Squandering the Peace Dividend on War: The American Way

From Seth Godin today again, a post about squandering our national resources. You can read the original by clicking on the coloured type but I'm going to repurpose his writing a bit and make a few comments.

The internet means that many time-consuming forms of white-collar drudgery have disappeared, or at least been offloaded to cheaper people who aren't you, permitting you to spend more time on things that are actually productive and highly leveraged.

I recall any great number of people loosing their jobs when the computer age finally kicked in to corporate America in the early 90s. I felt sorry for them. At Leo Burnett in Chicago during a large layoff of 250 or so (15% of the staff I recall) a number of soon-to-be ex-employees were structuring a class action suit claiming the company was remiss in not retraining them properly. I'm not sure that ever got off the ground but they were not incorrect. All along they had been doing what they were told, doing what they had been trained to do, following the old company manual. And things turned out poorly for them. I recall crossing one of the bridges across the Chicago River at lunch one day and seeing the men in the fireboat fishing a body wrapped in plastic out of the water. "Must be one of ours", a fellow Burnetter remarked walking by. Signs of those times.

It's a little like the bump we got after the Cold War ended. The peace dividend was there, just waiting for us to repurpose our military, our military budget and our military research. We didn't. We squandered the window, wasted the money and didn't rush to fill it with the sort of top-down industrial projects (like high speed rail and efficient new forms of energy) that could have changed everything.

I spent nearly half of 2009 and half of last year in Europe. France, Germany and The Netherlands for a short bit. It was positively enlightening. High speed trains everywhere. A 12 Euro ticket for my public transportation every week. Metro, S-Bahn or a tram or bus anywhere I wanted to go in Munich. Fast and cheap. Bill Clinton left America a surplus in budget after his term. That seemed to go away fairly quickly. If I studied economics, politics and military science would I find that a state of perpetual war and code 'Red', 'Purple', 'Orange' fascist fear tactics in a nation  were essentially good for economic and political stability in the long term? I'd be interested in reader's thoughts on that.

D a v i d E v e r i t t - C a r l s o n

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