive relationship with someone who gets you to believe you’d be much worse without them, but really you’d be better.  Can you imagine if a partner made you pledge allegiance to them constantly?  That’s a sign of a sociopath!  Yet that is being done to children every day.  It really explains some of the problems on this planet.

They say freedom isn’t free, implying cost.  Yet military contractors and war profiteers actually PROFIT from war, so they obviously wish to keep it going perpetually.  I don’t need to be told to honor and respect veterans by those who send them to fight and die and clearly don’t care about them or any of us because they are too greedy and self-serving.  That’s like a serial killer preaching peace and love!  It’s pretty ironic and hypocritical.  I currently take care of two 93 year old veterans, and I don’t go around telling everyone else what to do!  I also understand why people don’t honor and respect veterans, or anyone else too.

If they fight and die for freedom, and we still don’t have it, then fighting and dying is ineffective.  Fighting for peace is like shouting for silence.  It’s doing the opposite of what you say you want.  Of course that creates conflict!  Simply being peaceful creates peace ;)  And even the poor can be peaceful, which shows that peace costs nothing; war costs us much more.

As someone living in extreme poverty in “the wealthiest nation on Earth”, it is painful to see so much money and resources going to other countries when there is so much need here.  Supporting conflict on the other side of the planet is madness, especially when your own people struggle.  That breeds conflict here, not between different nations, but between each other, between different economic classes, between people who have so much more than they need, and those of us with so little.  It divides and weakens us all.

“Minimum wage” is an insult.  First, the name implies that we are not really cared for enough to provide more than the most meager level of existence.  Second, with inflation rising constantly and outpacing any pathetic wage increase, such a low amount does not even meet acceptable standards of living.  My raise this year was 25 cents an hour, which does nothing compared to the price of everything else going up (housing, groceries, gas, electricity, HOA fees, insurance, etc!)  Of course I have looked for many other jobs, but can’t find anything I can actually do that pays enough.  It doesn’t help that I was just majorly scammed, and am discovering more scams every day!  It seems like banks, taxes, goverments, corporations, and of course many other people are just trying to take whatever they can however they can from whoever they can.  Most of what I had has been taken, and I can’t afford to live in such a parasitic, corrupt, greedy culture.  So that settles it, I have been priced out of living here.  I have no choice but to leave, as I have tried making money all kinds of ways and none of them have worked.  I guess I’m not meant to be here.

I realize I can do nothing to change this culture or system; that’s not up to me.  It works for some people, but not for many of us. I must go where I actually fit in, am respected, and treated better.  It isn’t just veterans who suffer and are lied to, used, and discarded.  Some people just view themselves as elite or superior, and everyone else is inferior to them.  So they don’t care if others are suffering and dying, they’re actually making money from it.