I have often said our society is marinated in violence. How often is sucker punching someone portrayed as cathartic and gratifying in movies and TV? That is the tip of the iceberg of violent imagery. Why is such negative, useless and harmful behavior condoned/admired/nurtured? This cynic thinks it boils down to our government needing young men and women to volunteer to commit endless acts of violence on people they neither know nor understand all over the world for little or no reason (just following orders…) and convince parents this is a good and honorable decision. The fact there are so many willing to do this (because they see no other alternative?) in a society otherwise full of complacency allows our leaders to be feckless and lazy: the answer to every crisis is more arms, more killing, more destruction, all done by someone else, rather than sitting down with others, trying to understand them, and working out compromises. And while I’m at it, why are the American people the ones paying the full bill (yeah, most of the money is borrowed and we’re never going to pay it back, but…) for our armed forces policing the world? Every country we help, every sea lane we keep open, should be forking over a large percentage of the cost of our operations (assuming the operation worked and made things better – on second thought…). Our military budget is ridiculous and at best only serves as corporate welfare (at exorbitant costs) for the military contractors, and at worst destroys entire generations of young people and burdens us all with the survivors’ problems (it is usually closer to the worst). The amount of budgeted foreign aid this country does is often overestimated by the public, but that is because most bean counters do not include all our military does for free (for everyone else but us). It is not hard to point out that the present is one of the least violent times in human history, BUT it could easily be much less violent and everyone could be doing much better than we are. Even Pervez Musharraf, the former leader of Pakistan, bemoaned the reality that immense military spending deprived the people of so many improvements in their day to day lives. This is yet another example of how unimportant the welfare of the American people is to our government leaders, especially in comparison the the monied special interests.