I believe you, Patience.
2023-10-17
Dear friend,
What would Patience say? About the wars today?
I haven’t seen Patience since high school, but she’s been cemented in my memory since 3rd grade with the peace symbols. She drew them on her Trapper Keeper, the math quiz, her arm. “Peace,” she crayoned in 64 colors, etching in my brain the three-lines-inside-a-circle symbol first drawn in 1958 and originally standing for “nuclear disarmament.”
Patience didn’t wait for junior high to start dressing up for Hippie Day during Homecoming week. Her smile and outstretched V-shaped peace sign shone bright.
World peace sounded good, but I can’t say I took it seriously. I was cynical by the third grade. I grew up under a generation of men who, whether they went to Vietnam or not, felt like they were reeling from a moral defeat. The moral and military victory of WWII? Grandpa never talked about it.
No regular people get anything out of wars. We don’t want them. Who is leading us to them?
The new outbreak of war in Israel and Gaza is only the freshest knife in the skull of peace-loving people. Earth has six “major wars,” as defined by 10,000-plus deaths in the last year. There are 15 “conflicts,” with deaths in the single thousands, and 21 “minor conflicts,” with deaths under 1,000. Another 14 “skirmishes” claim less than 100 lives per year, but don’t discount them—this list the state of permanent threat between North and South Korea.
This isn’t just data I grabbed from Wikipedia. It’s our bone-crushing world. And we are connected, all 8.1 billion of us. War anywhere stokes fear in humans everywhere. I stand in solidarity with every innocent civilian suffering in Israel, Gaza, and Ukraine. I stand with every Jew around the world who fears for their life today, including Jews here in Vermont who are wondering who will shelter and protect them the next time.
Humans are an apex predator. We evolved to be as violent as orca whales, polar bears, and lions. Sometimes with each other. Countries everywhere are taking a second look at their border defenses. Whatever happens over the coming weeks in Gaza and Israel, we will surely be left with a more sus world—armed, walled-off, and sides-drawn. Suspicious. While you and I don’t like this direction, I suppose that this kind of world is the height of human achievement for some.
Everyone’s good at something. It doesn’t surprise me when someone excels at violence. There’s enough short-term sex, money and power in being a warlord, and enough desperation in places like Gaza, that violence shocks us, but also confirms what we already knew. Hurt people hurt people.
But we can make choices. What if we not only encouraged today’s third-graders to blossom in the unexplored upside potential of peace, but also invested in them? Well people well people.
In the U.S., we spend 12% of our federal budget on “defense.” When you look at the “discretionary” part of the federal budget that we decide on an annual basis, we spent half of our national wealth on the military.
Military spending gets a blank check to make messes. Meanwhile, our local classrooms are heated with aging boilers and, apparently, poisoned by PCBs.
Dahlias blooming this month in Halifax.
In the last 20 years, the ranks of Vermont fourth-graders reading at “below basic” level jumped from 27% to 38%. The reasons are complicated and have nothing to do with geopolitics. Or do they?
I like that my U.S. citizenship comes with having an army at my back and a Vermont National Guard to check on my family. Thank you to those who serve. But I have Patience’s voice in my head asking, does defense spending need to be the one thing that goes up every year, whether we are in a hot war or not?
Thank the stars the U.S. is a prosperous place, and we have the money to spend.
Oh. About that. Our country puts up pretty high GDP numbers, but those won’t be goosed forever by our one-time fossil inheritance.
Asteroid mining to the rescue? I’m assured by experts that it will be a thing that could save us. But as more of our not-unlimited resources are going to arms, another way this could end is with a single nation smashing a few satellites, leading to a chain reaction in which we’re trapped on Earth under all the space junk as our phones blare “Lost connection to GPS.”
Either way, the trend in the tax burden is squeezing out stuff that regular people like you and I care about, and that has consequences.
Each shot out of a Patriot interceptor missile system, say from the ground near Kiev to destroy a Russian missile, costs $4 million.
That figure stuck in my craw when I read it. Four million dollars was the exact number quoted to me last week by Rep. Eric Maguire, who helps run an important transitional housing organization in Rutland.
At the same time I want America to do everything we can for our allies, I fear we are rushing to put on our neighbor’s oxygen mask with our guts hanging out, slashed by the drug violence we are suffering at home.
Even before counting drug deaths, the violence associated with the Mexican drug cartels rates as one of those six “major” wars. And we ought to include in that count the 110,000-plus Americans who will die this year from overdoses, the majority of which, says the U.S. DEA, will be in connection with fentanyl produced in state-sanctioned labs in China and smuggled over U.S. borders.
That Wikipedia entry with the six major wars and all the territory they affect?
Windham F’ing County* should be listed in it. Along with all 14 counties in Vermont.
Rep. Maguire and I were exchanging ideas on how to expand and improve housing options to help the victims of this war in southern Vermont. Transitional housing is life-saving for those hit with the exceptionally deadly fentanyl missile. Dismas House staff like Eric knit community for those in recovery who need a roof over their head. I asked Eric—let’s say there was a suitable dorm on or near one of Vermont’s existing or historic college campuses, what would it cost on an annual basis to operate a “high-barrier” transitional home with solid protocols and staffing?
He said $4 million a year.
One Patriot missile.
I’m sorry I didn’t believe you, Patience. I’ve given enough of my patience away to the geopolitical and economic explanations that abstract us away from this hurt.
Might is not right. Humans are always going to have a violent and a competitive side but we can make choices. We can choose a favorite sport or outdoor activity, we can choose healing, and we can imagine better ways to spend $4 million than to put it in a penis-shaped device and bonk it into another guy’s penis bomb to KA-POW them both.
Hurt causes despair. Despair leads to self-hatred. Self-hatred leads to self-destructive behavior, which manifests as violence. Violence is a cycle no one gets off until they choose to. And sadly, a $1.3 billion contract with Raytheon for Patriot missiles makes leading with violence a profitable choice for a lot of people in Washington.
What would Patience say? I’m all in. We can do better.
What’s more powerful than a billion dollars?
One single grain of light. Like Patience. Like you.
Finding self-hatred in myself and setting it down is how I find peace. It starts inside. I give it room to grow.
How do you wage peace?
*Not its official name.
Warmly,
Tristan Roberts
Quill Nook Farm