April 2006 No Second Acts
No Second Acts.
I read this quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald one day, “There are no second acts in American lives.” I’ve never believed this nor should I say I don’t want to believe it. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life or celebrity is the perfect example of why I don’t believe this quote. When he died in 1940 none of his books were in print. In death though he made a comeback, and is considered one of the great writers of the twentieth century. He represents a decade of that century. If you mention the 1920’s, you automatically think of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
When I think of what the United States of America once represented after World War Two we were heroes, a tour de force in the world. You could go into any country as an American and be treated as a celebrity. What happened?
The Military Industrial Complex has turned us into a country that evokes fear in others. Eisenhower warned the nation in 1961. He was a military man, and he saw back then the evils that came to be because of our reliance on the military.He knew it would destroy any goodness this country had established with the rest of the world.
War is no longer about right and wrong in the world; war is being waged in the name of Imperialism and greed. We can’t even determine who the enemy is. We call the enemy terrorism. We now start wars to create profits for corporations. The deception or the hoax is that we are bringing democracy and freedom to another country through aggression. What?
We have no business as Americans in carrying out this immoral undertaking. Ahhh….but there is business in wars. Look up the profits of Halliburton and the oil conglomerates. We aren’t in the Middle East to bring peace or democracy or freedom – it’s about causing enough chaos to drive oil prices up.
I don’t want to think that this is the lasting legacy of the United States. The military budget for 2006 was $441.6 billion. This does not include the cost of the wars that we are currently fighting. Can you imagine the security and good this would provide in the United States and still bring relief to other parts of the world?We could become respectable partners in the world again – heroes to the rest of the world! Using this money to solve environmental issues rather than causing conflicts in other nations. Can you imagine what strength we could have by doing good onto others?
The saddest part is as the Bush and the Republican administration continue on with their military industrialism, and future generations will never realize what a great country we once were, which makes for a repulsive second act.
Write your congress people!
Jake Drew
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Living in Lethargy Blog 
October 6, 2006 at 5:02 pm
You can’t blame the president and his cadre for using WAR for an unprecedented expansion of Federal powers. A war-time president can justify almost anything and evade any criticism. A war-time president has so much more power and control by virtue of being at war. There is literally no dis-incentive to waging war. The war on terror is very ingenious, because it really has no end, and at some level the threat is real enough.
At one time there were checks and balances in place to prevent the young people of America from being sent to war without the full support of the American people for a cause believed by all. This all fell apart in the VietNam and Korean conflicts. A president needs to be able to respond quickly to a real threat. It’s too bad this is being used so cynically to sieze power over our country.